Larry Trask
Robert Lawrence "Larry" Trask (November 10, 1944 – March 27, 2004) was an American-British Professor of Linguistics at the University of Sussex and an authority on the Basque language and historical linguistics.
Biography
Born in upstate New York, USA, he initially studied chemistry in his home country, but after a brief stint in the Peace Corps he took an interest in linguistics. He received his PhD in linguistics from the University of London, and thereafter taught at various universities in the United Kingdom. He became a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex.
He was an authority on the Basque language: his book The History of Basque (1997) is an essential reference on diachronic Basque linguistics and probably the best introduction to Basque linguistics as a whole. He was at work compiling an etymological dictionary of that language when he died; the work was posthumously published by Max W. Wheeler. He was also an authority on historical linguistics, and had written about the problem of the origin of language. He also published two introductory books to linguistics: Language: The basics (1995) and Introducing Linguistics (coauthored with Bill Mayblin) (2000), and several dictionaries on different topics of this science: A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics (1993), A dictionary of phonetics and phonology (1996), A student's dictionary of language and linguistics (1997), Key concepts in language and linguistics (1999), The dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics (2000) and The Penguin dictionary of English grammar (2000).
Larry Trask (comics)
Larry Trask is a fictional character in the Marvel Comics universe. He was a mutant who was introduced as a villain for the X-Men.
Fictional character biography
Larry Trask is the son of scientist Bolivar Trask. At the age of five, Larry's mutant power of precognition manifested when he predicted the death of his mother. He lost his older sister Tanya soon after, as she was a mutant time-traveler who had become lost in the timestream.
Fearful of the "mutant menace," Bolivar crafted a medallion that would block Larry's powerful visions of the future, as well as erase any memory of them. As his son grew older, Bolivar enlisted Larry's help in the creation of the first wave of Sentinels. Bolivar occasionally removed Larry's medallion so that he could secretly observe and record Larry's predictions about mutants in the future, and Larry accurately predicted the assassination attempt of Senator Robert Kelly (as told in the classic "Days of Future Past" storyline).
Larry was skeptical of his father's hatred of mutants, until the night his sister Tanya (now calling herself Madame Sanctity) returned to the past. Tanya hoped to change the future by stopping her father's creation of the Sentinels, but she was thwarted by her friend Rachel Summers. Though Rachel successfully prevented Larry from witnessing the psychic duel that ensued, she could not hide the physical damage caused by the fight. This convinced Larry that dangerous mutants did exist.
