Obituaries

-- Matt Schudel

Frank Aydelotte RiceLinguist

Frank Aydelotte Rice, 90, a linguist who taught Arabic for the State Department for several years, died Oct. 27 at Powhatan Nursing Home in Falls Church. He had dementia.

Mr. Rice began linguistic studies as a boy and ultimately learned at least 14 languages. He came to Washington in the early 1950s and served as a State Department attache in Beirut and on the faculty of the Foreign Service Institute, teaching Arabic to Foreign Service officers.

According to his son, William Craig Rice, Mr. Rice studied Arabic for six weeks "and started teaching in Week 7."

He stayed with the State Department for about 10 years, leaving in the 1960s to become a linguist and scholar at the Center for Applied Linguistics in Washington. He retired in 1971.

Mr. Rice was born in Chicago and raised in Nebraska, Florida and England. His father, John Andrew Rice, was one of the founders of Black Mountain College, a progressive college in North Carolina noted for producing many artists and poets and for providing an academic refuge to European exiles before and during World War II.

Mr. Rice attended Black Mountain and Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania and graduated from the University of North Carolina. He taught English to German refugees in Cuba in the late 1930s. He received a master's degree in library science from the University of Michigan in 1942 and did additional graduate study in linguistics there and at Columbia University.

During the 1940s, he taught at Black Mountain and the College of Charleston in South Carolina. He also taught Arabic to employees of the Arabian American Oil Co. (Aramco) in Saudi Arabia in the 1950s.

His son said Mr. Rice knew Greek, Latin, all the western European and Scandinavian languages, Russian, Sanskrit and Arabic. A textbook he co-wrote in 1956, "Eastern Arabic," is still in print. He also published "The Classical Arabic Writing System" and other works on linguistics.

"He had a preternatural gift for languages," his son said. "He could mimic anything."