Mary Ritchie Key, 79; Linguist Researched Indigenous Languages

Mary Ritchie Key, chairwoman of UC Irvine’s fledgling Program in Linguists from 1969 to 1971, whose research in the indigenous languages of Mexico and South America led her to write dozens of books and articles about them, has died. She was 79.

Ill for several months, Key was hospitalized at Tustin Medical Center in Tustin, Calif. in early September. She died there on Sept. 5. The cause of death was not announced.

Before she retired from teaching in 1991, Key started work on an Intercontinental Dictionary Series, a computerized lexicon for non-European languages. She enlisted scholars from around the world to contribute to the project, a comparative study of terms grouped by geographic area. Key edited the first several volumes, each containing about 1,300 entries, and named her successor so that work can continue on the series.

“Mary was a passionate gatherer of data,” said Mary Louise Kean, professor of cognitive science at UC Irvine and a longtime colleague. “The dictionary will be of value to people interested in the details of language variations.”

Born in Julian, in eastern San Diego County, Key was fascinated with linguistics from childhood and began studying various alphabets when she was eight.

She graduated from Westmont College in Los Angeles (later relocated to Santa Barbara) and worked as an aircraft riveter during World War II. She married Harold Key, who was then serving in the Army.

After the war the couple joined Wycliffe Bible Translators, a Christian missionary group, and went to work in Puebla, Mexico, where they prepared a vocabulary book and a beginner’s reader for a community that spoke Nahuatl. The youngest of the Key’s three children was born in Mexico. The others were born in the U.S.

In 1954, the Keys moved to Bolivia to do work for the Wycliffe institute. They lived in the village of Tumichucua, near the larger city of Riberalta, where Key set up a public library and conducted research on the native Indian languages of the area.

The family returned to the United States in 1962. “The trauma of reentering the U.S. after close to 20 years away was a serious culture shock,” Key’s daughter, Mary Helen Ellis, told The Times this week.

A feminist, Key adapted to the unleashed social atmosphere of the ‘60s, but it was more difficult for her husband, Ellis said. Mary completed her doctorate at the University of Texas in 1963 and published the first of her 11 books several years later. (She recently donated her personal library of research, field notes, linguistics journals and books to the University of Texas library in Austin.)

The Keys moved to Santa Ana in 1964, where Harold continued to work for the Wycliffe institute. They divorced that year. She married Audley E. Patton, an engineer, in 1976. He died in 1996.

Key taught at Chapman University in Orange in the early 1960s and was among the first faculty members hired at UC Irvine in 1966, when the university was one year old.

“My mother was research-oriented and curious to solve questions never answered before,” Ellis said this week. “At home, it created an open-minded atmosphere. No question was taboo in our house and I never heard my mother use the word, ‘problem.’ She saw things as interesting, or curious.”

Along with her daughter, Key is survived by her son, Tom Key, and two granddaughters, Jessica and Melissa Ellis. Her eldest son, Hayden, died in 1984.