Frederik Kortlandt
Dutch linguist (born 1946)
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Frederik Herman Henri "Frits" Kortlandt (born 19 June 1946) is a Dutch former professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He writes on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in other language families. He has also studied ways to associate language families into super-groups such as the controversial Indo-Uralic.
Frederik Kortlandt | |
|---|---|
Kortlandt in 2006 | |
| Born | 19 June 1946 |
| Spouse | Annie Kortlandt |
| Academic background | |
| Thesis | Modelling the Phoneme: New trends in East European phonemic theory (1972) |
| Carl Lodewijk Ebeling | |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Leiden University |
Main interests | Indo-European languages, historical linguistics |
Biography
Kortlandt was born on 19 June 1946 in Utrecht.[1] Kortlandt, along with George van Driem and a few other colleagues, is one of the proponents of the Leiden school of linguistics, which describes language in terms of a meme or benign parasite.
Kortlandt holds five degrees from the University of Amsterdam:
- B.A., 1967, Slavic Linguistics and Literature
- B.A., 1967, mathematics and economics
- M.A., 1969, Slavic linguistics
- M.A., 1970, mathematical economics
- Ph.D., 1972, mathematical linguistics[2]
He obtained his PhD under Carl Lodewijk Ebeling with a thesis titled: "Modelling the phoneme: New trends in East European phonemic theory".[2][3] Kortlandt was a professor of Slavic Languages at Leiden University between 1975 and 2011.[1]
Kortlandt has been a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1986[4] and is a 1997 Spinozapremie laureate.[5] In 2007, he composed a version of Schleicher's fable, a story written in a hypothetical, reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, which differs radically from all previous versions.
