Warren Cowgill
American linguist (1929–1985)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Warren Crawford Cowgill (/ˈkoʊɡɪl/ KOH-gill;[1] December 19, 1929 – June 20, 1985) was an American linguist. He was a professor of linguistics at Yale University and the Encyclopædia Britannica's authority on Indo-European linguistics.[2] Two separate Indo-European sound laws are named after him, Cowgill's law of Greek and Cowgill's law of Germanic.
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Sheila Blau Levitsky(m. 1966–1970)
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Kathryn Louise Markhus(m. 1970)
Warren Cowgill | |
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| Born | December 19, 1929 Grangeville, Idaho, U.S. |
| Died | June 20, 1985 (aged 55) |
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| Children | 1 (born 1967) |
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| Relatives | George Cowgill (twin brother) |
| Academic background | |
| Education | |
| Thesis | The Indo-European Long-Vowel Preterits (1957) |
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| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Yale University |
| Main interests | Indo-European languages |
Cowgill was unusual among Indo-European linguists of his time in believing that Indo-European should be classified as a branch of Indo-Hittite, with Hittite as a sister language of the Indo-European languages, rather than a daughter language.
Warren Cowgill and his twin brother, anthropologist George Cowgill, were born near Grangeville, Idaho. Along with his brother, he graduated from Stanford University in 1952 and received a Ph.D. from Yale in 1957. He was a member of the Yale faculty in the Department of Linguistics until his death in 1985.[3][4] At Yale, Cowgill taught many of the leading Indo-European scholars of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, including:
- George Cardona (University of Pennsylvania, PhD 1960)
- Raimo Anttila (UCLA, PhD 1966; deceased)
- Andrew Sihler (University of Wisconsin-Madison, PhD 1967)
- Hans Henrich Hock (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, PhD 1971)
- Jared S. Klein (University of Georgia, PhD 1974)
- Stephanie W. Jamison (UCLA, PhD 1977)
- Donald Ringe (University of Pennsylvania, PhD 1984)
- Alexander Lerman (University of Delaware, PhD 1985; deceased)
