Calvert Watkins

Calvert Watkins (/ˈwɒtkɪnz/; March 13, 1933 – March 20, 2013) was an American linguist and philologist. He is best known for his book How to Kill a Dragon. He was Professor Emeritus of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and later went to serve as the professor-in-residence at UCLA.[1]

His doctoral dissertation at Harvard University, Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb I. The Sigmatic Aorist (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962), which deeply reflected the structuralist approach of Jerzy Kuryłowicz, opened a fresh era of creative work in Celtic comparative linguistics and the study of the verbal system of Indo-European languages.

Watkins, in a sense, completed his contribution to this area with his Indogermanische Grammatik, vol. 3, part 1: Geschichte der indogermanischen Verbalflexion (1969). Meanwhile, his work on Indo-European vocabulary and poetics yielded a large number of articles on (among others) Celtic, Anatolian, Greek, Italic and Indo-Iranian material, presented directly in his Selected Writings and indirectly in his book, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford University Press, 1995).

He contributed his expertise on Indo-European languages to the first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and edited The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots ( ISBN 0-618-08250-6).[1]

Published work

  • Indo-European origins of the Celtic verb, vol. 1: The sigmatic aorist. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advances Studies, 1962.
  • “Preliminaries to a historical and comparative analysis of the syntax of the Old Irish verb”, Celtica 6 (1963): 1-49.
  • “L’apport d’Emile Benveniste à la grammaire comparée”, in E. Benveniste aujourd’hui: Actes du Colloque international du CNRS, ed. G. Serbat. Louvain: Ed. Peeters, 1984, pp. 1: 3-11.
  • Indogermanische Grammatik, vol. 3, part 1: Geschichte der indogermanischen Verbalflexion. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1986.
  • “Etymologies, equations, and comparanda: types and values, and criteria for judgment”, in Linguistic Change and Reconstruction Methodology, ed. Philip Baldi. Berlin-NY: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990, pp. 289–304.
  • “The comparison of formulaic sequences”, in Reconstructing Languages and Cultures, eds. Edgar Polomé & Werner Winter. Berlin–NY: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992, pp. 391–409.
  • Selected Writings. 2 vols; I: Language and Linguistics; II: Culture and Poetics. Edited by Lisi Oliver. Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Schprachwissenschaft, 1994.
  • How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. NY–Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
  • “Proto-Indo-European: comparison and reconstruction”, in The Indo-European Languages, eds. Anna Giacalone Ramat & Paolo Ramat. London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 25–73.
  • “A Celtic miscellany”, in Proceedings of the Tenth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, Los Angeles, May 21–23, 1998, eds. Karlene Jones-Bley et al. Washington D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man, 1999, pp. 3–26.
  • The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd edn. Revised and edited by Calvert Watkins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. Original edition published in 1985.
  • “An Indo-European linguistic area and its characteristics: Ancient Anatolia. Areal diffusion as a challenge to the comparative method?”, in Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics, eds. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & R.M.W. Dixon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 (rev. edn., 2006), pp. 44–63.
  • “Homer and Hittite revisited II”, in Recent Developments in Hittite Archaeology and History: Papers in Memory of Hans G. Güterbock, eds. K. Aslihan Yener & Harry A. Hoffner Jr. with the assistance of Simrit Dhesi. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2002, pp. 167–176.
  • “Hittite ku-ku-us-zi, KUB 10.99 i 29”, in Hittite Studies in Honor of Harry A. Hoffner Jr. on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, eds. Gary Beckman, Richard Beal, & Gregory McMahon. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003, pp. 389–392.
  • “The third donkey: origin legends and some hidden Indo-European themes”, in Indo-European Perspectives: Studies in Honour of Anna Morpurgo Davies, ed. J.H.W. Penney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 65–82.
  • “What makes the study of Irish worthwhile”, in Why Irish? Irish Language and Literature in Academia, ed. Brian Ó Conchubhair. Galway, Ireland: Arlen House; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008, pp. 43–54.

References

  1. 1 2 Reuell, Peter (March 28, 2013). "Calvert Watkins dies at 80". Harvard Gazette. Retrieved 10 May 2013.
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