Edgar Howard Sturtevant, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Edgar Howard Sturtevant

American linguist

Date of Birth: 07-Mar-1875

Place of Birth: Jacksonville, Illinois, United States

Date of Death: 01-Jul-1952

Profession: university teacher, Hittitologist, linguist

Nationality: United States

Zodiac Sign: Pisces


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About Edgar Howard Sturtevant

  • Edgar Howard Sturtevant (March 7, 1875 – July 1, 1952) was an American linguist. Sturtevant was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, the older brother of Alfred Sturtevant.
  • He studied at the University of Chicago receiving there in 1901 a Ph.D.
  • with a dissertation on Latin case forms.
  • He became an assistant professor of classical philology at Columbia University in New York before joining the linguistics faculty at Yale University in 1923.
  • In 1924, he was a member of the organizing committee for the founding, with Leonard Bloomfield and George M.
  • Bolling, of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA). Besides research on Native American languages and field work on the Modern American English dialects, he is the father of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, first formulated in 1926, based on his seminal work establishing the Indo-European character of Hittite (and the related Anatolian languages), with Hittite exhibiting more archaic traits than the normally reconstructed forms for Proto-Indo-European. He authored the first scientifically acceptable Hittite grammar with a chrestomathy and a glossary, formulated the so-called Sturtevant's law (the doubling of consonants representing Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops) and laid the foundations to what later became the Goetze-Wittmann law (the spirantization of palatal stops before u as the focal origin of the centum-satem isogloss).
  • The 1951 revised edition of his grammar (co-authored with E.
  • Adelaide Hahn) is still useful today, although it was superseded in 2008 by Hoffner and Melchert's Grammar of the Hittite Language. Sturtevant died in Branford, Connecticut.

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