Warren Cowgill | |
Birth Date: | 19 December 1929 |
Birth Place: | Grangeville, Idaho, U.S. |
Death Place: | New Haven, Connecticut |
Children: | 1 (born 1967) |
Relatives: | George Cowgill (twin brother) |
Thesis Title: | The Indo-European Long-Vowel Preterits |
Thesis Year: | 1957 |
Workplaces: | Yale University |
Main Interests: | Indo-European languages |
Warren Crawford Cowgill (;[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, both called Cowgill's law in Greek and Germanic respectively.
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]