Jay Jasanoff

LSA 231: Tocharian and Indo-European

Jay Jasanoff earned his Ph.D. at Harvard, where he is Diebold Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Philology. He has held teaching appointments at Berkeley (1969-70), Harvard (1970-78, 1998), and Cornell (1978-98). He is a historical linguist who specializes in the early Indo-European languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Hittite, Tocharian, etc.) and their prehistory. His 2003 book, Hittite and the Indo-European Verb (Oxford), proposes the first major revision of the Proto-Indo-European verb system since the decipherment of Hittite nearly a century ago. Other recent works include "From reduplication to ablaut: the class VII strong verbs of Northwest Germanic" (Historische Sprachforschung 120 (2007), 241-284); "The origin of the Latin gerund and gerundive: a new proposal," to appear in the forthcoming Festschrift for Michael Flier; and a major new assault on the problem of accentual mobility in Balto-Slavic, to appear in Baltistica.

External website: http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~lingdept/f_jasanoff.html