Frederik Kortlandt
Frederik Herman Henri (Frits) Kortlandt (born June 19, 1946, Utrecht) is a professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He writes on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in other language families. He has also studied ways to associate language families into super-groups such as controversial Indo-Uralic.
Frederik Kortlandt | |
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![]() Frits Kortlandt | |
Born | Frederik Herman Henri June 19, 1946 Utrecht |
Nationality | Dutch |
Occupation | Linguist |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Leiden University |
Main interests | Indo-European languages, historical linguistics |
Biography
Kortlandt, along with George van Driem and a few other colleagues, is one of the proponents of the Leiden School of linguistics, which describes language in terms of a meme or benign parasite.
Kortlandt holds five degrees from the University of Amsterdam:
- B.A., 1967, Slavic Linguistics and Literature
- B.A., 1967, mathematics and economics
- M.A., 1969, Slavic linguistics
- M.A., 1970, mathematical economics
- Ph.D., 1972, mathematical linguistics
Kortlandt has been a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences since 1986[1] and is a 1997 Spinozapremie laureate.[2] In 2007, he composed a version of Schleicher's fable, a story written in a hypothetical, reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, which differs radically from all previous versions.
References
- "Frits Kortlandt". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved 17 July 2015.
- "NWO Spinoza Prize 1997". Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. 11 September 2014. Retrieved 30 January 2016.