Frederik Kortlandt | |
|---|---|
| Frits Kortlandt in 2006 | |
| Born | Frederik Herman Henri 19 June 1946 |
| Occupation | Linguist |
| Academic background | |
| Doctoral advisor | Carl Lodewijk Ebeling |
| Academic work | |
| Institutions | Leiden University |
| Main interests | Indo-European languages,historical linguistics |
Frederik Herman Henri "Frits" Kortlandt (born 19 June 1946) is a Dutch former 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 the controversial Indo-Uralic.
Kortlandt was born on 19 June 1946 in Utrecht. [1] 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:
He obtained his PhD under Carl Lodewijk Ebeling with a thesis titled:"Modelling the phoneme :new trends in East European phonemic theory". [2] [3] Kortlandt was a professor of Slavic Languages at Leiden University between 1975 and 2011. [1]
Kortlandt has been a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1986 [4] and is a 1997 Spinozapremie laureate. [5] 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.