Frederik Kortlandt

Frederik Kortlandt
Frits Kortlandt in 2006
Born	Frederik Herman Henri (1946-06-19) 19 June 1946 (age 78) Utrecht, Netherlands
Occupation	Linguist
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.

Biography

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:

• 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 ^[2]

He obtained his PhD under Carl Lodewijk Ebeling with a thesis titled: "Modelling the phoneme : new trends in East European phonemic theory". ^[2] 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 ^[3] and is a 1997 Spinozapremie laureate. ^[4] 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

1. "Frederik Herman Henri Kortlandt (Frits)". Leiden University. Archived from the original on 23 July 2019.
2. "F.H.H. Kortlandt". University of Amsterdam. Archived from the original on 30 October 2020.
3. "Frits Kortlandt". Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Archived from the original on 5 August 2020.
4. "NWO Spinoza Prize 1997". Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research. 11 September 2014. Archived from the original on 27 June 2015. Retrieved 30 January 2016.

External links

• Frederik Kortlandt: Bibliography