Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalism. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics. He made significant contributions to Indo-European historical linguistics, the description of Austronesian languages, and description of languages of the Algonquian family.
Sanskrit is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late Bronze Age. Sanskrit is the sacred language of Hinduism, the language of classical Hindu philosophy, and of historical texts of Buddhism and Jainism. It was a link language in ancient and medieval South Asia, and upon transmission of Hindu and Buddhist culture to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Central Asia in the early medieval era, it became a language of religion and high culture, and of the political elites in some of these regions. As a result, Sanskrit had a lasting effect on the languages of South Asia, Southeast Asia and East Asia, especially in their formal and learned vocabularies.
The Munda languages are a group of closely related languages spoken by about nine million people in India, Bangladesh and Nepal. Historically, they have been called the Kolarian languages. They constitute a branch of the Austroasiatic language family, which means they are more distantly related to languages such as the Mon and Khmer languages, to Vietnamese, as well as to minority languages in Thailand and Laos and the minority Mangic languages of South China. Bhumij, Ho, Mundari, and Santali are notable Munda languages.
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. No direct record of Proto-Indo-European exists; its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages.
The Vedanga are six auxiliary disciplines of Hinduism that developed in ancient times and have been connected with the study of the Vedas:
Ronald Wayne Langacker is an American linguist and professor emeritus at the University of California, San Diego. He is best known as one of the founders of the cognitive linguistics movement and the creator of cognitive grammar. He has also made significant contributions to the comparative study of Uto-Aztecan languages, publishing several articles on historical Uto-Aztecan linguistics, as well as editing collections of grammar sketches of under-described Uto-Aztecan languages.
Yāska was an ancient Indian grammarian and linguist [est. 7th–5th century BCE(disputed)]. Preceding Pāṇini [est. 7th–4th century BCE(disputed)], he is traditionally identified as the author of Nirukta, the discipline of "etymology" within Sanskrit grammatical tradition and the Nighantu, the oldest proto-thesaurus in India. Yaska is widely regarded as the precursive founder of the discipline of what would become etymology in both the East and the West.
George Cardona is an American linguist, Indologist, Sanskritist, and scholar of Pāṇini. Described as "a luminary" in Indo-European, Indo-Aryan, and Pāṇinian linguistics since the early sixties, Cardona has been recognized as the leading Western scholar of the Indian grammatical tradition (vyākaraṇa) and of the great Indian grammarian Pāṇini. He is currently Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and South Asian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Cardona was credited by Mohammad Hamid Ansari, the vice president of India, for making the University of Pennsylvania a "center of Sanskrit learning in North America", along with Professors W. Norman Brown, Ludo Rocher, Ernest Bender, Wilhelm Halbfass, and several other Sanskritists.
In linguistics, umlaut is a sound change in which a vowel is pronounced more like a following vowel or semivowel.
Sawi, Savi, or Sauji, is an endangered Indo-Aryan language spoken in northeastern Afghanistan and north-western Pakistan. It is classified as a member of the Shina language cluster within the Dardic subgroup.
Edgar Ghislain Charles Polomé was a Belgian-American philologist and religious studies scholar. He specialized in Germanic and Indo-European studies and was active at the University of Texas at Austin for much of his career.
Irmengard Rauch is a linguist and semiotician.
Leon Kellner was an English lexicographer, grammarian, and Shakespearian scholar. He was also a political activist and a promoter of Zionism.
Artemis Alexiadou is a Greek linguist active in syntax research working in Germany. She is professor of English linguistics at the Humboldt University of Berlin.
Liliane Madeleine Victor Haegeman ARB is a Belgian professor of linguistics at Ghent University. She received her PhD in English linguistics in 1981 from Ghent University, and has written numerous books and journal articles thereafter. Haegeman is best known for her contributions to the English generative grammar, with her book Introduction to Government and Binding Theory (1991) well established as the most authoritative introduction on the Principles and Parameters approach of generative linguistics. She is also acknowledged for her contributions to syntactic cartography, including works on the left periphery of Germanic languages, negation and discourse particles, and adverbial clauses. As a native speaker of West Flemish, her research has also touched upon the comparative study of English and West Flemish in terms of the subject position and its relation to the clausal structure.
Alice Davison was an American linguist who specialized in the syntax of South Asian languages, in particular Hindustani.
Elmer H. Antonsen was an American philologist who specialized in Germanic studies. Antonsen was born in Glens Falls, New York on 17 November 1929. He earned degrees in German at Union College where he took the B.A. degree, and then at University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign where he studied under Ernst Alfred Philippson for his doctorate. He taught German Studies, Germanic Philology and Germanic Linguistics at the University of Iowa in the 1960s before moving back to the University of Illinois to eventually rise to Full Professor. Antonsen served as Head of the department of Germanic languages and literatures from 1973 - 1982 and of the department of linguistics from 1990-92. He was visiting professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1972-73 and at University of Göttingen in 1988. He retired in 1996, and was awarded professor emeritus status. He was a known expert on runology.
Richard Wiese is a German linguist, with academic degrees from the universities of Bielefeld and Düsseldorf. Since 1996, he is a professor of German Linguistics at Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, now retired. He has also worked at the universities of Bielefeld, Kassel, TU Berlin, and Düsseldorf.
Henk van Riemsdijk is a Dutch linguist and professor emeritus at Tilburg University.
Susi Wurmbrand is an Austrian linguist specializing in syntax.
