COWGILL, Warren Crawford. Crangeville, Idaho 19.12.1929 — New Haven 20.6.1985. U.S. IE Linguist. Professor at Yale. Son of George Dewey C. and Ruby Eugenia Smith. Educated at Stanford (B.A. 1952 in classics, under H. Fraenkel) and, now studying IE and linguistics under Tedesco, Thieme et al., at Yale (M.A. 1953, Ph.D. 1957). Taught comparative IE linguistics at Yale: 1956-60 Instructor, 1960-63 Assistant Professor, 1963-72 Associate Professor, and from 1972 until his death full Professor. Died of cancer. Twin brother of anthropologist George Cowgill. Married 1966 Sheila Blau Levitsky (divorced), one daughter, and 1970 Kathryn Louise Markhus.
Cowgill was a “pan-Indo-Europeanist” who taught and wrote about Homeric Greek, early Latin, Gothic and Old Norse, Old Irish and Welsh, Hittite and Tocharian. He saw Old Anatolian languages as a separate group, making thus a higher unit of “Indo-Hittite”. He was specially interested in phonological change and its effects on morphological processes, also in dialectology.
Publications: “Ablaut, accent and umlaut in the Tocharian subjunctive”, W. W. Arndt (ed.), Studies in historical linguistics in honor of G. S. Lane. 1967, 171-181; “The aorists and perfects of Old Persian”, KZ 82, 1968, 259-268; “The First Person Singular Medio-Passive of Indo-Iranian”, Pratidānam Kuiper. 1968, 24-31; articles on Greek, IE, Germanic, etc.
– J. S. Klein (ed.): The collected writings of Warren Cowgill. 58+578 p. Ann Arbor 2006 (all published articles and reviews and a number of unpublished ones).
Sources: Dir. Am. Sch. 6th ed. 3, 1974; A. Bammesberger, review of Coll. Writings in Language 85, 2009, 220-223; St. Insler, Lex. Gramm. 1996, 208; in *Coll. Writings introduction by Klein, “Reminiscenses” (xxvii-xlvi) by colleagues and former students and an autobiographical letter (xlvii-lii); CowgillCousins.org; Wikipedia briefly; photo in TITUS Galeria.
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