Warren Cowgill

Who was Warren Cowgill?

Warren Cowgill was a professor of linguistics at Yale University and the Encyclopædia Britannica's authority on Indo-European linguistics. He was unusual among Indo-European linguists of his time in believing that Indo-European should be classified as a branch of Indo-Hittite, with Hittite as a sister language of the Indo-European languages, rather than a daughter language. He was also a supporter of the Indo-Uralic hypothesis.

Warren Cowgill and his twin brother, anthropologist George Cowgill, were born near Grangeville, Idaho. He graduated from Stanford University in 1952 and received a Ph.D. from Yale in 1957. He was a member of the Yale faculty in the Department of Linguistics until his death in 1985.