Jeremy Rau Named Professor of Linguistics and the Classics

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Jeremy Rau Named Professor of Linguistics and the Classics

Cambridge, Mass. - July 19, 2010 - Historical linguist Jeremy Rau, who has studied the early history and prehistory of the Indo-European family of languages, has been named professor of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University.

Rau was previously associate professor of linguistics and the classics at Harvard, where he has been a member of the faculty since 2003.

"Professor Rau’s scholarship has made substantial contributions to our understanding of the evolution and development of language," says Diana Sorensen, dean of arts and humanities in Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. "As importantly, he is an inspiring and dedicated teacher whose enthusiasm for linguistics comes through in the broad range of courses he teaches. I join the Department of Linguistics and the Department of the Classics in welcoming him as a permanent member of our faculty."

Rau examines the shared properties of ancient Indo-European languages, such as Greek and Latin, to recover information about an ancestor language, Proto-Indo-European (PIE), that was spoken about 6,000 years ago. In addition to focusing on Greek and the Italic family of languages that includes Latin, Rau also studies the Indo-Iranian languages, which include Sanskrit and Avestan. His study of these languages includes particular command of their history and prehistory, dialects, philological traditions, and early inscriptional and literary monuments.

Starting as a graduate student, Rau has made major contributions through his studies of PIE noun morphology. His 1998 article on the PIE word for "knowing" explored the evolution of its perfect participle into Greek and Gothic. He has also traced the history of kinship terms in Greek and Latin, the derivation of proper names in Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan, and the principles underlying the formation of nouns and adjectives in the older IE languages.

Rau’s monograph Indo-European Nominal Morphology: The Decads and the Caland System (Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Sprachwissenschaft, 2009) had two distinct areas of focus. The first part focused on the origin of words describing decads, such as "twenty" and "thirty," tracing how some arose from adjectival constructions meaning "consisting of three tens" while others came from noun phrases such as "three tens." The volume also examined the Caland system, a derivational subsystem in which a primary adjective, such as "red," changes its suffix to denote related meanings such as "redness" or "being red."

Rau’s work has also focused on Homeric language, contributing to our understanding of the transmitted text of the Iliad and Odyssey. This work has also helped clarify the formulaics of Homeric poetry and the way that oral composition influenced Homeric language, leading Homeric poets to create artificial forms that were more easily incorporated into Homeric meter.

Rau received a B.A. in classical languages and literatures from the University of Michigan in 1994 and a Ph.D. in classics from Cornell University in 2003. He joined Harvard as an assistant professor of linguistics and the classics later that year, and was an invited professor at Freie Universität in Berlin in 2007.

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