Warren Cowgill (; December 19, 1929 – June 20, 1985) was an American linguist. He was a professor of linguistics at Yale University and the Encyclopædia Britannica's authority on Indo-European linguistics. Two separate Indo-European sound laws are named after him, both called Cowgill's law in Greek and Germanic respectively.

Cowgill 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.

Warren Cowgill

Warren Cowgill and his twin brother, anthropologist George Cowgill, were born near Grangeville, Idaho. Along with his brother, 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.

Warren Cowgill

Notes

External links

Table of contents for The Collected Writings of Warren Cowgill ()

Warren Cowgill

1929 births

1985 deaths

20th-century linguists

Historical linguists

Indo-Europeanists

Linguists from the United States

Linguists of Indo-European languages

Paleolinguists

Stanford University alumni

Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences alumni

Yale University faculty