Warren Cowgill

Warren Crawford Cowgill (/ˈkoʊɡɪl/ KOH-gill; 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, Cowgill's law of Greek and Cowgill's law of Germanic.

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 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. At Yale Cowgill taught many of the leading Indo-European scholars of the 20^th and 21^st centuries, some of whom are still teaching today, including:

• George Cardona (PhD 1960), who taught at the University of Pennsylvania for many years,
• Raimo Anttila (PhD 1966; deceased), who taught for many years at UCLA,
• Andrew Sihler (PhD 1967), who taught at the University of Wisconsin-Madison,
• Hans Henrich Hock (PhD 1971), professor emeritus at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,
• Jared S. Klein (PhD 1974), who currently teaches linguistics courses at the University of Georgia,
• Stephanie W. Jamison (PhD 1977). who currently teaches at UCLA,
• Donald Ringe (PhD 1984), who currently teaches linguistics courses at the University of Pennsylvania,
• Alexander Lerman (PhD 1985; deceased), who taught at the University of Delaware