Calvert Watkins dies at 80
Calvert Watkins, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Linguistics and the Classics, emeritus, died earlier this month at the age of 80. A towering figure in historical and Indo-European linguistics and a pioneer in the field of Indo-European poetics, Watkins presided over the expansion of Harvard’s Department of Linguistics in the 1960s, and served as its chair several times between 1963 until his retirement in 2003. From then until his death, he served as professor in residence at the University of California, Los Angeles. “He was an inspirational teacher,” said Jay H. Jasanoff, the Diebold Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Philology and interim chair of the Department of Linguistics. “He was brilliant and all-knowing. He seemed to know every language you had ever heard of, and he produced forms in languages like Sanskrit and Old Irish and Hittite with such panache that if you were interested in those subjects to begin...