Frederik Kortlandt
linguist
Frederik Herman Henri "Frits" Kortlandt (born 19 June 1946) is a Dutch former professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He writes on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in other language families. He has also studied ways to associate language families into super-groups such as the controversial Indo-Uralic.
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Quotes
edit- Indo-European is a branch of Indo-Uralic which was radically transformed under the influence of a North Caucasian substratum when its speakers moved from the area north of the Caspian Sea to the area north of the Black Sea (…). As a result, Indo-European developed a minimal vowel system combined with a large consonant inventory including glottalized stops, also grammatical gender and adjectival agreement, an ergative construction which was lost again but has left its traces in the grammatical system (...).
- Kortlandt, Frederik, 2011: An Outline of Proto-Indo-European
