Eric P. Hamp, Renowned Scholar of Indo-European Linguistics, 1920-2019
During his 41-year career at the University of Chicago, Professor Emeritus Eric P. Hamp became one of the world’s foremost scholars of Indo-European linguistics. Not only did he base much of his scholarship on lesser-known languages and dialects, but his colleagues said he rescued many of the obscure ones. Hamp, who passed away on Feb. 17 at age 98, compared modern languages to reconstruct how our common ancestors spoke thousands of years ago—long before language was recorded.
