Jay Jasanoff

Jay Harold Jasanoff is an American linguist and Indo-Europeanist born in 1942 who serves as the Diebold Professor of Indo-European Linguistics and Philology at Harvard University. He is best known for developing the h2e-conjugation theory, which revised understanding of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system by integrating evidence from Hittite and Tocharian languages unavailable to nineteenth century scholars. His major work, Hittite and the Indo-European Verb (2003), proposed new reconstructions of middle voice endings and their relation to perfect and thematic conjugations, and he has also studied the origins of Balto-Slavic pitch accent.