Calvert Watkins

Calvert Watkins was an American linguist and a leading Indo-Europeanist of the late twentieth century, spending most of his career as a professor at Harvard University and later at the University of California, Los Angeles. Watkins specialized in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and in the historical grammar of its early attested daughter languages, particularly Hittite and the Celtic languages, and he compiled the widely used appendix of Indo-European roots for the American Heritage Dictionary, making the reconstructed vocabulary of Proto-Indo-European accessible to a broad general readership. In his 1995 book How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics, Watkins traced a shared formulaic phrase associated with dragon-slaying and heroic combat across widely separated Indo-European poetic traditions, arguing it preserved a fragment of a common inherited poetic language reaching back to the Proto-Indo-European speech community. Watkins served as president of the Linguistic Society of America and trained many of the next generation's leading Indo-Europeanists.