Warren Cowgill

Warren Crawford Cowgill (/ˈkoʊɡɪl/ KOH-gill;^[1] December 19, 1929 – June 20, 1985) was an American linguist. He was a professor of linguistics at Yale University and the Encyclopædia Britannica's authority on Indo-European linguistics.^[2] Two separate Indo-European sound laws are named after him, Cowgill's law of Greek and Cowgill's law of Germanic.

Warren Cowgill
Born	(1929-12-19)December 19, 1929 Grangeville, Idaho, U.S.
Died	June 20, 1985(1985-06-20) (aged 55) New Haven, Connecticut
Spouses	Sheila Blau Levitsky ​ ​ (m. 1966⁠–⁠1970)​ Kathryn Louise Markhus ​ ​ (m. 1970)​
Children	1 (born 1967)
Parents	George Dewey Cowgill Ruby Eugenia Smith Cowgill
Relatives	George Cowgill (twin brother)
Academic background
Education	Stanford University Yale University
Thesis	The Indo-European Long-Vowel Preterits (1957)
Doctoral advisors	Paul Tedesco Konstantin Reichardt
Academic work
Institutions	Yale University
Main interests	Indo-European languages

Cowgill was unusual among Indo-European linguists of his time in believing that Indo-European should be classified as a branch of Indo-Hittite, with Hittite as a sister language of the Indo-European languages, rather than a daughter language.

Warren Cowgill and his twin brother, anthropologist George Cowgill, were born near Grangeville, Idaho. Along with his brother, he graduated from Stanford University in 1952 and received a Ph.D. from Yale in 1957. He was a member of the Yale faculty in the Department of Linguistics until his death in 1985.^[3][4] At Yale, Cowgill taught many of the leading Indo-European scholars of the late 20^th and early 21^st centuries, including:

• George Cardona (University of Pennsylvania, PhD 1960)
• Raimo Anttila (UCLA, PhD 1966; deceased)
• Andrew Sihler (University of Wisconsin-Madison, PhD 1967)
• Hans Henrich Hock (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, PhD 1971)
• Jared S. Klein (University of Georgia, PhD 1974)
• Stephanie W. Jamison (UCLA, PhD 1977)
• Donald Ringe (University of Pennsylvania, PhD 1984)
• Alexander Lerman (University of Delaware, PhD 1985; deceased)