Frederik Kortlandt
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Frederik Herman Henri (Frits) Kortlandt (June 19, 1946, Utrecht, The Netherlands) is a professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University. He is an expert on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in many other language families. He has also studied ways to associate language families into super-groups such as Indo-Uralic.
Kortlandt, along with George van Driem and a few other colleagues, is one of the proponents of the Leiden School of linguistics, which describes language in terms of a meme or benign parasite.
Kortlandt holds five degrees from the University of Amsterdam:
- B.A., 1967, Slavic Linguistics and Literature
- B.A., 1967, mathematics and economics
- M.A., 1969, Slavic linguistics
- M.A., 1970, mathematical economics
- Ph.D., 1972, mathematical linguistics
Kortlandt is a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Sciences and a Spinozapremie laureate. In 2007, he composed a version of Schleicher's fable, a story written in a hypothetical reconstruction Proto-Indo-European, which differs radically from all previous versions.
