Professor of Greek and Latin Language, Literature and Historical Linguistics
About
Ben Fortson is a Professor of Greek and Latin Language, Literature, and Historical Linguistics (Classical Studies) and Adjunct Professor of Linguistics. His core teaching includes Latin language and literature, several Classical Civilization courses (including "Ancient Languages and Scripts" and "Medical Terminology"), and the Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin. His research specializes in the comparative linguistic study of the Indo-European language family, focusing primarily on the Italic, Greek, Indo-Iranian, Anatolian, and Celtic branches, with side interests in comparative Indo-European metrics, poetics, and culture. He also does research in the methodology of historical linguistics and the mechanisms of phonological and morphological change. He is currently preparing a translation of, together with historical linguistic and cultural commentary on, the lexicon of Festus. For several years he was etymologist and Senior Lexicographer of The American Heritage Dictionary of English, and continues to do occasional lexicographic work. He is also Editor-in-Chief of Beech Stave Press (www.beechstave.com).
Selected Publications
Indo-European Language and Culture: An Introduction (3rd edition in preparation, to appear in 2021, Wiley-Blackwell)
Language and Rhythm in Plautus: Synchronic and Diachronic Studies (Mouton de Gruyter, 2008)
“An overlooked use of apices and I longae? Notes on CIL VI 2080.” ZPE 214 (2020)
“Oscan kúnsíf deívúz and the Dī Cōnsentēs.” CP 114 (2019) (with M. Weiss)
“-σον-of-a-gun: The Greek 2sg. s-aorist imperative.” In Proceedings of the 29th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, ed. David M. Goldstein et al. (2018).
"Italic dialectology," in Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An International Handbook of Language Comparison and the Reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, ed. Jared S. Klein and Brian D. Joseph (Mouton de Gruyter, 2017)
"An illicit Hittite–Latin affair," Journal of Cuneiform Studies 67 (2015)
"A fragmentary early Republican public inscription from Gabii," ZPE 178 (2011) (with D. Potter)
"Latin prosody and metrics," in A Companion of the Latin Language, ed. James Clackson (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011)
"Reconsidering the history of Latin and Sabellic adpositional morphosyntax," AJP 131 (2010)
"Bleary eyes and ladles of clay: Two liquid Sabellicisms in Latin," Glotta 84 (2009)
"The origin of the Latin future active participle," in Verba Docenti: Studies in Historical and Indo-European Linguistics Presented to Jay H. Jasanoff, ed. Alan Nussbaum (Beech Stave, 2007)
Field(s) of Study
- Indo-European linguistics and comparative philology, historical linguistics, early Latin and Greek, metrics and poetics, lexicography
