Edgar Howard Sturtevant

Sturtevant was born in Jacksonville, Illinois, the older brother of Alfred Sturtevant and grandson of educator Julian Monson Sturtevant. He studied at Illinois College, where his grandfather was president, and obtained an A.B. from Indiana University Bloomington,{{Cite web |last=Gordon |first=Laura |title=STURTEVANT, Edgar Howard |url=https://dbcs.rutgers.edu/all-scholars/9152-sturtevant-edgar-howard |access-date=2022-05-28 |website=dbcs.rutgers.edu |language=en-gb}} then the University of Chicago receiving there in 1901 a Ph.D. with a dissertation on Latin case forms. He became an assistant professor of classical philology at Columbia University before joining the linguistics faculty at Yale University in 1923. In 1924, he was a member of the organizing committee for the founding, with Leonard Bloomfield and George M. Bolling, of the Linguistic Society of America (LSA).

Besides research on Native American languages and field work on the Modern American English dialects, he is the father of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, first formulated in 1926, based on his seminal work establishing the Indo-European character of Hittite (and the related Anatolian languages), with Hittite exhibiting more archaic traits than the normally reconstructed forms for Proto-Indo-European.

He authored the first scientifically acceptable Hittite grammar with a chrestomathy and a glossary, formulated the so-called Sturtevant's law (the doubling of consonants representing Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops) and laid the foundations to what later became the Goetze–Wittmann law (the spirantization of palatal stops before u as the focal origin of the centum-satem isogloss). The 1951 revised edition of his grammar (co-authored with E. Adelaide Hahn) is still useful today, although it was superseded in 2008 by Harry A. Hoffner and Craig Melchert's Grammar of the Hittite Language, for which a second edition was published in 2024.

Sturtevant was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1939 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1940.{{Cite web |title=APS Member History |url=https://search.amphilsoc.org/memhist/search?creator=Edgar+H.+Sturtevant&title=&subject=&subdiv=&mem=&year=&year-max=&dead=&keyword=&smode=advanced |access-date=2023-05-12 |website=search.amphilsoc.org}}{{Cite web |title=Edgar Howard Sturtevant |url=https://www.amacad.org/person/edgar-howard-sturtevant |access-date=2023-05-12 |website=American Academy of Arts & Sciences |date=9 February 2023 |language=en}}

Sturtevant died in Branford, Connecticut. His son, Julian M. Sturtevant, was a chemist and molecular biophysicist at Yale University.{{Cite web |title=Yale Bulletin and Calendar |url=http://archives.news.yale.edu/v34.n3/story35.html |access-date=2022-05-28 |website=archives.news.yale.edu}}

• {{cite book |last1=Sturtevant |first1=E. H. |title=Linguistic Change: An introduction to the historical study of language |date=October 1917 |publisher=The University of Chicago Press |location=Chicago, Illinois |url=https://archive.org/details/linguisticchang00stur/page/n5/mode/2up}}
• Sturtevant, E. H. (1920, 1940). The Pronunciation of Greek and Latin: The Sounds and Accents. [https://archive.org/details/pronunciationofg00stur/page/n5/mode/2up First edition] Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, September 1920. [https://archive.org/details/pronunciationofg0000stur_r7n2/page/n5/mode/2up Second edition] Philadelphia: Linguistic Society of America, University of Pennsylvania, 1940.
• {{cite journal |last1=Sturtevant |first1=E. H. |title=On the Position of Hittite among the Indo-European Languages |journal=Language |date=March 1926 |volume=2 |issue=1 |pages=25–34 |doi=10.2307/408784 |jstor=408784}}
• {{cite journal |last1=Sturtevant |first1=Edgar Howard |title=Hittite Glossary: Words of Known or Conjectured Meaning, with Sumerian Ideograms and Accadian Words Common in Hittite Texts |journal=Language |date=June 1931 |volume=7 |issue=2 |pages=3–82 |doi=10.2307/522061 |jstor=522061 |publisher=Language Monograph No. 9}}
• {{cite journal | author=Sturtevant, Edgar H. | title=The Development of the Stops in Hittite|

journal=Journal of the American Oriental Society|volume=52 | issue=1 |pages=1–12 |year=1932 | doi=10.2307/593573 | jstor=593573}}

• Sturtevant, Edgar H. A. (1933, 1951). A Comparative Grammar of the Hittite Language]. New Haven: Yale University Press. [https://archive.org/details/a-comparative-grammar-of-the-hittite-language/page/320/mode/2up First edition]: 1933. [https://archive.org/details/SturtevantHahnAComparativeGrammarOfTheHittiteLanguageI2ndEdition1951/page/n3/mode/2up Revised edition] co-authored with E. Adelaide Hahn: 1951.
• {{cite book |last1=Sturtevant |first1=Edgar H. |last2=Bechtel |first2=George |title=A Hittite Chrestomathy |date=1935 |publisher=Linguistic Society of America, University of Pennsylvania |location=Philadelphia |url=https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.279400/page/n1/mode/2up}}
• {{cite journal |last1=Sturtevant |first1=E. H. |title=Evidence for Voicing in Indo-Hittite γ |journal=Language |date=April 1940 |volume=16 |issue=2 |pages=81-87 |doi=10.2307/408942 |jstor=408942}}
• {{cite book |last1=Sturtevant |first1=Edgar H. |title=The Indo-Hittite Laryngeals |date=1942 |publisher=Linguistic Society of America at the Waverly Press |location=Baltimore |url=https://archive.org/details/indohittitelaryn0000stur/page/n5/mode/2up}} doi:[https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1x76d2x 10.2307/j.ctt1x76d2x].

• [http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Edgar+Howard+Sturtevant "Sturtevant, Edgar Howard"]. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970–1979). Published online by The Free Dictionary.
• {{cite book |last1=Hoffner Jr. |first1=Harry A. |last2=Melchert |first2=H. Craig |author1-link=Harry A. Hoffner |author2-link=Craig Melchert |title=A Grammar of the Hittite Language: Part 1: Reference Grammar |date=2024 |publisher=Penn State University Press |location=University Park, PA |isbn=9781646023066 |edition=Second |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=nPcSEQAAQBAJ}}

• {{DBCS}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Sturtevant, Edgar}}

Category:1875 births

Category:1952 deaths

Category:People from Jacksonville, Illinois

Category:Columbia University faculty

Category:Linguists from the United States

Category:Hittitologists

Category:Historical linguists

Category:Linguists of Anatolian languages

Category:Linguistic Society of America presidents

Category:Illinois College alumni

Category:Indiana University Bloomington alumni

Category:Members of the American Philosophical Society