Joshua T. Katz

Professor of Classics

Princeton University

Fall 2009

Monday 10-11 a.m. and Tuesday 3-4 p.m.

Fall 2009

FRS 115 "Wordplay: A Wry Plod from Babel to Scrabble"

Background

B.A. Yale '91, M.Phil. Oxford '93, Ph.D. Harvard '98.

Professor Katz is a linguist by training, a classicist by profession, and a comparative philologist at heart.  He is particularly interested in etymology, which he views as part of the history of ideas.  In addition to his wide-ranging Harvard dissertation, Topics in Indo-European Personal Pronouns, he is the author of numerous articles on literary, linguistic, and cultural subjects, ranging from Hesiod to Catullus, from Tocharian phonology to Hittite morphology, and from Greek badgers to Roman testicles.  He writes a regular column ("My Word!") for the Daily Princetonian and counts among his honors the President's Distinguished Teaching Award (2003) and the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Award (2008).

Recent work includes:

— "Sanskrit sphij-/sphigí:- and Greek phíkis," in A. Hyllested et al. (eds.), Per aspera ad asteriscos: Studia Indogermanica in honorem Jens Elmegård Rasmussen sexagenarii Idibus Martiis anno MMIV (Innsbruck 2004), pp. 277-84;

— "The 'Swimming Duck' in Greek and Hittite," in J. H. W. Penney (ed.), Indo-European Perspectives: Studies in Honour of Anna Morpurgo Davies (Oxford 2004), pp. 195-216;

— "The Indo-European Context," in J. M. Foley (ed.), A Companion to Ancient Epic (Malden, MA 2005), pp. 20-30;

— "To Turn a Blind Eel," in K. Jones-Bley et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, Los Angeles, November 5-6, 2004 (Washington, D.C. 2005), pp. 259-96;

— "Reconstruction, Cultural," in K. Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language & Linguistics, 2nd ed. (Amsterdam 2006), vol. 10, pp. 389-93;

— "The Riddle of the sp(h)ij-: The Greek Sphinx and her Indic and Indo-European Background," in G.-J. Pinault & D. Petit (eds.), La Langue poétique indo-européenne: actes du Colloque de travail de la Société des Études Indo-Européennes (Indogermanische Gesellschaft/Society for Indo-European Studies), Paris, 22-24 octobre 2003 (Louvain 2006), pp. 157-94;

— "Erotic Hardening and Softening in Vergil's Eighth Eclogue" (with Katharina Volk), Classical Quarterly 56 (2006), 169-74;

— "The '"Urbi et Orbi"-Rule' Revisited," Journal of Indo-European Studies 34 (2006), 319-61;

— "What Linguists are Good for," Classical World 100 (2007), 99-112;

— "The Development of Proto-Indo-European *sm in Hittite," in A. J. Nussbaum (ed.), Verba Docenti: Studies in Historical and Indo-European Linguistics presented to Jay H. Jasanoff by Students, Colleagues, and Friends (Ann Arbor 2007), pp. 169-83;

— "The Epic Adventures of an Unknown Particle," in C. George et al. (eds.), Greek and Latin from an Indo-European Perspective (Cambridge 2007), pp. 65-79;

— "An Acrostic Ant Road in Aeneid 4," Materiali e Discussioni 59 (2007), 77-86;

— "Dux reget examen (Epistle 1.19.23): Horace's Archilochean Signature," Materiali e Discussioni 59 (2007), 207-13;

— "The Origin of the Greek Pluperfect," Die Sprache 46 (2006 [publ. 2008]), 1-37;

— "Vergil Translates Aratus: Phaenomena 1-2 and Georgics 1.1-2," Materiali e Discussioni 60 (2008), 105-23;

— "A Little Etymological Test," Cabinet 34 (Summer 2009), 86-88;

— "On the Regularity of Nasal Dissimilation in Anatolian," in press in a Festschrift;

— "Linguistics," in A. Barchiesi & W. Scheidel (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Roman Studies (Oxford, in press);

— "Etymology," in A. Grafton, G. Most & S. Settis (eds.), The Classical Tradition (Cambridge, MA, in press);

— "Inherited Poetics," in E. J. Bakker (ed.), A Companion to the Ancient Greek Language (Malden, MA, in press); and

— "Wordplay," in S. W. Jamison, H. C. Melchert & B. Vine (eds.), Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference (Bremen, in press).