Calvert Watkins is a professor Emeritus of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and professor-in-residence at UCLA. A professor is a senior teacher and researcher, usually in a college or university. ... Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study(the more accurate term is linguistician but it is too much of a tongue-twister to become generally accepted. ... Classics, particularly within the Western University tradition, when used as a singular noun, means the study of the language, literature, history, art, and other aspects of Greek and Roman culture during the time frame known as classical antiquity. ... Harvard University is a private university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and a member of the Ivy League. ... The University of California, Los Angeles, popularly known as UCLA, is a public, coeducational university situated in the neighborhood of Westwood within the city of Los Angeles. ...

His doctoral dissertation was Indo-European Origins of the Celtic Verb I. The Sigmatic Aorist (Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1962), which deeply reflected the structuralist approach of Jerzy Kurylowicz, opened a fresh era of creative work in Celtic comparative linguistics and the study of the Indo-European verbal system. See also structural analysis and structural functionalism. ... Jerzy Kuryłowicz (1895-1978) was a Polish linguist, and one of the greatest 20th-century students of Indo-European languages. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Celtic languages are a branch of the Indo-European languages. ... Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time, by means of examining languages which are recognizably related through similarities such as vocabulary, word formation, and syntax, as well as the surviving records of ancient languages. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Indo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. ...

Watkins, in a sense, completed his contribution to this area with his Indogermanische Grammatik III/1: Geschichte der Indogermanischen Verbalflexion (1969). Meanwhile, his work on Indo-European vocabulary and poetics yielded a large number of articles on (among others) Celtic, Anatolian, Greek, Italic and Indo-Iranian material. A good, large, messy sample of this interesting work can be seen in his most recent book, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford University Press, 1995). The Anatolian languages are a group of extinct languages, either Indo-European or (in some classifications) closely related to Indo-European, which were spoken in Asia Minor, including Hittite. ... Indo-Iranian languages (also called Aryan languages) are the eastern-most group of the living Indo-European languages. ...

He contributed his expertise on Indo-European languages to the first edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language and edited The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots. Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies Indo-European is originally a linguistic term, referring to the Indo-European language family. ... The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (AHD) is a dictionary of American English published by Boston publisher Houghton-Mifflin, the first edition of which appeared in 1969. ...