Jochem "Joki" Schindler (8 November 1944 in

Amstetten, Lower Austria Amstetten (; Central Bavarian: ''Aumstedn'' or ''Aumstettn'') is a town in Lower Austria. It is the capital of the Amstetten District and the centre of the historical region Mostviertel (“Most” – cider, “viertel” – a quarter of the prov ...

– 24 December 1994 in

Prague Prague ( ; cs, Praha ; german: Prag, ; la, Praga) is the capital and largest city in the Czech Republic, and the historical capital of Bohemia. On the Vltava river, Prague is home to about 1.3 million people. The city has a temperate ...

) was an

Austria Austria, , bar, Östareich officially the Republic of Austria, is a country in the southern part of Central Europe, lying in the Eastern Alps. It is a federation of nine states, one of which is the capital, Vienna, the most populous ...

Indo-Europeanist Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypothetical pro ...

. In spite of his comparatively thin bibliography, he made important contributions, in particular to the theory of

Proto-Indo-European Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo ...

nominal inflection and

ablaut In linguistics, the Indo-European ablaut (, from German '' Ablaut'' ) is a system of apophony (regular vowel variations) in the Proto-Indo-European language (PIE). An example of ablaut in English is the strong verb ''sing, sang, sung'' and its ...

. Taught at University of Vienna from 1972 - 1978, as a professor at Harvard University from 1978 - 1987, then at Vienna. A meticulous scholar, he also recognized that mistakes were inevitable, and his phrase "Mut zum Irrtum" ("courage to err") became popular with his colleagues, including

Calvert Watkins Calvert Watkins ( /ˈwɒtkɪnz/; March 13, 1933 – March 20, 2013) was an American linguist and philologist, known for his book '' How to Kill a Dragon''. He was a professor of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and after retirem ...

. With Watkins and others, he was a founding member of the “East Coast Indo-European Conference” in 1982."Calvert Watkins dies at 80". Harvard Gazette. 2013-03-28. Retrieved 2022-01-06 https://linguistics.ucla.edu/people/Melchert/inmemoriamcalvertwatkins.pdf

Partial Bibliography

1966. ‘Bemerkungen zum idg. Wort für “Schlaf”’, ''Die Sprache'' 12, 67–76. 1970. Review of Anttila 1969, ''Kratylos'' 15, 146–52. 1972 'L'apophonie des noms racines indo-européens' ''Bulletin de la Société Linguistique de Paris'' 67, 31–8. 1975a. 'L'apophonie des thèmes indo-européens en ''-r/n'' ' ''Bulletin de la Société Linguistique de Paris'' 70, 1–10. 1975b. ‘Zum Ablaut der neutralen s-Stämme des Indogermanischen’, in Helmut Rix (ed.), ''Flexion und Wortbildung'', 259–67, Wiesbaden: Reichert. 1977a. ‘A thorny problem’, ''Die Sprache'' 23, 25–35. 1977b. ‘Notizen zum Sieversschen Gesetz’, ''Die Sprache'' 23, 56–65. 1994. ‘Alte und neue Fragen zum indogermanischen Nomen’, in Jens E. Rasmussen (ed.), ''In Honorem Holger Pederson'', 397–400, Wiesbaden: Reichert.

References

*Eichner (ed.) ''Compositiones Indogermanicae in memoriam Jochem Schindler'', Praha (1999). *Wolfgang U. Dressler "Jochem Schindler (1944-1994)" in ''

Die Sprache ''Die Sprache'' is a peer-reviewed academic journal that was established in 1949. It contains articles on historical and comparative linguistics, especially of Indo-European languages. The main focus is on comparative grammar and etymology, but t ...

'' 37/1 (1995), 1–4. *Rüdiger Schmitt, "Jochem Schindler. Ein Nachruf" in ''Almanach der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften'' 145 (1995), 581–594.

External links

Thesaurus Indogermanischer Text- und Sprachmaterialien
1944 births 1994 deaths Linguists from Austria Linguists of Indo-European languages Paleolinguists 20th-century linguists {{austria-linguist-stub