Johanna Narten

Johanna Narten (Hannover, 5 October 1930 – Uttenreuth, 15 July 2019), was a German Indo-Europeanist and Indo-Iranian linguist who discovered the reconstructed morphological category in Proto-Indo-European now known as the Narten present. She was Professor of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian Linguistics at Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg and a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften.

Early life

Johanna Narten, known as "Jo", was born in Hannover on 5 October 1930 to Herta and Karl Narten, who had met while studying chemistry in Berlin. During World War II, she and her mother were evacuated to stay with family in Eisenberg; her father had been recruited into the German army. While in Eisenberg, Narten began learning Latin with her grandfather. Following the war the family returned to Hannover, where Narten attended the Wilhelm-Raabe-Schule, graduating in 1950.

Academic career

Narten originally learned Greek and Hebrew in order to study theology at university, but ultimately studied classical philology instead. In 1951 she enrolled at the University of Saarland in 1951, first studying with Ernst Zinn and then switching to studying Indo-European linguistics, in particular Indo-Iranian linguistics (especially Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan), with Karl Hoffmann, who became the Chair of Indo-European Studies at the university in 1952. In 1955, Narten moved with Hoffman to the University of Erlangen, where he supervised her PhD dissertation, "Entstehung und Ausbreitung der sigmatischen Aoriste in der vedischen Literatur" aorists in Vedas">Vedic literature