Puhvel, Jaan

Born January 24, 1932 in Tallinn in the family of a civil engineer. He attended the Jacob Westholm Gymnasium in Tallinn, then the school in Aegviidu . In 1944, together with his family, he fled from the Soviet troops to Finland , and then to Sweden ^[2] . In 1949, in Stockholm, Puhvel graduated from high school, and in the same year moved with his family to Canada ^[3] . From 1949 to 1952 he studied at McGill University in Montreal , and from 1952 to 1954 - at Harvard University ^[3] . In 1954-1955, he received a scholarship to study in Europe and went to the universities of Paris and Uppsala .

Puhvel then worked as a teacher of classical languages ​​at McGill University in Montreal and at the University of Texas at Austin . In 1959, he received his Ph.D. in philology from Harvard University. Since 1958, he taught classical languages ​​and comparative Indo-European linguistics at the University of California , since 1964, with the title of professor. Since the 1990s, he has also been a visiting professor at the University of Tartu ^[4] .

Jaan Puvel is the author of many publications on Indo-European studies. His most famous work is the incomplete etymological dictionary of the Hittite language , the first volume of which was published in 1984.

Jaan Puhvel is married to Estonian microbiologist Sirje Madli Hansen (born 1926), they had three children. His brother is the Estonian-Canadian literary critic Martin Puhvel (born 1933).

• Laryngeals and the Indo-European verb (Berkeley, Los Angeles 1960)
• Hittite Etymological Dictionary (Berlin, New York, Amsterdam)
  • 1984, Vol. 1 (A)
  • 1984, Vol. 2 (E, I)
  • 1991, Vol. 3 (H)
  • 1997, Vol. 4 (K)
  • 2001, Vol. 5 (L)
  • 2004, Vol. 6 (M)
  • 2007, Vol. 7 (N)
  • 2011, Vol. 8 (PA)
• Comparative mythology (Baltimore, London 1987, ISBN 978-0801839382 )
• Indoeuropaea. Delectus operum minorum annos 1952-1977 complectus (Innsbruck 1989)
• Homer and Hittite (1991)
• Studies in Honor of Jaan Puhvel (1997, ISBN 978-0941694544 )