Jaan Puhvel was born on 24 January 1932 and is an Estonian comparative linguist and comparative mythologist who specializes in Indo-European studies.
21 Facts About Jaan Puhvel
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Jaan Puhvel is the founder of the Hittite Etymological Dictionary, and the author and editor of several works on Proto-Indo-European mythology and Proto-Indo-European society.
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Jaan Puhvel was born in Tallinn, Estonia on 24 January 1932, the son of Karl Puhvel and Meta Elisabeth Paern.
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Jaan Puhvel's father, a civil engineer by profession, was a forest manager working for the Estonian government.
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Jaan Puhvel received his earliest education in Aegviidu and at the Jakob Westholm Gymnasium.
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Jaan Puhvel graduated from high school in Sweden in 1949, and his family subsequently emigrated to Canada.
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Jaan Puhvel studied Latin, French and Ancient Greek at McGill University, where he graduated with an MA in comparative linguistics in 1952, for which he earned the Governor General's Gold Medal.
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Jaan Puhvel subsequently lectured on the classics at McGill, Harvard and University of Texas at Austin.
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Jaan Puhvel gained his PhD in comparative linguistics at Harvard University in 1959 with a dissertation on the laryngeal theory.
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Jaan Puhvel taught classical languages and comparative Indo-European linguistics at the University of California, Los Angeles from 1958.
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Jaan Puhvel founded the Center for the Study of Comparative Folklore and Mythology at UCLA in 1961.
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Jaan Puhvel was President of the Association for the Advancement of Baltic Studies from 1971 to 1972.
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Jaan Puhvel is a member of many other scholarly organizations, including the Linguistic Society of America, the American Oriental Society and the American Philological Association.
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Jaan Puhvel has been a Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, and a Guggenheim Fellow.
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Jaan Puhvel became an Officer First Class of the Order of the White Rose of Finland in 1967.
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Jaan Puhvel is the creator of the Hittite Etymological Dictionary, which as of 2020 has been published in ten volumes.
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Jaan Puhvel has retired from UCLA as Professor Emeritus of Classical Linguistics, Indo-European Studies and Hittite.
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Jaan Puhvel was a visiting professor at the University of Tartu from 1993 to 1999.
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Jaan Puhvel received the Estonian Order of the White Star, Third Class in 2001.
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Jaan Puhvel took part in the editing process of Gilgamesh when the translation into Estonian was being prepared.
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Jaan Puhvel married Estonian microbiologist Madli Jaan Puhvel on 4 June 1960, with whom he has three children.