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Dr Nicholas Zair |
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I am a Senior Lecturer in Classics (Classical Linguistics and Comparative Philology) in the Classics Faculty at Cambridge University, and Director of Studies in Classics and Linguistics at Peterhouse. My second book, Oscan in the Greek Alphabet came out in 2016. It's about how Oscan-speakers in Ancient Italy used the Greek alphabet to write Oscan, and what this tells us about the phonology and morphology of Oscan, and the relationship between speakers of Greek and Oscan. I wrote it as part of the AHRC-funded project 'Greek in Italy'.You can read about what we got up to on our project blog. I also carry out research more generally on the writing systems used to write the Italic languages (Latin, Oscan, Umbrian, South Picene), and their phonology and morphology. Other research interests include the Celtic languages, Proto-Indo-European phonology and morphology, sound change and language grouping. I would be delighted to hear from potential graduate students who are interested in working on topics related to these areas.My book on The Reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European Laryngeals in Celtic, based on my doctoral thesis in the Faculty of Linguistics, Philology and Phonetics at the University of Oxford, came out in September 2012 in the Brill series 'Studies in Indo-European Languages and Linguistics'. It collects the evidence for the development of the series of sounds known as the laryngeals in the Celtic languages according to phonetic environment. It concludes that laryngeals must still have been present in many environments at a fairly late stage of Proto-Celtic, and identifies previously unrecognised developments. It also suggests that laryngeals cannot be used as good evidence for an 'Italo-Celtic' sub-family. I teach papers in Latin and Greek language, and comparative philology and classical linguistics in all years. Contact details: |