Biography

Sturtevant was born in Jacksonville, Illinois

Jacksonville, Illinois

Jacksonville is a city in Morgan County, Illinois, United States. The population was 18,940 at the 2000 census. It is the county seat of Morgan County....

, the older brother of Alfred Sturtevant

Alfred Sturtevant

Alfred Henry Sturtevant was an American geneticist. Sturtevant constructed the first genetic map of a chromosome in 1913. Throughout his career he worked on the organism Drosophila melanogaster with Thomas Hunt Morgan...

. He studied at the University of Chicago

University of Chicago

The University of Chicago is a private research university in Chicago, Illinois, USA. It was founded by the American Baptist Education Society with a donation from oil magnate and philanthropist John D. Rockefeller and incorporated in 1890...

 receiving there in 1901 a Ph.D.

Ph.D.

A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...

 with a dissertation on Latin case forms. He became an assistant professor of classical philology at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 in New York

New York

New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...

 before joining the linguistics faculty at Yale University

Yale University

Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...

 in 1923. In 1924, he was a member of the organizing committee for the founding, with Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield

Leonard Bloomfield was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. His influential textbook Language, published in 1933, presented a comprehensive description of American structural linguistics...

 and George M. Bolling, of the Linguistic Society of America

Linguistic Society of America

The Linguistic Society of America is a professional society for linguists. It was founded in 1924 to advance linguistics, the scientific study of human language. The LSA has over 5,000 individual members and welcomes linguists of all kinds. It works to advance the discipline and to communicate...

 (LSA).

Besides research on Native American

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...

 languages and field work on the Modern American English dialects, he is the father of the Indo-Hittite

Indo-Hittite

In Indo-European linguistics, the term Indo-Hittite refers to Sturtevant's 1926 hypothesis that the Anatolian languages may have split off the Proto-Indo-European language considerably earlier than the separation of the remaining Indo-European languages...

 hypothesis, first formulated in 1926, based on his seminal work establishing the Indo-European

Indo-European

Indo-European may refer to:* Indo-European languages** Aryan race, a 19th century and early 20th century term for those peoples who are the native speakers of Indo-European languages...

 character of Hittite

Hittite language

Hittite is the extinct language once spoken by the Hittites, a people who created an empire centred on Hattusa in north-central Anatolia...

 (and the related Anatolian languages

Anatolian languages

The Anatolian languages comprise a group of extinct Indo-European languages that were spoken in Asia Minor, the best attested of them being the Hittite language.-Origins:...

), with Hittite exhibiting more archaic traits than the normally reconstructed forms for Proto-Indo-European

Proto-Indo-European language

The Proto-Indo-European language is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European languages, spoken by the Proto-Indo-Europeans...

. He authored the first scientifically acceptable Hittite grammar with a chrestomathy

Chrestomathy

Chrestomathy is a collection of choice literary passages, used especially as an aid in learning a foreign language.In philology or in the study of literature, it is a type of reader or anthology which presents a sequence of example texts, selected to demonstrate the development of language or...

 and a glossary, formulated the so-called Sturtevant's law (doubling of consonants representing IE voiceles stops) and laid the foundations to what later became the Goetze

Albrecht Goetze

Albrecht Goetze was a German-American Hittitologist.Goetze was Professor of Semitic languages at the University of Marburg when the Nazi regime came to power in 1933. It was through the initiative of Edgar H. Sturtevant that Goetze was invited to Yale University in 1934, a move that was to prove...

-Wittmann law

Henri Wittmann

Henri Wittmann is a Canadian linguist from Quebec. He is best known for his work on Quebec French.-Biography:Henri Wittmann was born in Alsace in 1937...

 (spirantization of palatal stops before u as the focal origin of the Centum-Satem isogloss

Centum-Satem isogloss

The centum-satem division is an isogloss of the Indo-European language family, related to the different evolution of the three dorsal consonant rows of the mainstream reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European:...

). The 1951 revised edition of his grammar is still useful today, although it was superseded in 2008 by Hoffner and Melchert's Grammar of the Hittite Language.