Leonard Robert Palmer

Leonard Robert Palmer (5 June 1906, Bristol – 26 August 1984, Pitney, Somerset) was author and Professor of Comparative Philology at the University of Oxford from 1952 to 1971. He was also a Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. Palmer made some significant contributions to the study of Classical languages, and in the area of historical linguistics.

Career

He was educated at Cardiff High School, the University of South Wales, Trinity College Cambridge, and the University of Vienna.

He started his academic career in 1931, teaching classics at Manchester University.

During World War II, Palmer worked at the Government Code and Cypher School (GC&CS) at Bletchley Park, at the so-called Hut 4. Their work was the translation, interpretation and distribution of enemy messages.

A strong focus of Palmer's work was the Greek linguistics, and in particular the language and dating of the Mycenaean Linear B tablets. He also researched the pre-Greek languages in the Aegean Sea area, their origin and chronology. Palmer also wrote a widely translated and reprinted textbook on Latin language.

Palmer played a role in the controversies over the dating of archaeological finds from Minoan Crete, where he disagreed with the excavator, Sir Arthur Evans, and favoured a later date.[1]

In his book "Descriptive & Comparative Linguistics" (1972), among other things, he took an issue with the Chomskian linguistics.

Proto-Greek studies

Palmer was one of the linguists who were investigating the theories that some unknown language or languages were spoken in prehistoric Greece before the settlement of Proto-Greek speakers in the area. So this is the question of an ancient linguistic Pre-Greek substrate in Greece. According to Palmer, this may have been one of the ancient Anatolian languages, perhaps a Luwian language.[2][3] He suggested that the language of Linear A might be Luwian on the basis of -ss- and -nd- (corresponding to -ss- and -nth- in mainland Greece) placenames being widespread in Western Anatolia.[4]

Honours

Palmer was elected Secretary and then President of the British Philological Society. He was also a corresponding member of the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut. In 1981, he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Innsbruck.

References

  1. ↑ OBITUARY: PROF LEONARD PALMER The Times, 29 August 1984
  2. ↑ Mylonas, George E. (1962). "The Luvian Invasions of Greece". Hesperia. The American School of Classical Studies at Athens. 31 (3): 284–309. doi:10.2307/147122. JSTOR 147122.
  3. ↑ Palmer, L. R. (1958). "Luvian and Linear A". Transactions of the Philological Society. 57: 75–100. doi:10.1111/j.1467-968X.1958.tb01273.x.
  4. ↑ Finkelberg, Margalit (2005). Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition. Cambridge. ISBN 978-0521107990, esp. 42–64. Reveiewed in Beckman, Gary (Jan 2009). "Greeks and Pre-Greeks: Aegean Prehistory and Greek Heroic Tradition by Margalit Finkelberg". The Classical Journal. The Classical Association of the Middle West and South. 104 (2): 175–177. doi:10.2307/27750230. JSTOR 27750230.

Publications

External links

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