Person
Johanna Nichols
Linguist who puts the practical limit of the comparative method at about 8,000 years or somewhat more.
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Background on Johanna Nichols
Background
Selected excerpts from Wikipedia. This is general background, not Angle's reporting, and it may have changed since the stories above were published.
Johanna Nichols (born 1945, Iowa City, Iowa) is an American linguist and professor emerita in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley.
Career
She earned her Ph.D. in Linguistics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1973 with a dissertation titled "The Balto-Slavic predicate instrumental: a problem in diachronic syntax".
Her research interests include the Slavic languages, the linguistic prehistory of northern Eurasia, language typology, ancient linguistic prehistory, and languages of the Caucasus, chiefly Chechen and Ingush. She has made fundamental contributions to these fields.
Honors
A festschrift in her honor, Language Typology and Historical Contingency: In honor of Johanna Nichols, was published in 2013.
Nichols's best known work, Linguistic Diversity in Space and Time, won the Linguistic Society of America's Leonard Bloomfield Book Award for 1994.
In 2013 Nichols was inducted as a Fellow of the Linguistic Society of America. In 2023 she was elected as a member of the Academia Europaea.
From the Wikipedia article Johanna Nichols (revision of ). Wikipedia contributors; selected plain-text excerpts from this revision. Formatting, reference markers and non-prose material removed. Available under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0. Identity from Wikidata (CC0).