Václav Blažek, born in Sokolov, Czech Republic, in 1959. Ph.D. from Masaryk University, Brno. Assistant Professor at the Institute of Linguistics at the Masaryk University, Brno, and at the Faculty of Humanities, Western Bohemian University, Plzeň.
Mellon Fellow (1 February 2003 – 30 June 2003)
Half of my time at NIAS was spent preparing comparative-historical phonologies of individual Indo-European branches. Up to now, there no complete documentation of phonetic rules based on all Indo-European branches has been produced.
In my study of the Indo-European lexicon, I decided to focus on social and kinship terminology as well the terminology connected with crafts. Besides a comprehensive synthesis of the above-mentioned semantic fields, I also wrote articles for publication on the following specific terms: Tocharian kla:wiyen- ‘woman’, where I try to demonstrate the original meaning ‘bride’ or ‘daughter-in-law’; Brythonic *u(p)o-siyu- ‘daughter-in-law’, where I offer the interpretation ‘following the son’; Hieroglyphic Luwian atala- ‘brother’, where I try to prove its relation to the institution of fosterage; Greek doulos- ‘slave, servant’, where I verify all existing etymologies and offer a new one, namely a borrowing from a Western Semitic source; Celtic gob-ent- ‘smith’ and its relatives, especially Latin faber. In the article the semantic typology of various designations for ‘smith’ was included. Celtic sa(p)ero- ‘carpenter’ and the promising etymology based on the Hittite word for ‘knife’.
I also wrote Lexica Nostratica Addenda for which I collected more than 50 new etymologies supporting the hypothesis about the early relationship between the Indo-European language family and other language families of the Old World.