Brent Vine
Professor
Classical and Indo-European Linguistics, Latin Literature
Dodd 289B
310-825-1121
vine@humnet.ucla.edu

A devoted student of Latin since seventh grade and of Greek since tenth grade, Brent Vine earned a BA in Classics (Harvard, 1973) and went on to receive his PhD in Linguistics (Harvard, 1982), specializing in historical/comparative Indo-European linguistics. He taught in the Departments of Classics at Yale and Princeton before joining the UCLA Classics Department in 1995.

At the graduate level, Professor Vine regularly teaches a series of core linguistically-oriented courses: history of Latin, Italic dialects (Oscan, Umbrian, and other ancient languages of Italy), Vulgar Latin, history of Greek, Greek dialects, Mycenaean Greek, and advanced courses in Indo-European linguistics. He also enjoys introducing undergraduates to these areas, through the "Introduction to Classical Linguistics" he developed for Classics majors, and through his teaching of the "Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics" for the UCLA Program in Indo European Studies (which he chaired from 1997-2004).

Having begun his studies as a Classicist, Professor Vine continues to teach Greek and Latin language and literature, and to conduct research on literary topics, with a particular interest in language and style, including meter. He has also worked extensively on Archaic Latin and on Latin (and Italic) epigraphy, as in his 1993 book Studies in Archaic Latin Inscriptions; ongoing research in this area studies the poetics of curse-tablet inscriptions in Latin and Oscan. But the bulk of his research is devoted to the history of the Greek and Latin languages, their development from Proto-Indo-European, and the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European itself. He is most interested in derivational morphology (as in his 1998 monograph Aeolic orpeton and Deverbative * etó- in Greek and Indo-European and recent work on the Proto-Indo-European words for “year” and “yesterday”), and in historical phonology (including studies on “Thurneysen-Havet’s Law” and other accentual phenomena in Latin and Italic, and on consonant dissimilation in Greek). A natural extension of all this is an interest in etymology: current projects explore the background of some obscure items of vocabulary in Greek, Latin, and the ancient Italic languages Umbrian and South Picene.