Isidore Dyen

Isidore Dyen (16 August 1913 in Philadelphia – 14 December 2008 in Newton, Massachusetts) was an American linguist, Professor Emeritus of Malayo-Polynesian and Comparative Linguistics at Yale University. Quotes “As defined by Dyen (1956), a homeland is a continuous area and a migration is any movement causing that area to become non-continuous (while a movement that simply changes its shape or area is an expansion or expansive intrusion). The linguistic population of the homeland is a set of intermediate protolanguages, the first-order daughters of the original protolanguage (in Dyen’s terms, a chain of coordinate languages). The homeland is the same as (or overlaps) the area of the largest chain of such co-ordinates, i.e. the area where the greatest number of highest-level branches occur. Homelands are to be reconstructed in such a way as to minimize the number of migrations, and the number of migrating daughter branches, required to get from them to attested distributions (Dyen 1956: 613).”109 Dyen, quoted in Johanna Nichols in Archaeology and Language, Vol. I: Theoretical and Methodological Orientations edited by Roger Blench and Matthew Spriggs, Routledge, London and New York, 1997. (Paper by Johanna Nichols). Quoted in Talageri, S. (2000). The Rigveda: A historical analysis. New Delhi: Aditya Prakashan. External links Category:1913 births Category:2008 deaths Category:Linguists from the United States Category:University of Pennsylvania alumni Category:Yale University faculty