Larry Trask


Robert Lawrence Trask was an American–British professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex, and an authority on the Basque language and the field of historical linguistics.

Biography

Born in Olean, New York, he initially studied chemistry in his home country, but after a brief stint in the Peace Corps he took an interest in linguistics. He received his doctorate in linguistics from the University of London, and thereafter taught at various universities in the United Kingdom. He became a professor of linguistics at the University of Sussex.
He was considered as an authority on the Basque language: his book The History of Basque is an essential reference on diachronic Basque linguistics and probably the best introduction to Basque linguistics as a whole. He was at work compiling an etymological dictionary of that language when he died; the unfinished work was posthumously published on the Internet by Max W. Wheeler. He was also an authority on historical linguistics, and had written about the problem of the origin of language.
He also published two introductory books to linguistics: Language: The basics and Introducing Linguistics , and several dictionaries on different topics of this science: A dictionary of grammatical terms in linguistics, A dictionary of phonetics and phonology, A student's dictionary of language and linguistics, Key concepts in language and linguistics, The dictionary of historical and comparative linguistics and The Penguin dictionary of English grammar.
Other of his books include: