Anna Elbina Morpurgo Davies (21 June 1937 – 27 September 2014) was an Italian philologist who specialised in comparative Indo-European linguistics. She spent her career at Oxford University, where she was the Professor of Comparative Philology and Fellow of Somerville College.
Personal life and education Anna Elbina Morpurgo was born in Milan, the fourth child of a Jewish family. Her grandfather Guido Castelnuovo was a mathematician; her father, Augusto Morpurgo,Andreas Willi, "Anna Morpurgo Davies obituary", The Guardian, 9 October 2014. was dismissed in 1938 under the Fascist racial laws and died the following year after trying to find a way to take his family to Argentina. She and her mother Maria moved to Rome, where they survived with false papers and in hiding.Anna Morpurgo Davies, 21 June 1937 - 27 September 2014 , Somerville College, 28 September 2014, archived at the Wayback Machine, 15 October 2014.
She earned her doctorate in classics from the University of RomeAdnkronos, "Università: è morta Anna Morpurgo, filologa di Oxford" , Sassari Notizie, 29 September 2014 with a thesis on Linear B; she published the first lexicon of the language in 1963.
In 1961 she moved to Washington, D.C., where she met the classical historian John K. Davies. They married the following year, and both moved to Oxford. The marriage was dissolved in 1978.
Academic career In 1961 she became a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington, D.C., where she formed a deep interest in theoretical linguistics; she was later to help establish a chair in the subject at Oxford University. She moved to Oxford in 1962, became a lecturer in Classical Philology in 1964, and spent the remainder of her career there with the exception of visiting professorships at the University of Pennsylvania, Yale University and the University of California at Berkeley and guest lecturing at the University of Cincinnati, Stanford University and Harvard University.
In 1966 Morpurgo Davies became a fellow of St Hilda's College; in 1971 she was appointed to the Chair in Comparative Philology and became a fellow of Somerville. In 2003 this became the Diebold Chair. She was also a Delegate of the Oxford University Press from 1992 to 2004, when she retired, as well as serving as President of the Philological Society (1976–80; thereafter Honorary Vice-president) and of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas (1991–3, Vice President thereafter).
Research Morpurgo Davies published in many areas of Indo-European grammar. She was particularly known as an expert in the Anatolian languages, and was one of the decipherers of Luwian hieroglyphs. She was also known for her work on Mycenaean Greek and on the development of linguistics in the nineteenth century;Fiona Marshall, "Review: Historical Ling/Indo-European Langs: Penney (2004)", The Linguist List, 22 December 2005. in 1996 she published an Italian-language history of the latter, La linguistica dell'Ottocento, and in 1998 she was responsible for the volume on that century in the Longman History of Linguistics, where a reviewer found she set aside the overall editorial aim of tracing the development of linguistic thought in favour of presenting a history of the development of Indo-European linguistics in Europe and the United States.Michael MacKert, Review of History of Linguistics. Vol. III. Renaissance and Early Modern Linguistics by Giulio Lepschy; History of Linguistics. Vol. IV. Nineteenth-Century Linguistics by Giulio Lepschy; Anna Morpurgo Davies, Journal of Linguistics 35.3 (November 1999), pp. 630-34.
In 2005 a reviewer at The Times referred to her "trend-setting work in onomastics, Greek dialectology, Mycenaean lexicography, Anatolian languages, writing systems, history of scholarship and social history".Mark Southern and Tom Palaima, "Measure of our tongues over time", Review of Indo-European Perspectives: Studies in Honour of Anna Morpurgo Davies, Times Higher Education, 28 October 2005.
Honours Davies was made a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1974 and of the British Academy in 1985. She was an honorary or corresponding member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Austrian Academy of Sciences, the Linguistic Society of America, the Academia Europaea, the American Philosophical Society, the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and the Italian Accademia dei Lincei. She became an honorary fellow of St Hilda's College in 1972 and was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of St Andrews and the University of Nancy.
In 2001, she became an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire;Donald MacLeod, "Honours for art, science - and student fees", Education, The Guardian, 29 December 2000. since she was not a British citizen, she could not use the "Dame" title, but was able to use the post-nominals DBE.
In 2005 a festschrift was published in her honour, Indo-European Perspectives: Studies in Honour of Anna Morpurgo Davies.
After Davies's death, a joint annual lecture series organised by the British Academy and the Philological Society was named in her honour; the Philological Society also established an Anna Morpurgo Davies Bursary to support Master's students working on ancient languages.
Publications Books
1963: Mycenaeae Graecitatis Lexicon. Roma: Edizioni dell'Ateneo. 1966 – 1974–5: (& all. (eds.)). Studies in Mycenaean Inscriptions and Dialect, vols. 12–20. London: Institute of Classical Studies. 1973: (with J. D. Hawkins & G. Neumann). Hittite Hieroglyphs and Luwian: New Evidence for the Connection. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. 1976: (with W. Meid, eds.). Studies in Greek, Italic and Indo-European Linguistics, offered to L. R. Palmer. Innsbruck: Innsbruck Institut für Sprachwissenschaft. 1985: (with Y. Duhoux, eds.). Linear B. A 1984 Survey. Louvain-la-Neuve: Cabay (reprinted: Louvain 1988: Peeters). 1996: La linguistica dell' Ottocento. Bologna: Il Mulino [Italian translation of an earlier version of the next title]. 1998: Nineteenth-Century Linguistics, vol. 4 of G. Lepschy (ed.) History of Linguistics. London: Longman. 2008–14: (with Y. Duhoux, eds.). A Companion to Linear B. Mycenaean Greek Texts and their World, vol. 1 (2008), vol. 2 (2011), vol. 3 (2014). Louvain: Peeters.
Selected articles
Linear B and Mycenaean Greek 1958: ‘Damar in Miceneo’. La Parola del Passato [PdP], 322–24. 1960 b: ‘Il genitivo miceneo e il sincretismo dei casi’. Rendiconti dell' Accademia dei Lincei 15, 33–61. 1961: ‘L'esito delle nasali sonanti in miceneo’. Rendiconti dell' Accademia dei Lincei, 15, 321–36. 1966: ‘An instrumental-ablative in Mycenaean?’. In Proceedings of the Cambridge Colloquium on Mycenaean Studies (L.R. Palmer & J. Chadwick, eds.), 191–202. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1968 c: ‘The treatment of r and l in Mycenaean and Arcado-Cyprian’. In Atti e Memorie del Primo Congresso Internazionale di Micenologia, 791–814. Roma: Edizioni dell’Ateneo. 1968 d: ‘Fabbri e schiavi a Pilo’. La Parola del Passato, 220–22. 1972: ‘Greek and Indo-European semiconsonants: Mycenaean u and w’. In Acta Mycenaea, vol. 2 (M. S. Ruipérez, ed.), 80–121. Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca. 1979 c: ‘Terminology of power and terminology of work in Greek and Linear B’. In Colloquium Mycenaeum (E. Risch & H. Mühlestein, eds.), 87–108. Neuchatel: Neuchâtel, Faculté des Lettres. 1983: ‘Mycenaean and Greek prepositions: o-pi, e-pi etc.’. In Res Mycenaeae. Akten des VII. Int. Mykenologischen Colloquiums (A. Heubeck & G. Neumann, eds.), 287–310. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1985: ‘Mycenaean and Greek language’. In Linear B: a 1984 Survey (A. Morpurgo Davies & Y. Duhoux, eds.), 75–125. Louvain-la-Neuve: Cabay. 1986 a: ‘Forms of writing in the ancient Mediterranean world’. In The Written Word. Literacy in Transition (G. Baumann, ed.), 55–77. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1986 c: ‘The linguistic evidence: is there any?’. In The end of the Early Bronze Age in the Aegean (G. Cadogan, ed.), 93–123. Leiden: Brill. 1999 b: ‘The Morphology of personal Names in Mycenaean and Greek: Some observations’. In Floreant Studia Mycenaea. Akten des X. internationalen mykenologischen Colloquiums in Salzburg von 1–5 Mai 1995 (S. Deger-Jalkotzy, S. Hiller & O. Panagl, eds.), 389–405. Vienna: Oesterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften. 2006 a: ‘Linguistic evidence from the Thebes Texts in Linear B (handout)’. In Die neuen Linear B-Texte aus Theben (S. Deger-Jalkotzy & O. Panagl, eds.), 119–24. Wien: Verlag der Oesterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. 1992 f: ‘Mycenaean, Arcadian, Cyprian and some questions of method in dialectology’. In Mykenaika (Suppl. XXV to Bulletin de correspondance hellénique) (J.P. Olivier, ed.), 415–32. Athens - Paris: Ecole française d’Athènes. 2012 a: (& J.-P. Olivier). ‘Syllabic Scripts and Languages in the Second and First Millennia BC’. In Parallel Lives: Ancient Island Societies in Crete and Cyprus (G. Cadogan et al., eds.), BSA Studies 20, 105–18. London: BSA. 2012 c: ‘Open problems in Mycenaean phonology and the Input of morphology’. In Etudes mycéniennes 2010. Actes du XIIIe colloque international sur les textes égéens (Carlier, P. et al., eds.), 511–22. Pisa - Roma: Serra Editore.
Linear A and 'Minoan' 1969 b: ‘The structure of the Minoan language’. Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies [BICS], London, 16, 161–62. 1971 c: (& G. Cadogan). ‘A Linear A tablet from Pyrgos, Myrtos, Crete’. Kadmos 10, 105–09. 1977: (& G. Cadogan). ‘A second Linear A tablet from Pyrgos’. Kadmos 16, 7–9.
Archaic and classical Greek linguistics 1960 a: ‘Kτίλος (Pind. Pyth. II 17)’. Rivista di Cultura Classica e Medioevale [RCCM] 2, 30–40. 1960 c: ‘Il genitivo maschile in -ας’. Glotta 39, 93–111. 1964 a: ‘'Doric' features in the language of Hesiod’. Glotta 42, 138–65. 1964 b: ‘SEG XI 1112 e il sincretismo dei casi in arcade-cipriota’. La Parola del Passato, 346–54. 1965: ‘A note on Thessalian’. Glotta 43, 235–51. 1968 a: ‘Thessalian patronymic adjectives’. Glotta 46, 85–106. 1968 b: ‘Article and demonstrative: a note’. Glotta 46, 76–85. 1968 e: ‘Gender and the development of the Greek declensions’. Transactions of the Philological Society [TPhS] 67.1, 12–36. 1969 a: ‘Epigraphical -φι’. Glotta 47, 46–54. 1970 a: (& L. H. Jeffery). ‘Ποινικαστάς and ποινικάζεν. BM 1969, 4-2.1. A new archaic inscription from Crete’. Kadmos 9, 118–54. 1970 b: ‘Cretan δριωτον’. Classical Review [CR] 20, 280–82. 1971 a: (& L. H. Jeffery). ‘An archaic Greek inscription from Crete’. The British Museum Quarterly 36, 24–29. 1971 b: (& B. Levick). ‘Κοπτοπώλης’. Classical Review 21, 162–66. 1976: ‘The -εσσι datives, Aeolic- -ss- and the Lesbian poets’. In Studies L. R. Palmer (A. Morpurgo Davies & W. Meid, eds.), 181–197. Innsbruck: Innsbruck Institut für Sprachwissenschaft. 1978 a: ‘Thessalian εἴντεσσι and the participle of the verb 'to be'’. In Etrennes de Septantaine. Travaux offerts à M. Lejeune, 157–66. Paris: Klincksieck. 1987 b: ‘Folk-linguistics and the Greek word’. In Festschrift H. M. Hoenigswald (G. Cardona & N. Zide, eds.), 263-80 Tübingen: Narr. 1993 a: ‘Geography, history and dialect: the case of Oropos’. In Dialectologica Graeca. Actas del II Coloquio Internacional de Dialectologia Griega (E. Crespo, J.L. García Ramón & A. Striano, eds.), 261–79. Madrid: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. 1997: ‘Particles in Greek epigraphical texts: the case of Arcadian’. In New Approaches to Greek Particles. Proceedings of the Colloquium held in Amsterdam, Jan. 4–6, 1996, to honour C. J. Ruijgh on the occasion of his retirement (A. Rijksbaron, ed.), 49–73. Amsterdam: Gieben.