Anna Morpurgo Davies

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

She earned her doctorate in classics from the University of Rome with a thesis on Linear B; she published the first lexicon of the language in 1963.

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.

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.

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.

The marriage was dissolved in 1978.

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).

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; 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.

In 2001, she became an honorary Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire; since she was not a British citizen, she could not use the "Dame" title, but was able to use the post-nominals DBE.

In 2003 this became the Diebold Chair.

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".

In 2005 a festschrift was published in her honour, Indo-European Perspectives: Studies in Honour of Anna Morpurgo Davies.

After Davies' 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.