Jaan Puhvel: A Remembrance by Martin E. Huld

When I first considered applying to UCLA’s Program in Indo-European Studies, one of my undergraduate professors offered me some well-meant advice: “Try to avoid Puhvel. He can be difficult to work with.” My adviser knew of a current enrollée in the program who reported to another faculty member endless problems trying to appease this Puhvel person. Heeding that advice, I arranged a day and time for my interview when I would have to be seen by Patrick K. Ford, then serving as the program chair. I arrived at Pat Ford’s office in Campbell Hall only to find a note on the door informing me that he had been called away but “Mr. Puhvel in Bunche Hall would be happy to see you.” Accordingly, I made my way over to Bunche and took the elevator up to the seventh floor to face the difficult and intimidating Jaan Puhvel. My knock on the door was answered cheerfully by deep bass voice “Come in, come in. You must be Mr. Huld; please have a seat.” What followed was a pleasant hour of conversation about my independent undergraduate work with Messapic, my interest in Minoan and Mycenaean prehistory, and my background in historical linguistics. The difficult Mr. Puhvel was instead a fount of friendly support, advising me that while such marginal languages as Messapic were fascinating–he himself had done quite a bit of work with Thracian–in the end there was far too little material to arrive at firm conclusions. It would be better to build a solid grounding in the basic languages and dabble in Messapic, Lycian, or Linear A on the side. Nevertheless, he still encouraged my interests in these side areas. Lycian, he informed me would have to wait for a more complete understanding of Luvian, where advancements would soon appear. He also gave me offprints of several of his articles including an early draft of one on labiovelars in Hittite that was still in preparation as well as his magisterial surveys of Hittite and the Anatolian languages from the fourteenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica before its learning was scattered into three parts named something like Prosthesis, Microcephalia, and Megalomania.

Professor Puhvel suggested classes to take in the coming quarter and announced that he would direct my dissertation. That interview fixed our relationship for the next five years of my graduate career and for much of my scholarly life. During those years, Jaan Puhvel was also my teacher for Italic dialects, Greek dialects, Hittite, Etruscan, and comparative mythology. He advised me to take Professor Ford’s seminars in Old Irish and Middle Welsh. He maintained a keen interest in my Iranian studies in Avestan and Sogdian with Professor Schmidt and watched happily as my dabbling in Messapic and Illyrian turned to agnosticism concerning the reliability of ethnic labels in Hesychius and I started to focus my attention on the more soluble problems of Albanian developments. When I published my first article in Kuhns Zeitschrift, other students told me that he went out of his way to work a mention of it into the class that he was teaching that quarter. I did not receive special treatment; whenever a student or former student published, presented, or made any other contribution to scholarship, he let his current students know.

That initial interview was very different from anything I had expected, and I later met the predecessor who had such difficulties with Puhvel, and it was readily apparent that the difficulty wasn’t Jaan Puhvel but the student who was frustrated by his insistence that opinions should be back by facts and citations not by more opinions. Jaan Puhvel himself had very decided opinions on many matters, but they were always supported by the best evidence he could muster at the time, and subject to revision. He was also meticulous in patiently recording opinions he rejected and his reasons for rejecting them. Moreover, he was exceptionally tolerant of differences of opinion. An early admirer of Georges Dumézil, he also praised the work of Paul Thieme, who was one of Dumézil’s harshest critics. At Harvard, he had been a student of Joshua Whatmough, a man of decidedly different character. Whatmough was famous for rejecting phonemic, insisting that had there been such a Greek word, the derivative should be phonematic, and he was rumored to have failed students who pronounced Celtic with an initial sibilant rather than a velar stop on the grounds that no Greek would have ever assibilated Κελτοί. I have always wondered how he pronounced cynic, which is based on κυνικός. Some people react to such models of intolerance by reversing and redirecting the intolerance onto its source and shutting down all communication. Jaan Puhvel’s response was to try keep as many channels of communication as possible open and to believe that change was always possible.

When he retired, he sought no memorial or celebration, but the graduate students of Indo-European Studies invited him to give a lecture which we turned into a tribute to him. In his later valedictory address before the Center for Folklore and Mythology, he justified his continuing rejection of the Indo-Hittite hypothesis, which he cleverly described in an earlier paper as “an Indo-European Cadillac with tail fins.” His commitment to the Schwund Hypothesis was based on an inherent optimism, that traces of lost Indo-European features might later be found among the Anatolian languages. In part, that optimism was justified, for Craig Melchert and Jens Rasmussen later noted that Lycian apparently still distinguished feminine nouns from masculine. To approach prehistory by combining linguistics, mythology, and archaeology as he first envisioned Indo-European Studies at UCLA is to be optimistic that scholars of different orientations and disciplines, on different continents, with different interests and orientations can come together and inform and inspire each other to advance human knowledge. It is that optimism, that by communicating with others and listening to them fairly and impartially we can advance knowledge, that I feel was the greatest lesson I received from him.