Johanna Narten

Johanna "Jo" Narten (5 October 1930 – 15 July 2019), was a German Indo-Europeanist and Indo-Iranian linguist who discovered the reconstructed morphological category in Proto-Indo-European now known as the Narten present.

Academic career Narten originally learned Greek and Hebrew in order to study theology at university, but ultimately studied classical philology instead. In 1951 she enrolled at the University of Saarland in 1951, first studying with Ernst Zinn and then switching to studying Indo-European linguistics, in particular Indo-Iranian linguistics (especially Vedic Sanskrit and Avestan), with Karl Hoffmann, who became the Chair of Indo-European Studies at the university in 1952. Narten's Habilitation thesis, completed in 1971, was a philological and linguistic study of the Zoroastrian sacred text Yasna Haptaŋhāiti.

Scholarship Narten's first book, based on her PhD dissertation, was published in 1964, and is described by Almut Hintze as a 'masterpiece' which 'has remained an essential tool for grammatical analysis in Vedic and Indo-Iranian Studies to the present day'. in which she showed the existence of a class of verbs that feature a lengthened e-grade in the present, is described by Hintze as a "seminal" article, due to which "her name has become a sort of hallmark far beyond the remit of Indo-Iranian Studies": Her later work included monographs on Zoroastrian religion and religious texts, in particular the Yasna Haptaŋhāiti, which had been the subject of her Habilitation thesis, and (with Karl Hoffman) on the Avestan script, as well as numerous articles in the field of Indo-Iranian studies.

Selected publications