Norman, K.

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Norman, K. on the DRL

Kenneth Norman
English Phonetics Kenneth R. Norman
Sort Name Norman, Kenneth
Norman Kenneth-Wikipedia.png
Dates
Birth:   1925
Death:   2020


Tibetan calendar dates

About
Primary Affiliation (Workplace)
Cambridge

Biographical Information

Kenneth Roy Norman FBA (21 July 1925 – 5 November 2020) was a British philologist at the University of Cambridge and a leading authority on Pali and other Middle Indo-Aryan languages.

Norman was born on 21 July 1925, and was educated at Taunton School in Somerset and Downing College, Cambridge, receiving his M.A. in 1954.

He was trained as a classicist and studied classical philology, in the form which was current in his student days, i.e. the investigation of the relationship between Latin, Greek and Sanskrit in particular, and between other Indo-European languages in general. He went on to study Sanskrit and the dialects associated with Sanskrit—the Prakrits—and was appointed to teach the Prakrits, or Middle Indo-Aryan, as they are sometimes called, lying as they do between Old Indo-Aryan, i.e. Sanskrit, and New Indo-Aryan, i.e. the modern Indo-Aryan languages spoken mainly in North India.

The whole of his academic career was spent at Cambridge. He was appointed Lecturer in Indian Studies in 1955, Reader in 1978, and Professor of Indian Studies in 1990. He retired in 1992.

From 1981 to 1994 he was President of the Pali Text Society, and from January to March 1994 he was the Bukkyō Dendō Kyōkai Visiting Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies. 

He was made a Foreign Member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters in 1983 and a Fellow of the British Academy in 1985. (Adapted from Source July 16, 2023)

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