Eric Pratt Hamp (November 16, 1920 – February 17, 2019) was an American linguist widely respected as a leading authority on Indo-European linguistics, with particular interests in Celtic languages and Albanian. Unlike many Indo-Europeanists, who work entirely on the basis of written materials, he conducted extensive fieldwork on lesser-known Indo-European languages and dialects, such as Albanian, Arbëresh and Arvanitika; Breton; Welsh; Irish; Resian and Scots Gaelic. His wide-ranging interests also included American Indian languages. He served for many years as editor of the International Journal of American Linguistics and did field work on Quileute and Ojibwa. He also studied linguistic aspects of braille. Hamp's scholarship was characterized by the densely argued, narrowly focused note, essay and review, generally consisting of a few pages. He wrote more than 3,500 articles and reviews, and nearly every important aspect of historical linguistics was dealt with, often multiple times, in Hamp's writings. He was the Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago and in spite of his advanced age, he continued to write, edit, speak and travel at select meetings and conferences, and was an Associate Editor of the journal Anthropological Linguistics. He died in February 2019 at the age of 98. Early life Hamp was born in London in 1920 and moved to the United States in 1925 when his father became the New York representative of the Silver Line, a British shipping company. Growing up in East Orange, New Jersey, Hamp was sent to the Tome School in 1935 and entered Amherst College in the fall of 1938. He received his BA from Amherst, majoring in Greek and Latin, in 1942. Hamp was still a British subject during the early years of World War II, and he spent the period immediately after college as a purchasing agent for the Union of South Africa under Lend-Lease, which provided U.S. war materiel to the Allies. He then became a U.S. citizen and served in the U.S. Army, being discharged in 1947 at the rank of sergeant. Hamp resumed his studies in 1947, entering the Department of Comparative Philology at Harvard University (the department was renamed the Department of Linguistics in 1951), from which he received an MA (1948) and PhD (1954). Among Hamp's teachers at Harvard were Joshua Whatmough and Kenneth H. Jackson. Career Hamp became interested in Albanian while in graduate school at Harvard, and he traveled to