Jay Friedman was 12 or 13 when he says his future career "foisted itself upon me." At Crossroads Middle School in Santa Monica, the curriculum required two years of Latin. "I hated it for a long time," he says, "in large part because I sucked at it." But this animosity later "blossomed into love" during his junior year of high-school when "one random day, for some unknown reason, I just got it. That day changed my life; for the first time I had a real passion towards something."

At Vassar, Jay added other languages to his repertoire, but not French or Spanish: rather, Greek and Sanskrit. "They told me that Greek was twice as hard as Latin, and Sanskrit ten times as hard as Greek. Naturally, I had to check them out; especially Sanskrit." His senior year, shortly before applying to Harvard's graduate program in Sanskrit, he was shown a brochure about the Indo-European Studies program at UCLA by one of his professors. "The opportunity to study Old Irish, Classical Armenian, Old Saxon and other such languages was too much for me to resist." He was soon on his way back to Southern California.

Perhaps the primary-but certainly not the only-goal of Indo-European Studies is the recovery and illumination of Proto-Indo-European a language spoken some 7,000 years ago on the steppes of the Black Sea. Though Proto-Indo-European itself is not directly attested, its phonology, morphology and lexicon are all largely recoverable through the study and comparison of its "daughter" languages. These languages not only include Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, but also more familiar modern languages like Welsh, Lithuanian and Russian. Graduate students in the Indo-European Studies Program are required to study a minimum of four archaic Indo-European languages, with research generally revolving around various problems connected with the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and the subsequent development of its various offshoots.

Jay has spent the latter half of his graduate studies focusing on two language families in particular: Anatolian, which dates to 1700 B.C. and was originally used in the parts of Asia that are now Turkey and Indo-Iranian, to which nearly all of today's modern Indian and Iranian languages can be traced, and Tocharian, a deceased branch attested only in sixth to eighth century (A.D.) Buddhist documents uncovered in the Chinese province of Xinjiang.

His dissertation titled "Studies in Anatolian Historical Morphology" will detail a good number of "little things" he worked out during his stay at UCLA, such as the derivational mechanisms which led to the creation of Hittite harsar "head", the transformational processes by which certain types of Indo-European root-aorists became Anatolian hi-verbs, and the apophonic patterning of the Indo-Eruopean endingless locative. "The little things always pave the way for the big things," he says. "The big answers are hard to come by; careful, diligent work gets us there in the end. I'm just one more cog in a great historical machine."

But no ordinary cog, according to his adviser, Professor Brent Vine. "Certain things set Jay apart from most students. For one thing, he can usually spot the weak points in a theory or an argument right away, and since he has an extremely supple and original mind, this often leads him to work out novel and ingenious solutions to problems," Professor Vine says. Also, "Jay is not daunted by the fact that some of the best minds in the field over the past century may have come up with a solution that is now widely accepted. If that solution is problematic, Jay will happily throw it out and replace it with something better.

Jay has also contributed to the Indo-European Studies program by managing the Reading Room, sometimes without compensation. In the process, he's "amassed a vast knowledge of the bibliographic resources in the field," Professor Vine says, sharing his knowledge in informal seminars with other graduate students, "who benefit immensely from this contact and attention." Jay has also "reigned as tyrant" over the Humanities Council, part of the Graduate Students Association, for at least three years.

With his dissertation nearly complete, Jay will soon be looking to take his credentials into an academic workplace, a task made difficult by the fact that only one or two jobs may be open at a given time. "There will probably be some lean years until things play out," he acknowledges, "but if I work at it, the opportunity will come eventually." In addition to investigating Linguistics and Classics departments, he'll also be seeking employment in programs devoted to the study of South Asia or the Near East. Although he hopes to work one day at a research university that supports the study of Indo-European related disciplines directly, he acknowledges he'll likely begin his first teaching appointment at a small college without such concerns.

"I would prefer teaching what I do," Jay says, "but it's not tremendously important right now. What is important is graduating and earning a living." That and enjoying what he does. "My Dad always told me to do what you like, and the rest will go from there."

Published in Spring 2002, Graduate Quarterly