Calvert Watkins (; March 13, 1933 – March 20, 2013) was an American linguist and philologist. He is best known for his book How to Kill a Dragon. He was Professor Emeritus of linguistics and the classics at Harvard University and later went to serve as the professor-in-residence at UCLA.
Watkins, in a sense, completed his contribution to this area with his Indogermanische Grammatik, vol. 3, part 1: Geschichte der indogermanischen Verbalflexion (1969). Meanwhile, his work on Indo-European vocabulary and poetics yielded a large number of articles on (among others) Celtic, Anatolian, Greek, Italic and Indo-Iranian material, presented directly in his Selected Writings and indirectly in his book, How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics (Oxford University Press, 1995).
Indo-European origins of the Celtic verb, vol. 1: The sigmatic aorist. Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advances Studies, 1962.
“Preliminaries to a historical and comparative analysis of the syntax of the Old Irish verb”, Celtica 6 (1963): 1-49.
“L’apport d’Emile Benveniste à la grammaire comparée”, in E. Benveniste aujourd’hui: Actes du Colloque international du CNRS, ed. G. Serbat. Louvain: Ed. Peeters, 1984, pp. 1: 3-11.
Indogermanische Grammatik, vol. 3, part 1: Geschichte der indogermanischen Verbalflexion. Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1986.
“Etymologies, equations, and comparanda: types and values, and criteria for judgment”, in Linguistic Change and Reconstruction Methodology, ed. Philip Baldi. Berlin-NY: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990, pp. 289-304.
“The comparison of formulaic sequences”, in Reconstructing Languages and Cultures, eds. Edgar Polomé & Werner Winter. Berlin–NY: Mouton de Gruyter, 1992, pp. 391–409.
Selected Writings. 2 vols; I: Language and Linguistics; II: Culture and Poetics. Edited by Lisi Oliver. Innsbruck: Innsbrucker Beiträge zur Schprachwissenschaft, 1994.
How to Kill a Dragon: Aspects of Indo-European Poetics. NY–Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995.
“Proto-Indo-European: comparison and reconstruction”, in The Indo-European Languages, eds. Anna Giacalone Ramat & Paolo Ramat. London: Routledge, 1998, pp. 25–73.
“A Celtic miscellany”, in Proceedings of the Tenth Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, Los Angeles, May 21-23, 1998, eds. Karlene Jones-Bley et al. Washington D.C.: Institute for the Study of Man, 1999, pp. 3–26.
The American Heritage Dictionary of Indo-European Roots, 2nd edn. Revised and edited by Calvert Watkins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000.
“An Indo-European linguistic area and its characteristics: Ancient Anatolia. Areal diffusion as a challenge to the comparative method?”, in Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics, eds. Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & R.M.W. Dixon. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001 (rev. edn., 2006), pp. 44–63.
“Homer and Hittite revisited II”, in Recent Developments in Hittite Archaeology and History: Papers in Memory of Hans G. Güterbock, eds. K. Aslihan Yener & Harry A. Hoffner Jr. with the assistance of Simrit Dhesi. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2002, pp. 167–176.
“Hittite ku-ku-us-zi, KUB 10.99 i 29”, in Hittite Studies in Honor of Harry A. Hoffner Jr. on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, eds. Gary Beckman, Richard Beal, & Gregory McMahon. Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 2003, pp. 389–392.
“The third donkey: origin legends and some hidden Indo-European themes”, in Indo-European Perspectives: Studies in Honour of Anna Morpurgo Davies, ed. J.H.W. Penney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 65–82.
“What makes the study of Irish worthwhile”, in Why Irish? Irish Language and Literature in Academia, ed. Brian Ó Conchubhair. Galway, Ireland: Arlen House; Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008, pp. 43–54.
