John Clayton

Lecturer in Indo-European Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles

Program in Indo-European Studies

Dodd 100, P.O. Box 951417

Los Angeles, CA 90095-1417

I am a Lecturer in Indo-European Linguistics in the Program in Indo-European Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, where I teach courses on Indo-European linguistics, comparative mythology and poetics, Gothic, Old Norse and Proto-Germanic, and language and evolution.

I received my Ph.D. from the UCLA Program in Indo-European Studies in 2023 with the dissertation “The Development of the Indo-European *-wr̥-/-wen-Heteroclites in Sanskrit and Beyond”, advised by Stephanie Jamison. My research focuses on Indo-Iranian and Latin/Italic phonology, diachronic morphophonology, Germanic linguistics, Indo-European mythology and poetics, and computational phylogenetics.

Before graduate school I studied linguistics at Yale University (B.A.) and computer science at Oregon State University (B.S.), and worked as a software engineer at Capital One.

selected publications

  1. Proceedings
    The Identity of pīlu in Atharvaveda Paippalāda 7.19: Vedic Arboreal Terminology and Etymology
    John Clayton
    In Proceedings of the 34th Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference: Los Angeles, October 27th and 28th, 2023, 2024
    Bib PDF
  2. Journal
    Labiovelar loss and the rounding of syllabic liquids in Indo-Iranian
    John Clayton
    Indo-European Linguistics, 2022
    DOI Bib PDF