Čestmír Loukotka (12 November 1895 – 13 April 1966) was a Czechoslovak

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

and

ethnologist Ethnology (from the , meaning 'nation') is an academic field and discipline that compares and analyzes the characteristics of different peoples and the relationships between them (compare cultural, social, or sociocultural anthropology). Scien ...

. His daughter was

Jarmila Loukotková Jarmila Loukotková (14 April 1923 – 29 October 2007) was a Czech literature, Czech writer who was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. Her father was Čestmír Loukotka. Works Loukotková wrote a number of historical prose focused on antiquity ...

Career

Loukotka proposed a

classification Classification is the activity of assigning objects to some pre-existing classes or categories. This is distinct from the task of establishing the classes themselves (for example through cluster analysis). Examples include diagnostic tests, identif ...

for the

languages of South America The languages of South America can be divided into three broad groups: * the languages of the (in most cases, former) colonial powers, primarily Spanish and Portuguese; * many indigenous languages, some of which are co-official alongside th ...

based on several previous works. This classification contained many unpublished materials and therefore greatly improved upon previous classifications. He divided the languages of South America and the Caribbean into 77 different families, based upon similarities of vocabulary and available lists. His classification of 1968 is the most influential and was based upon two previous schemes (1935, 1944), which were similar to those proposed by Paul Rivet (whom he was a student of), although the number of families was increased to 94 and 114. *reviewed in

References

1895 births 1958 deaths Linguists from Czechoslovakia Historical linguists Linguists of Indigenous languages of the Americas 20th-century Czech linguists {{Czech-linguist-stub