Dieter Gunkel
Associate Professor
Fields of Interest: the historical and comparative grammar of Greek, Latin, and other Indo-European languages, the relationships between language, melody, and poetic meter, Greek music
Research
Dieter Gunkel holds a joint appointment in the Department of Classics and the Program in Indo-European Studies (PIES). He studies accentuation and word-formation in Greek, archaic word forms and versification in Vedic Sanskrit, and the nature of Tocharian metered verse, among other things. He is currently researching text-setting in ancient Greek music. To find out more about his current research, please visit his personal website.
He received his PhD from PIES in 2010. Before joining the faculty at UCLA in 2024, he held positions in the Lehrstuhl für Vergleichende und Indogermanische Sprachwissenschaft at the University of Munich (2010–2017) and in the Department of Classical Studies and the Linguistics Program at the University of Richmond (2017–2024).
Articles
2024. Sandell, Ryan P. and Dieter Gunkel. “On the representation and realization of the ancient Greek acute: Evidence from tone-tune mappings in ancient Greek music.” Journal of Greek Linguistics 24:78–183 [download]
2023. “Musical evidence for low boundary tones in ancient Greek.” Greek and Roman Musical Studies 12:1–54. [download]
2022. Gunkel, Dieter and Kevin M. Ryan. “Vedic Sanskrit vocatives in -an: The case for restoring two endings.” In Ha! Linguistic Studies in Honor of Mark R. Hale, ed. Laura Grestenberger, Charles Reiss, Hannes A. Fellner, and Gabriel Z. Pantillon, 117–134. Wiesbaden: Reichert. [preprint]
2022. “The first person singular of the athematic middle optative in Vedic and Indo-Iranian.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 142.2:251–266. [preprint]
2018. “Localizational evidence for the restoration of Rigvedic *mimihí ‘measure’.” In Vina Diem Celebrent. Studies in Linguistics and Philology in Honor of Brent Vine, ed. Dieter Gunkel, Stephanie W. Jamison, Angelo O. Mercado, and Kazuhiko Yoshida, 76–92. Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press. [download]
2018. Gunkel, Dieter and Kevin M. Ryan. “Phonological evidence for pāda cohesion in Rigvedic versification.” In Language and Meter, ed. Dieter Gunkel and Olav Hackstein, 34–53. Leiden: Brill. [download]
2016. “The Sanskrit source of the Tocharian 4×25-syllable meter.” In Sahasram Ati Srajas. Indo-Iranian and Indo-European Studies in Honor of Stephanie W. Jamison, ed. Dieter Gunkel, Joshua T. Katz, Brent Vine, and Michael Weiss, 82–95. Ann Arbor: Beech Stave Press. [preprint]
2015. Bross, Christoph, Dieter Gunkel, and Kevin M. Ryan. “The colometry of Tocharian 4×15-syllable verse.” In Tocharian Texts in Context, ed. Melanie Malzahn, Michaël Peyrot, Hannes Fellner, and Theresa-Susanna Illés, 15–28. Bremen: Hempen. [preprint]
2014. Bross, Christoph, Dieter Gunkel, and Kevin M. Ryan. “Caesurae, bridges, and the colometry of four Tocharian B meters.” Indo-European Linguistics 2:1–23. [download]
2011. “The emergence of foot structure as a factor in the formation of Greek verbal nouns in -μα(τ)-.” Münchener Studien zur Sprachwissenschaft 65:77–103. [download]
2011. Gunkel, Dieter and Kevin M. Ryan. “Hiatus avoidance and metrification in the Rigveda.” In Proceedings of the 22nd Annual UCLA Indo-European Conference, ed. Stephanie W. Jamison, H. Craig Melchert, and Brent Vine, 53–68. Bremen: Hempen. [download]