High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Eric Pratt Hamp is an American linguist. Born in London, England on November 16, 1920, he grew up in The United States from age 5 onward due to his father`s posting by a British shipping firm. He received his BA in 1942 from Amherst College, PhD from Harvard University in 1954 and taught at the University of Chicago from 1950, where he is Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, Departments of Linguistics, Slavic Languages and Literatures, Psychology (Cognition and Communication) and the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, until his retirement in 1991. His fields of interest include Indo-European linguistics, particularly Celtic languages, and Albanian. He is also known for his interest in, and expertise, on the smaller Indo-European languages. Unlike many Indo-Europeanists, who work entirely on the basis of written materials, he has conducted extensive fieldwork on lesser-known Indo-European languages and dialects, such as Albanian, Breton, Welsh, Irish, and Scots Gaelic. His wide-ranging interests, however, have also included American Indian languages. He served for many years as editor of the International Journal of American Linguistics and did field work on Quileute and Ojibwa.