Artemij Keidan
Associate Professor of General and Historical Linguistics
ISO - Italian Institute of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome
Associate Professor of General and Historical Linguistics
ISO - Italian Institute of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome
I am Associate Professor of Historical and General Linguistics at Sapienza University of Rome, affiliated with the Department "ISO – Italian Institute of Oriental Studies". I received my doctorate in 2005 with a dissertation on Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī.
My research encompasses historical linguistics (with particular emphasis on Indo-European comparative studies); general and theoretical linguistics (including phonology, morphonology, and axiomatization); philosophy of language; and the history of linguistics. I maintain a special interest in the Indian grammatical tradition and Renaissance linguistics.
I also have a keen interest in fonts, typography, and typesetting.
May 13, 2005
Sapienza University of Rome
Thesis: L'Aṣṭādhyāyī di Pāṇini: aspetti teorici e formali
Supervisor: Prof. Paolo Di Giovine
July 17, 2001
Sapienza University of Rome
Thesis: Nuovo Testamento in gotico
Supervisor: Prof. Carla Del Zotto
December 2023
GLOT-01/A (Historical and General Linguistics)
December 2020 – Present
GLOT-01/A (Historical and General Linguistics)
Sapienza University of Rome, Department "ISO"
December 2014 – November 2020
Sapienza University of Rome, Department "ISO"
December 2011 – November 2014
Sapienza University of Rome, Department "ISO"
July 2005 – June 2009
Sapienza University of Rome, Faculty of Oriental Studies
May 2010 – October 2010
University of L'Aquila, Faculty of Humanities
September 2023
University of Toronto (Canada), Department of Philosophy
August – September 2022
University of Lisbon (Portugal), CLUL – Centro de Linguística
March 2019
Institute of Linguistics, Russian Academy of Sciences (Russia)
Mother tongue: Russian, Italian
Modern languages: English (good), French (reading), German (reading), Spanish (reading)
Ancient languages: Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, Gothic, Old Church Slavonic
I have published academic papers in English, Italian, and Russian.
Bibliographic records, research outputs, and institutional affiliations are available through the following academic profiles and research identifiers:
The following sections outline the principal areas of linguistics in which I am currently engaged or have previously conducted research. Each area includes links to the corresponding publications.
The axiomatization of linguistics constitutes a comprehensive research programme developed along the lines proposed by Anna Polivanova, who has advanced a systematic redefinition of fundamental grammatical concepts in logical-formal terms. This approach aims to reformulate the basic notions of linguistics exclusively through set-theoretical apparatus and explicitly stated correctness criteria (or axioms), thus providing a rigorous and formally transparent foundation for grammatical description. See related publications and talks.
Within the history of linguistic thought, my primary focus is the ancient Indian grammatical tradition (known as Vyākaraṇa), beginning with Pāṇini's Aṣṭādhyāyī and its exegetical corpus, which I analyze in relation to contemporary linguistic theory. See related publications and talks
Additionally, I conduct research on premodern European linguistics, from the Renaissance to the early nineteenth century. See related publications and talks.
My research addresses the description of segmental inventories across a range of the world's languages, as well as the formal mapping between different levels of segmental representation, including phonetic, phonological, morphonological, and their interface with the paradigmatic level and beyond. See related publications and talks.
I investigate the notion of grammatical category (or inflectional category), developing Anna Polivanova's ideas concerning the concept of "strong grammaticality". This theoretical approach is tested primarily on inflectional categories such as grammatical gender. See related publications and talks.
I investigate the theoretical foundations of the comparative-reconstructive method in historical linguistics from a formal perspective, with the aim of reformulating key notions such as "linguistic relatedness", "regular sound correspondence", and related concepts within a more explicit and rigorous framework. See related publications and talks.
CBC14. Reading Sanskrit Texts. Deep Reading as an Analytical Method for Written, Oral, and Performative Texts, Sapienza University of Rome. Co-organized with Elisa Freschi [web].
Gender in Grammar: History, Theory, Policy, Sapienza University of Rome [web].
CBC11 Panel. Vyākaraṇa and its many espouses: Linguistics, Philology, Philosophy, University of Rome [web].
Workshop Morpho-syntactic isoglosses in Indo-European: diachrony, typology and linguistic areas, at ISTAL 23, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (Greece). Co-organized with Nikolaos Lavidas and Leonid Kulikov [web] [Booklet].
CBC5. Space, culture, language and politics in South Asia: common patterns and local distinctions, Sapienza University of Rome [web].
CBC3 Panel. Translation Techniques in the Asiatic Cultures, University of Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy) [web].
CBC2. The Study of South Asia between Antiquity and Modernity. Parallels and Comparisons, Sapienza University of Rome [web].
CBC1. Lo studio dell'Asia fra antico e moderno, Sapienza University of Rome [web].
Sapienza University Conference Grant for the organization of the conference "Gender in Grammar". Funding amount: €2,500 [conference website].
SEED / PNR Grant. Project title: "Il Genere nella Lingua e nella Grammatica: teoria, storia e attualità". Funding amount: €10,000.
Sapienza University Research Office Grant. Project title: "Tra l'esotismo e l'eurocentrismo: grammaticalizzazione e categorie flessionali nella descrizione delle lingue indoeuropee classiche vs. quelle dell'Estremo Oriente". Funding amount: €11,320 [project page].
Member of the PRIN 2020 project "Metalinguistic texts as a privileged data source for the knowledge of ancient languages" (total funding: €603,000; Principal Investigator: L. Lorenzetti).
Tutor of the Sapienza University Research Office Grant for young scholars. Project title: "Grammaire Latine Étendue in Giappone: il modello greco-latino nell'opera di João Rodriguez (1562–1633?)". Funding amount: €3,400; Principal Investigator: C. D'Antonio [project page].
Sapienza University Research Office Grant. Project title: "Data in progress: aggiornamento, accessibilità permanente e potenzialità multidisciplinare dei database epigrafici". Funding amount: €14,000; Principal Investigator: S. Kaczko [project page].
Sapienza University Research Office Grant. Project title: "Categorie grammaticali nominali in prospettiva sincronica, diacronica e tipologica: flessione e derivazione nelle lingue indoeuropee arcaiche e post-arcaiche". Funding amount: €14,065 [project page].
Member of the PRIN 2017 project "Ancient languages and writing systems in contact: a touchstone for language change" (total funding: €517,000; Principal Investigator: P. Di Giovine) [project website].
Member of the Sapienza University Research Office Grant. Project title: "Champollion beyond hieroglyphs. The many languages of the Rosetta Stone code breaker". Funding amount: €11,000; Principal Investigator: C. A. Ciancaglini [project page].
Tutor of the Sapienza University Research Office Grant for young scholars. Project title: "Posizionamento dei clitici in paleoslavo". Funding amount: €1,250; Principal Investigator: A. Di Manno.
MIUR Grant for Basic Research Activities (Finanziamento delle attività base di ricerca). Funding amount: €3,000.
Sapienza University Research Office Grant. Project title: "Sviluppi convergenti nella morfologia indoeuropea: codifica dei modificatori nominali". Funding amount: €3,000 [project page].
Sapienza University International Office Grant for a visiting scholarship for Prof. Leonid Kulikov (Ghent University). Funding amount: €9,000.
Sapienza University Research Office Grant. Project title: "Indo-European isoglosses: data collection and models of representation". Funding amount: €9,000.
Sapienza University Conference Grant for the conference "Coffee Break Conference 5. The influence of space on culture in South Asia". Funding amount: €1,500.
Sapienza University Research Office Grant. Project title: "Contact-based approach to the Late Indo-European isoglosses: branch-crossing features and linguistic areas". Funding amount: €4,500.
Sapienza University International Office Grant for a visiting scholarship for Prof. Alexander Lubotsky (Leiden University). Funding amount: €9,000.
Sapienza University Research Office Grant. Project title: "La morfologia derivazionale nelle lingue indoeuropee orientali: dal pensiero grammaticale antico all'indoeuropeistica moderna". Funding amount: €3,000.
Currently, this is the only available project. Visit the project website. A detailed description will be added to this page soon.
This is my personal web page. Those who are looking for information about classes and courses I teach, are invited to refer to my Teaching page. In this section only a brief summary is presented.
6 credits | Department of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome
6 credits | Department of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome
6 credits | Department of Oriental Studies, Sapienza University of Rome
The textbook on general linguistics co-authored with C. A. Ciancaglini is available here.
Selected unpublished teaching materials used in my courses are available here.
Office: Sapienza University of Rome
Department “ISO – Italian Institute of Oriental Studies”
“Marco Polo” building, III floor, room 316
Ufficial address: Circonvallazione Tiburtina 4,
00185 Roma
Effective address: Viale dello Scalo di S. Lorenzo 82, 00159 Roma
This section presents writings that extend beyond formal academic publications, including popular essays, teaching materials, self-published research, and unpublished drafts.
This section features posts from my blog, loaded directly from Tumblr. The blog is entitled Śabdānuśāsana, a Sanskrit term meaning 'Explanation of words'. I share reflections on topics ranging from linguistics to art history.
Unable to load blog posts. Visit the blog directly on Tumblr →
I develop custom fonts for specialized applications in linguistics and historical studies.
Version 1.04 (Updated October 20, 2004)
This font renders the Gothic alphabet with glyph shapes modeled on Times New Roman. The font includes the complete Gothic alphabet, together with two glyph variants: one for the letter Sauil (S) and one for the letter Eis (I).
The font is freely available for download. Please note that the font remains a work in progress; comments and suggestions are welcome.
Over the years, I have typeset numerous scholarly books, conference proceedings, and journals using InDesign, LaTeX, and other typesetting tools. (Sometimes I am credited as the layout editor, and some other times I am not.)
Welcome to my homepage. Here you will find my CV, a list of my publications, and other materials. Please use the menu above to navigate among the site's sections.
This website was built through interaction between the author and several AI applications, most notably Claude Opus and DeepSeek, with more limited use of ChatGPT. All scholarly content and data are the author's own; the interface, design, and a substantial part of the implementation were produced and then iteratively refined through AI-assisted dialogue.
Many features, including the algorithm that renders floating letters in the background, were developed as experiments, largely to test the limits of this workflow. To access all features of the site, please accept cookies when prompted.
After working with three AI tools, I have formed some general impressions. Claude Opus proved consistently the most reliable for source code, preserving file integrity while applying corrections without disrupting structure. DeepSeek was particularly effective at identifying redundancies and avoidable repetition in existing code, but less satisfactory when asked to generate complex structures from scratch. In this project, ChatGPT proved comparatively less reliable, occasionally introducing regressions or partial overwrites.
Artemij Keidan