Mario Alinei

Mario Alinei (10 August 1926 – 9 August 2018) was an Italian linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Utrecht, where he taught from 1959 to 1987. He was founder and editor of Quaderni di semantica, a journal of theoretical and applied semantics. Until 1997, he was president of Atlas Linguarum Europae at UNESCO. Alinei was born in Turin, Italy in August 1926. He authored hundreds of publications and was a prominent scholar in the field of dialectology. Alinei was a pioneer in the use of computers in linguistics. According to Pavle Ivić, "Alinei is one of the not so numerous European linguists who already in the early sixties were willing and able to apply the results of technological innovations to the study of language." After his retirement, beginning in 1996, Alinei also became known as a proponent of the Paleolithic continuity theory that Indo-European languages originated in Europe during the Upper Paleolithic. He died in Impruneta, Italy in August 2018, two days shy of his 92nd birthday. Since 1980: General Editor of the journal «Quaderni di Semantica». 1970–1997: Co-founder, Vice-President and President (from 1982) of the Atlas Linguarum Europae, a UNESCO sponsored project. 1968–1987: Full Professor of Italian Linguistics and Literature, University of Utrecht (NL). 1962–1968: Associate Professor of Italian Linguistics and Literature, University of Utrecht (NL). 1959–1962: Assistant Professor of Italian Linguistics and Literature, University of Utrecht (NL). Consultant of Olivetti for advanced research on computational linguistics Consultant of IBM for advanced research on computational linguistics Since 1996: honorary member of the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics 1989–1996: President of the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics 1989: President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. 1979–1980: Research Fellowship of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. Since 1996: senior member of the Royal Academy Gustaf Adolf, Uppsala (Sweden).