Eric Hamp, was a professor of linguistics for more than 40 years. He has taught at the University of Chicago. He was an expert in languages ranging from those with Indo-European roots like Albanian to Native American languages including Quileute and Ojibwa. Hamp’s contributions to the field included over 3,000 publications, Friedman said. “Most of them very short but very important, very incisive. He could find some small detail in a language or a dialect and from that detail could reconstruct something with huge implications.” Hamp’s special interest in Albanian. When it was hard to get permission to travel to Albania, Hamp continued his research on the language by visiting villages in Greece and southern Italy where Albanian was spoken. Joseph said Hamp visited hundreds of such villages, compiling word lists, verb information and noun forms. “He had a grasp of outlying Albanian dialects gathered by field work,” Joseph said. Hamp was an American linguist and he has particular interests in Celtic languages and Albanian.