A Czech linguistic genius with a lasting legacy: Bedřich Hrozný, the decipherer of Hittite

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On the 12th of December 1952, a senior academic died in Prague. This lifelong scholar was Bedřich Hrozný, a Czech man born in the Bohemian town of Lysá nad Labem, and he remains famous today for his work on ancient languages. Most notably, it was thanks to him that the first translations of the lost language of the Hittites were not into English or French, but Czech. To understand the genius and the legacy of Hrozný, Danny Bate spoke to Krishnan Ram-Prasad, a scholar of Hittite and other languages of antiquity at the University of Oxford.