Peter E. Hook
Peter E. Hook (born 1942) is professor emeritus in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan. Biography

Hook was born in southwestern Connecticut and attended public and private school in northeastern Ohio. He graduated from Harvard College in 1964 and went to India as a member of the American Peace Corps before earning his PhD in Indo-Aryan linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania. He is married to Prof. Hsin-hsin Liang who directs the Chinese language program at the University of Virginia. They have a daughter Leise and a son Lawrence. Academic work

Hook's academic  interest has been in the linguistic description of languages belonging to the Indo-Aryan family in South Asia, and more broadly in their place in Masica's Indo-Turanian linguistic area. At  Michigan, he taught Hindi at all levels, occasionally other South Asian languages, along with courses in linguistics and South Asian literature for three and a half decades, and published on both Indo-Aryan languages and linguistics. His chief contributions are The Compound Verb in Hindi and numerous articles on the compound verb and other syntactic and semantic phenomena in western Indo-Aryan languages and dialects spoken in North India, West India, and Pakistan: Kashmiri, Marathi, Gujarati, Rajasthani, Shina, and Sanskrit. After Jules Bloch in his La Formation de la Langue Marathe, Hook was the first to realize that Kashmiri, not unlike German, has V2 word order. More recent publications have refined the notion of South Asia as a linguistic area as first adumbrated by Murray Emeneau and - with the addition of Central Asia and Eastern Asia - expanded by Colin Masica. 