It is with great sadness that we learned that our former colleague emeritus professor Heiner Eichner passed away on March 7th.
From 1989 until his retirement in 2010, he was Professor of General and Indo-European Lingusitics at the Linguistics Department of the University of Vienna, and Corresponding Member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
As a member of the Erlangen School, Heiner Eichner was one of the most influential Indo-Europeanists of the late twentieth century. His meticulous methods of reconstruction and his encyclopedic knowledge of linguistic facts were unequaled. His love for learning modern languages brought less studied languages into the focus of attention, including modern Iranian, which he also promoted as director of the Iranian Commission of the Austrian Academy of Sciences.