Lunt was born on September 12, 1918, in
Colorado Springs, United States. He attended
Harvard College, where he was
Samuel Hazzard Cross' undergraduate student in
German. Cross encouraged him to develop an interest in
Slavic studies. He gained a
bachelor's degree in Harvard. The sixth edition from 1974 was supplied with a
generative analysis of OCS phonology, which was replaced in the final, seventh edition (2001) with a
historical section describing the development from
Proto-Indo-European to OCS. In June 1950, Lunt was sent by Harvard University to Yugoslavia to re-establish contact with Yugoslav academia that had been disrupted since 1941 by war and post-war policies. In August, he attended the Seminar for Foreign Slavists at
Bled sponsored by the Yugoslav Ministry of Science and Culture, where he met Yugoslav scholars
Blaže Koneski, Krum Tošev, and
Haralampije Polenaković, who were lecturing. Apart from Koneski, Lunt relied heavily on information by
Božidar Vidoeski and Radmila Ugrinova-Skalovska, who worked as assistants in the Department of South Slavic Languages at
Skopje University. Per Slavist
Victor Friedman, he was tracked by
OZNA. Lunt wrote an article on the morphology of the Macedonian verb in 1951. In August 1952, his grammar of
Literary Macedonian, the first
English language grammar of Macedonian, was printed at the Jugoštampa printing house. The grammar was a contribution to the
standardization of Macedonian, which made Lunt subject to political criticism in
Bulgaria and
Greece. Lunt also contributed to the development of
Macedonian studies at universities in
United States. Lunt was the first American citizen to be elected as a member of the
Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In 1963, he married feminist and political activist Sally Herman, with whom he had two daughters. In 1973, his Harvard colleague
Omeljan Pritsak convinced him to lead a weekly seminar at
Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute to review and improve his own translation of the
Rus Primary Chronicle. He died due to
pneumonia and complications from
Parkinson's disease on August 11, 2010, in
Baltimore, United States. == Works ==