Yevgeny
Dmitrievich
Polivanov
(Russian: Евге
́ний Дми́триевич Полива́нов;
12 March [O.S. 28 February] 1891 – 25 January
1938) was a Soviet linguist, orientalist and
polyglot who wrote major works on the
Chinese, Japanese, Uzbek and Dungan
languages and on theoretical linguistics and
poetics.
He participated in the development of
writing systems for the peoples of the Soviet
Union and also designed a cyrillization system
for Japanese language, which was officially accepted in the Soviet
Union and is still the standard in modern Russia. He also translated the
Kyrgyz national Epic of Manas into Russian. Polivanov is credited as
the scholar who initiated the comparative study of Japanese pitch accent
across dialects.
In 1928–1929 he expressed disagreement with Nicholas Marr's
Japhetic theory, which was promoted by the regime at the time. After
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this he was blackballed from all scholarly institutions in Moscow and
Leningrad and until his arrest "was essentially in exile in Central Asia,
where he accomplished fruitful work on the local languages."
Alexander
Khristoforovich
Vostokov
(born Alexander Woldemar
Osteneck;
Russian:
Алекса́ндр
Христофо́рович Восто́ков; 27 March
[O.S. March 16] 1781 – 20 February [O.S.
8 February] 1864) was one of the first
Russian philologists.
He was born into a Baltic German
family in Arensburg, Governorate of
Livonia, and studied at the Imperial
Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg. As a
natural son of Baron von Osten-Sacken, he
received the name Osteneck, which he later chose to render into Russian
as Vostokov (Ost, the German word for "east," translates to vostok in
Russian).[1] He liked to experiment with language and, in one of his
poems, introduced the female name Svetlana, which would gain
popularity through Vasily Zhukovsky's eponymous ballad.
During his lifetime, Vostokov was known as a poet and translator,
but it is his innovative studies of versification and comparative Slavonic
grammars which proved most influential. In 1815, he joined the staff of
the Imperial Public Library, where he discovered the most ancient dated
book written in Slavonic vernacular, the so-called Ostromir Gospel. In
1841, Vostokov was elected to the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Vostokov's works on the Church Slavonic language were
considered a high-water mark of Slavic studies until the appearance of
Izmail Sreznevsky's comprehensive lexicon in 1893–1903 and garnered
him the doctorates honoris causa from the Charles University and
University of Tübingen.
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