Max Vasmer

Max Julius Friedrich Vasmer (; ; 28 February 1886 – 30 November 1962) was a Russian and German linguist. He studied problems of etymology in Indo-European, Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages and worked on the history of Slavic, Baltic, Iranian, and Finno-Ugric peoples.

Biography

Max Vasmer was born on 28 February 1886 to German parents in Saint Petersburg. Vasmer graduated from Saint Petersburg University in 1907 as a student of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Aleksey Shakhmatov. From 1907 to 1908, he studied Greek dialects and the Albanian language in Greece. He continued to study at the universities of Krakow and Vienna from 1908 to 1910.

From 1910, he delivered lectures and taught at the Bestuzhev Courses in 1912. During the Russian Civil War of 1917–1922, he worked in the universities of Saratov (1917–1918) and Dorpat (1918–1921). From 1921 to 1925, he taught at the University of Leipzig, and from 1925 to 1945, he taught at the University of Berlin. He also founded the journal ''Zeitschrift für slavische Philologie''.

In 1938–1939, he delivered lectures at Columbia University in New York City. It was there that he started to work on his ''magnum opus'', the . He delivered the eulogy for Professor Aleksander Brückner in Berlin- Wilmersdorf in 1939 and he took over the chair of Slavistic studies at the University of Berlin. In 1941, he published the book "The Slavs in Greece" (''Die Slaven in Griechenland'') and in 1944 the book "The Greek loanwords in Serbo-Croatian" (''Die griechischen Lehnwörter im Serbo-Kroatischen'').

In 1944, the bombing of Vasmer's house in Berlin destroyed most of his materials. Nevertheless, Vasmer persevered in his work, which was finally published in three volumes by Heidelberg University in 1950–1958 as . From 1947 to 1949, he taught at the Stockholm University. He was the head of Slavic studies at the Free University of West Berlin. Vasmer died in West Berlin on 30 November 1962.

The Russian translation of Vasmer's dictionary – with extensive commentaries by Oleg Trubachyov – was printed in 1964–1973. , it remains the most authoritative source for Slavic etymology. The Russian version is available on Sergei Starostin's ''Tower of Babel'' web site.

Another monumental work led by Max Vasmer involved the compilation of a multi-volume dictionary of Russian names of rivers and other bodies of water. He initiated an even grander project, completed by a team of workers after his death: the publication of a monumental (11 volumes) gazetteer that included virtually all names of populated places in Russia found both in pre-revolutionary and in Soviet sources."Russisches geographisches Namenbuch" (The book of Russian Geographic Names), founded by Max Vasmer. Compiled by Ingrid Coper et al. Wiesbaden, Atlas and Volumes 1–9. O. Harrassowitz, 1964–1981. The additional volume 11 appeared in 1988, , and an additional atlas volume in 1989, .

See also

* Etymological dictionary

References

Sources

*

External links

Query the Russian dictionaries
at Sergei Starostin'
''Tower of Babel''

{{DEFAULTSORT:Vasmer, Max
1886 births
1962 deaths
Saint Petersburg State University alumni
People from Sankt-Peterburgsky Uyezd
Russian people of German descent
Etymologists
20th-century German linguists
Linguists from Russia
Russian language
Knights Commander of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
Corresponding Members of the USSR Academy of Sciences
Foreign members of the USSR Academy of Sciences
Members of the German Academy of Sciences at Berlin
Columbia University faculty
Academic staff of Saint Petersburg State University
German Turkologists
20th-century Russian scientists