Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych (, also transliterated as Illič-Svityč; 12 September 1934 – 22 August 1966) was a
Soviet
The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
linguist and
accentologist. He was a founding father of comparative
Nostratic
Nostratic is a hypothetical language macrofamily including many of the language families of northern Eurasia first proposed in 1903. Though a historically important proposal, it is now generally considered a fringe theory. Its exact compositi ...
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
and the
Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics
The Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics (also called the Nostratic languages, Nostratic School) is a school of linguistics based in Moscow, Russia that is known for its work in . Formerly based at Moscow State University, it is currently cente ...
.
Biography
Of
Polish Jewish descent, Illich-Svitych was born in
Kyiv
Kyiv, also Kiev, is the capital and most populous List of cities in Ukraine, city of Ukraine. Located in the north-central part of the country, it straddles both sides of the Dnieper, Dnieper River. As of 1 January 2022, its population was 2, ...
. In 1941, he and his parents moved to
Chkalov and later to
Moscow
Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...
. His father, Mark Vladislavovich Illich-Svitych (1886–1963), worked as a bookkeeper. His mother, Klara Moiseevna Desner (1901–1955), was chief director of puppet theater in Orenburg.
He resuscitated the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis, originally proposed by
Holger Pedersen in 1903. While embarking on a field trip to collect data on the
Hungarian dialects of the
Carpathians
The Carpathian Mountains or Carpathians () are a range of mountains forming an arc across Central Europe and Southeast Europe. Roughly long, it is the third-longest European mountain range after the Urals at and the Scandinavian Mountains ...
, he died in an automobile accident on August 22, 1966, near
Moscow
Moscow is the Capital city, capital and List of cities and towns in Russia by population, largest city of Russia, standing on the Moskva (river), Moskva River in Central Russia. It has a population estimated at over 13 million residents with ...
.
His death prevented him from completing the ''Comparative Dictionary of Nostratic Languages'', but the ambitious work was continued by his colleagues, including
Sergei Starostin
Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin (; March 24, 1953 – September 30, 2005) was a Russian historical linguistics, historical linguist and philology, philologist, perhaps best known for his reconstructions of hypothetical proto-languages, including hi ...
and
Vladimir Dybo.
Illich-Svitych was buried at the Obraztsovskoye Cemetery in the
Shchyolkovsky District of the Moscow Region. A phrase in the Nostratic language is engraved on his tombstone.
Selected publications
* ''Nominal Accentuation in Baltic and Slavic'', translated by R. L. Leed and R. F. Feldstein, Cambridge, London 1979: the MIT Press. (originally edited in Russian in 1963)
See also
*
Illich-Svitych's law
Notes
References
*
Merritt Ruhlen: ''On the Origin of Languages. Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy.'' Stanford University Press 1994.
*Sydney M. Lamb and E. Douglas Mitchell (Hrsg.): ''Sprung from Some Common Source. Investigations into the Prehistory of Languages.'' Stanford University Press, Stanford (Calif.) 1991.
*
Vitaly Shevoroshkin: ''Reconstructing Languages and Cultures. Abstracts and Materials from the First International Interdisciplinary Symposium on Language and Prehistory.'' Brockmeyer, Bochum 1989.
*
Bomhard, Allan R. and John C. Kerns: ''The Nostratic Macrofamily. A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship''. Mouton De Gruyter. Berlin - New York 1994.
*
Dolgopolsky, Aharon: ''The Nostratic Macrofamily and Linguistic Palaeontology.'' The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Oxford 1998.
* Holger Pedersen: ''Türkische Lautgesetze.'' ZDMG 57, 1903.
* Holger Pedersen: ''Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century: Methods and Results.'' Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1931.
External links
Example of Illich-Svitych's Nostratic reconstruction
{{DEFAULTSORT:Illich-Svitych, Vladislav Markovich
1934 births
1966 deaths
Linguists from Russia
Russian people of Polish-Jewish descent
Linguists from the Soviet Union
Linguists of Nostratic languages
Road incident deaths in the Soviet Union
Long-range comparative linguists
Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics