And more about, incl. more about and
Andrey Zaliznyak / Photo: Dmitry Sichinava's Facebook page
Lenta.ru tells why his death is an irreparable loss for Russia and the world, what he is remembered for and how he fought modern obscurantism.
Many readers of this text probably do not fully realize the scale of the loss that has befallen our country. Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak was not just a scientist, not just an intellectual, and not just a popularizer of science in those times when scientific knowledge was not particularly in demand. The author of these lines had the honor of being acquainted with him, and upon meeting was struck by his modesty and intelligence. And now there is no person who deciphered dozens (if not hundreds) of birch bark letters of the Russian Middle Ages and opened the voices of the inhabitants of the Novgorod Republic - a state that modern Russia inherits in exactly the same way as the Grand Duchy of Moscow.
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Andrei Zaliznyak was born in Moscow on April 29, 1935. In the fifth grade, he took a dictionary of the Russian language to the pioneer camp, and in 1951 he won the first university Olympiad in literature and the Russian language, after which he decided to become a linguist. Then, already during student trips, Zaliznyak learned many other languages - from Moldovan to Sanskrit. After studying (which was unthinkable in the USSR of that time), he did an internship at the Sorbonne and the Higher Normal School with the structuralist André Martinet.
What benefit did Andrey Zaliznyak bring to Russia? Firstly, he proved the authenticity of the manuscript "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" found in the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery in the city of Yaroslavl. Secondly, Zaliznyak's algorithms are now used in literacy checks in electronic dictionaries and in morphological descriptions in Internet search engines. It would not be an exaggeration to say that without the work of Zaliznyak, the Russian Internet would have had a completely different look and configuration. Thirdly, Zaliznyak managed to scientifically prove the inconsistency of the arguments of Fomenko and Nosovsky with their notorious “new chronology” and the falsity of the so-called Veles book. In December 2011, at the Festival of World Ideas organized by the Vokrug Sveta magazine, answering questions from guests, the academician reasonably noted that any discussion with such characters is possible only if there is a common scientific foundation, such as that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but nothing not vice versa.
In May 2014, at the height of pseudo-patriotic obscurantism in our country, Andrei Anatolyevich explained to the author of these lines and to his other compatriots the nature of the modern Russian language, and especially its connection with the Novgorod dialect, which differs from the Kiev-Chernigov-Moscow dialect. Yes, that's right: a thousand years ago, there were fewer differences in the speech of the inhabitants of Chernigov and Rostov than between them and the natives of Veliky Novgorod. Zaliznyak clearly showed that the current Russian language has become a synthesis of the dialects of Pskov and Veliky Novgorod with the language of the inhabitants of Kyiv, Chernigov, Vladimir and Moscow.
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Every warm season, despite his venerable age, Zaliznyak went to archaeological excavations in Veliky Novgorod. Each time, his lectures on the results of these trips were a colossal success, unthinkable in modern Russia. Largely because of this excitement, the author of this text did not manage to make an interview with him for Lenta.ru. In the fall of 2017, I attended the last (who would have thought!) public event of Andrei Anatolyevich in the main building of Moscow State University on Sparrow Hills. A huge queue in front of the entrance to the audience, consisting mainly of young students, inspired the idea that not everything is lost, that thinking people, in spite of everything, in our musty time, are trying to live a conscious life. And academician Andrei Zaliznyak, who grew up in the late Stalinist era, was for all of us an obvious and clear example of the fact that in any “freeze” one can and should remain, first of all, a person and a person.
Andrei Anatolyevich, although he became an internationally recognized scientist, was a man of no snobbish disposition, always ready to communicate with journalists. He believed in enlightenment, which, he said, would save today's Russia from the darkness of ignorance.
Andrey Zaliznyak. History of the Russian language
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When he was presented with the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize, Zaliznyak said: “In the case of The Tale of Igor's Campaign, unfortunately, the lion's share of the argument is permeated with just such aspirations - those who have patriotism on their banner need the work to be genuine; those who are convinced of the unconditional and permanent Russian backwardness need it to be fake. And the fact that the conversation of the deaf turns out is largely determined precisely by this. (...) I would like to speak in defense of two simple ideas that were previously considered obvious and even simply banal, but now sound very unfashionable.
1) Truth exists, and the purpose of science is its search.
2) In any issue under discussion, a professional (if he is really a professional, and not just a bearer of official titles) is usually more right than an amateur.
They are opposed by provisions that are now much more fashionable.
1) There is no truth, there is only a multitude of opinions (or, in the language of postmodernism, a multitude of texts).
2) On any issue, no one's opinion weighs more than the opinion of someone else. A fifth-grade girl has the opinion that Darwin is wrong, and it is good manners to present this fact as a serious challenge to biological science.
This craze is no longer purely Russian, it is felt throughout the Western world. But in Russia it is noticeably reinforced by the situation of the post-Soviet ideological vacuum. (...) I am not particularly optimistic that the vector of this movement will somehow change and the situation will correct itself. Apparently, those who realize the value of truth and the corrupting power of dilettantism and quackery and try to resist this power will continue to find themselves in the difficult position of swimming against the current. But the hope is that there will always be those who will do it anyway.
Now one thing can be said: the long-suffering Russian humanities have been orphaned - and this time, apparently, forever.
Philologist Andrey Zaliznyak at a lecture, 2017
"Zaliznyak will be remembered forever"
Named the place where the farewell to Academician Andrei Zaliznyak will take place
The famous Soviet and Russian linguist Andrei Zaliznyak died at the age of 83. Gazeta.Ru recalls his contribution to science and to the fight against pseudoscience.
The famous Russian linguist Andrey Zaliznyak died at the age of 83. This was announced by an employee of the Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) Dmitry Sichinava.
“A. A. Zaliznyak died. I sometimes thought about how it would be transferred, and came up with nothing. Do not hold my legs, I stand leaning against the wall, ”- wrote scientist on Facebook.
Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak was born on April 29, 1935, his father was an engineer, his mother was a chemist. After studying at Moscow State University, the Sorbonne and the Higher Normal School in Paris, Zaliznyak worked at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (now the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences).
He also taught for more than 50 years at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, lectured at Aix-en-Provence, Paris and Geneva Universities, was a visiting professor at the universities of Italy, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Great Britain, Spain.
Zalizniak's first monograph, Russian Nominal Inflection, was published in 1967.
In it, he touched upon the theoretical problems of morphology and formulated rigorous definitions of a number of linguistic concepts, such as "word form", "grammatical meaning", "agreement class", "genus" and others.
In 1977, the first edition of the "Grammatic Dictionary of the Russian Language" was published, where for 100 thousand Russian words exact models of inflection were given and a classification of these models was proposed.
The dictionary formed the basis of the vast majority of algorithms for automatic morphological analysis, which are used, among other things, in machine translation and information retrieval.
Many of Zalizniak's works were devoted to birch bark letters. In them, he highlighted the issues of identifying the specific features of the Old Novgorod dialect, its differences from the supra-dialect Old Russian language, the spelling of birch bark letters, and the method of their dating. Since 2000, he has been studying the Novgorod Code, the oldest book of Rus', and reconstructing "hidden" texts. The text of the codex is written on wooden boards covered with wax, on which barely noticeable traces of the records made earlier have been preserved - they were deciphered by Zaliznyak.
to create a fake, a hypothetical forger would have to use knowledge gained only in the 19th-20th centuries.
Zaliznyak also made a significant contribution to the popularization of linguistics and the fight against pseudoscience. Many of his lectures were devoted to the problems of "amateur" linguistics and its criticism. In particular, he criticized the "New Chronology" of the mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, which offers a new version of history.
Zaliznyak considered Fomenko's "research" at best a mockery of the humanities, at worst - amateurism, built on the most primitive methods. The professor believed that such “great achievements of our time as the Internet and freedom of the press” also played their role in the rapid development of pseudoscientific research and the decline in the prestige of professional science.
He also proved the falsity of the "Book of Veles" - a text that appeared in the 1950s, allegedly containing legends, prayers, legends and stories about ancient Slavic history from about the 7th century BC. e. until the ninth century A.D. e.
Zaliznyak established that neither the phonetics, nor the morphology, nor the syntax of the Book of Veles correspond to the available data on the most ancient Slavic languages and dialects in this historical period. The records are so unsystematic from a grammatical point of view that they cannot be attributed to any of the known languages of the world at all, and, apparently, the falsifiers had no idea about the history of the Slavic languages.
“Truth exists, and the purpose of science is to find it.
In any issue under discussion, a professional (if he is really a professional, and not just a bearer of official titles) is usually more right than an amateur, ”- pointed out Zalizniak in 2007 in a speech at the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Literary Prize Ceremony.
For 31 years, Zaliznyak annually gave lectures dedicated to the new birch bark documents found by archaeologists at Moscow State University. Previously, lectures were held in one of the auditoriums of the humanitarian building, and in recent years - in the largest auditorium of the main building of Moscow State University. However, even it could hardly accommodate everyone - visitors crowded on the balconies, sat on the floor.
The last lecture dedicated to the finds of archaeologists took place in October 2017. The audience greeted Zaliznyak with unchanging thunderous applause.
“We are too saddened by this loss, Andrei Anatolyevich is the greatest linguist of our time. It is difficult to overestimate his contribution and the importance of his works for the study of the Russian language and the birch bark language. He is one of those people who will be remembered forever, he was always very accurate in words and deep, he could find a common language with any audience,” Academician Nikolai Makarov, director of the Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, told Gazeta.Ru.
Farewell to the outstanding scientist Andrei Zaliznyak, most likely, will take place at the Russian Academy of Sciences, Ivan Tuchkov, dean of the Faculty of History of Moscow State University, told RIA Novosti.
“In the Academy of Sciences, most likely, there will be a farewell. It is clear that we will all be there,” Tuchkov said.
He also noted that Zaliznyak's contribution to science was enormous. According to him, the role that the scientist played in the study of Novgorod, birch bark letters, allows you to expand and increase knowledge about Novgorod.
“He really is such a large-scale figure both in terms of what was done, and in terms of what he studied, and in the way he did it. This is a tragic loss. Everyone in the world believes that there are no irreplaceable people, in fact there are. His interest, his passion for science, the results that have been made are really a huge contribution to the study of philology, the study of Russian culture,” Tuchkov said.
Andrey Zaliznyak died
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Not a single passing article, not a single extra line
Alexey Gippius - in memory of linguist Andrey Zaliznyak / Stories
December 24 at the age of 83 died outstanding Russian linguist, academician Andrey Zaliznyak. At the request of Meduza, Zaliznyak is remembered by one of his closest associates in the study of birch bark letters, professor at the Higher School of Economics, Corresponding Member of the Russian Academy of Sciences Alexey Gippius.
The news of the death of Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak spread instantly, causing a feeling of profound loss and pain in an extremely large number of people who did not even know him personally. What he did in linguistics is enormous and will retain its significance as long as linguistic science exists. To say that Zaliznyak was the greatest researcher of birch bark writings and proved the authenticity of the Tale of Igor's Campaign is to say nothing about him. In all areas of linguistics to which he contributed, his writings constituted an era.
One of Zaliznyak’s first books, “Russian Nominal Inflection”, belongs to the pinnacle of achievements of world linguistic thought, and based on its theoretical principles, the “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language”, an unprecedented description of Russian morphology in completeness and rigor, underlies modern computer spelling algorithms and search in the Russian segment of the Internet.
Zalizniak's appeal to Novgorod birch bark for the first time revealed the invaluable linguistic potential of this source for Slavic studies, allowing hundreds of ancient Russian texts to be read in a new way. The unique, seemingly supernatural ability of Zaliznyak to bring huge masses of linguistic material into strict order found a way out in everything he did. The systematizing power of his intellect succumbed to the most subtle and complexly organized areas of the language: the syntax of ancient Russian enclitics, the history of accent systems, and others.
Zaliznyak treated his gift with an amazing chastity, rarely found in an academic environment: he never got distracted by trifles, he never wrote a single passing work, an extra paragraph, an extra line. Everything that he wrote was the standard of quality and served to solve the main problems of life. Hence the titanic productivity, which in recent years has not only not weakened, but, on the contrary, has increased. The desire to "get to the very essence" made him return to what he had written again and again - replenishing, correcting, reacting to new data. Death caught him on the next rise, with a new edition of the book on Old Russian stress and the classic Old Novgorod Dialect prepared.
But Zalizniak was more than a great linguist. His uncompromising service to the truth made him a moral authority. The famous words from the speech delivered at the reception of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize in 2007: "Truth exists, and the goal of science is to search for it" - have become a symbol of defending professional scientific knowledge from the onslaught of pseudoscientific speculations of various stripes.
Several generations of linguists who had the good fortune to study with Andrei Anatolyevich at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University owe him not only the school of scientific thinking, but also the idea of the scientist's ideal. Fundamental linguistics in his performance was completely devoid of dull "seriousness", acquired Mozartian lightness and Pushkin's simplicity, infected with the energy of joyful knowledge. The charm of his personality was grandiose, and the atmosphere of the holiday reigned at the lectures. And I would like to think that this will always be the case.
On December 16, a week before his death, Zaliznyak held the last lesson of the semester on the "History of Russian stress" and, having signed his student records, left the 11th classroom to enter eternity, forever remaining in our hearts.
Linguist Andrei Zaliznyak / Photo: Grigory Sysoev
Adverb corrector
Andrey Zaliznyak died
Academician Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak, one of the greatest scientists in the history of the science of the Russian language and in the domestic humanitarian knowledge of recent decades, died at the age of 83.
The result of almost every life already lived can be summed up by contemporaries. This is not the most encouraging observation, but it is all the more justified by the few exceptions. Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak, who died today, is in this row. The result of this life will not be summed up soon and, apparently, not in our time - therefore, it is impossible for me to explain what ended today and what will continue. I just ask you to believe that this is so - sometimes we are faced with a difficult to estimate happiness to live in a time period in which a scientist can change the idea of both current and future generations about the subject of his studies, which is of great importance. The subject of Zaliznyak's research was the Russian language - and what is happening to it now and will happen for many more years is to a large extent - no, not scientific - rather a personal, personal achievement of Andrei Anatolyevich. A society whose environment is language is changing by the actions of individual people in it, by their self-realization - but only the self-realization of a few, a separate author's grapheme, is clearly distinguishable.
In terms of scale, Zaliznyak's contribution to the organization of society is comparable to the contribution of the greatest poet, writer or author of music, and this contribution, by its nature, is closer to them than to the scientist's colleagues.
For people who have nothing to do with linguistics and philology - although, of course, it’s funny, but who can these people be who have nothing to do with the language at all - the list of Andrey Zaliznyak’s achievements will inevitably include his works dedicated to “The Tale of Igor's Campaign” and substantiate the authenticity of this text. The re-creation of the Novgorod dialect of the Old Russian language at first glance looks like something more abstract, subtleties that affect society to a lesser extent; works on Old Russian enclitics, several dictionaries compiled by Zaliznyak, and even more so works on birch bark letters, on the Novgorod Code, on the Righteous Measure, articles and books on accentology - even more so. The educational activity of Andrei Anatolyevich was also important, but it never allowed us to speak of him as a professional popularizer of science in the sense in which this occupation has become familiar to us in recent decades. He treated it as an easy and necessary duty of a major scientist, but the very idea of \u200b\u200bdevoting time to this occupation, which would affect the main circle of studies, was unacceptable for him - and Zaliznyak was highly principled and divinely disciplined in relation to himself and other people .
It seems to me that, in many respects, it is precisely this ability to rationalize the surrounding reality according to a plan that is much more complex than it usually seems, in the end, will be Zaliznyak's legacy.
The main thing that should be taken from his books and articles is precisely this understanding of the not supernatural, but naturally complex structure of reality, which surpasses in complexity the ordinary understanding of complexity. The point is not only that in the Tale of Igor's Campaign one can detect mathematically reliably calculated deviations from certain spelling norms of the 12th century, which can be considered papillary drawings of that time. The point is the construction of a language that has such properties and is so ordered. Live Zaliznyak in the XIV century, they would have seen him as a scientist who gave reasonable confirmation of the divine origin of the language. I don’t know what it will be called in the 21st century, but I know that in all the works of Andrei Anatolyevich that I read, it was the basis, an invisible grid on which more particular truths were attached. Poetry does it a little differently, but does pretty much the same thing; no one can do more.
No need to grieve. Through the efforts of Zaliznyak, we are already living in a world in which the Russian language of the 11th, 16th, 20th and 21st centuries is an undeniable continuum, our language has a reliable and complex history, which is no longer possible not to refer to, since it exists. Andrey Anatolyevich was needed in order for this to be not only scientific truth, but also truth for society, truth in the very language in which we speak and write.
The person who did this is no longer subject to the vices of memory and oblivion - and yet we still do not know what will follow from our acquired linguistic integrity, this phenomenon that often changes the fate of hundreds of millions of people.
Language in general is a more significant thing than we imagine it to be, and even more so in Russia, where, apparently, it is the main thing that we possess. I think Zaliznyak had an exhaustive idea of all this, so it was at least a little easier for him to die than it will be for all of us.
Goodbye, Andrey Anatolyevich, and thank you for everything.
Andrey Mozzhukhin / Alexey Gippius / Dmitry Butrin
Lenta.ru / Meduza / Kommersant / Gazeta.Ru, December 24-25, 2017
Andrey Anatolievich Zaliznyak(born April 29, 1935, Moscow) - Soviet and Russian linguist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Section of Literature and Language of the Department of History and Philology (1997), Doctor of Philology (1965, defending his Ph.D. thesis). Laureate of the State Prize of Russia in 2007. He was awarded the Lomonosov Big Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2007).
Biography
Born in 1935 in the family of engineer Anatoly Andreyevich Zaliznyak and chemist Tatyana Konstantinovna Krapivina.
In 1958 he graduated from the philological faculty of Moscow State University (MGU) (Romano-Germanic department), studied at the Sorbonne under the French structuralist Andre Martinet.
He taught and teaches at the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University (mainly at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics), as well as at Aix-en-Provence, Paris (Nanterre) and Geneva Universities.
Since 1987 - Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, since 1997 - Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Chief Researcher of the Department of Typology and Comparative Linguistics of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Zaliznyak's wife E. V. Paducheva and daughter Anna Zaliznyak are also well-known linguists.
Contribution to science
Synchronous description of Russian morphology
The first monograph by A. A. Zaliznyak - "Russian nominal inflection" (1967) was an experience of a consistent algorithmic description of the declension of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals in the Russian language in its written form. The paper touches upon important theoretical problems of morphology, gives strict definitions of the concepts "word form", "grammatical meaning", "grammatical category", "grammatical category", "consensual class", "gender", "accent paradigm", etc. About grammatical categories case, number, gender and consonant class A. A. Zaliznyak wrote special articles where these phenomena are also considered from a typological point of view.
Experience was gained during the compilation of the Russian-French Dictionary, published in 1961. For the convenient use of the dictionary by foreigners, the dictionary was accompanied by a “Brief Essay on Russian Inflection”, which establishes the main schemes of declension and conjugation, including convenient indexing for each word.
The continuation of the ideology of “Russian nominal inflection” was the classic “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language” (1977, 4th ed. 2003), where for 100 thousand words of the Russian language the exact model of inflection is indicated (and a classification of these models themselves is proposed). The dictionary compiled by A. A. Zaliznyak by hand became the basis for almost all computer programs for automatic morphological analysis (including information retrieval, machine translation, etc.). These ideas are also used in the Russian Wiktionary to describe the morphology of Russian nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, and numerals.
The monograph of A. A. Zaliznyak and his most important works on general and Russian morphology were republished in the book: A. A. Zaliznyak. "Russian nominal inflection" with the application of selected works on the modern Russian language and general linguistics. M.: Languages of Russian culture, 2002.
Birch bark letters and Old Novgorod dialect
Since 1982, A. A. Zaliznyak has been systematically studying the language of birch bark letters, both already known and newly discovered during excavations. He is a co-author of the publication "Novgorod letters on birch bark" - volumes VIII (1986), IX (1993), X (2000), XI (2004). These volumes contain his works devoted to identifying the specific features of the Old Novgorod dialect, its differences from the supra-dialect Old Russian language, the spelling and paleography of birch bark letters, and the methods of their dating. The generalizing work of A. A. Zaliznyak in this area was the book “Old Novgorod Dialect” (1995; 2nd ed. 2004), which presents a grammatical outline of the Old Novgorod dialect and is given with a linguistic commentary (more detailed than in the publication[what?]) texts of almost all birch bark letters.
In 1958 he graduated from the philological faculty of Moscow State University (MSU) (Romano-Germanic department), studied at the Sorbonne under the French structuralist Andre Martinet.
He taught and teaches at the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University (mainly at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics), as well as at Aix-en-Provence, Paris and Geneva Universities.
Since 1987 - Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, since 1997 - Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Chief Researcher of the Department of Typology and Comparative Linguistics of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Zaliznyak's wife E. V. Paducheva and daughter Anna Zaliznyak are also well-known linguists.
Contribution to science
Synchronous description of Russian morphology
The first monograph by A. A. Zaliznyak - "Russian nominal inflection" (1967) was an experience of a consistent algorithmic description of the declension of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals in the Russian language in its written form. The paper touches upon important theoretical problems of morphology, gives strict definitions of the concepts "word form", "grammatical meaning", "grammatical category", "grammatical category", "consensual class", "gender", "accent paradigm", etc. About grammatical categories case, number, gender and consonant class A. A. Zaliznyak wrote special articles where these phenomena are also considered from a typological point of view.
Experience was gained during the compilation of the Russian-French Dictionary, published in 1961. For the convenient use of the dictionary by foreigners, the dictionary was accompanied by a “Brief Essay on Russian Inflection”, which establishes the main schemes of declension and conjugation, including convenient indexing for each word.
The continuation of the ideology of “Russian nominal inflection” was the classic “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language” (1977, 4th ed. 2003), where for 100 thousand words of the Russian language the exact model of inflection is indicated (and a classification of these models themselves is proposed). The dictionary compiled by A. A. Zaliznyak by hand became the basis for almost all computer programs for automatic morphological analysis (including information retrieval, machine translation, etc.). These ideas are also used in the Russian Wiktionary to describe the morphology of Russian nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, and numerals.
The monograph of A. A. Zaliznyak and his most important works on general and Russian morphology were republished in the book: A. A. Zaliznyak. "Russian nominal inflection" with the application of selected works on the modern Russian language and general linguistics. M.: Languages of Russian culture, 2002.
Slavic accentology
"Righteous Standard" of the 14th century as an accentological source (1990).
Old Russian and Old Great Russian Accentological Index Dictionary (XIV-XVII centuries) (2011)
Birch bark letters and Old Novgorod dialect
Since 1982, A. A. Zaliznyak has been systematically studying the language of birch bark letters, both already known and newly discovered during excavations. He is a co-author of the publication "Novgorod letters on birch bark" - volumes VIII (1986), IX (1993), X (2000), XI (2004). These volumes contain his works devoted to identifying the specific features of the Old Novgorod dialect, its differences from the supra-dialect Old Russian language, the spelling and paleography of birch bark letters, and the methods of their dating. The generalizing work of A. A. Zaliznyak in this area was the book "Old Novgorod dialect" (1995; 2nd ed. 2004), which presents a grammatical outline of the Old Novgorod dialect and given with a linguistic commentary (more detailed than in the edition) the texts of almost all birch bark letters.
The study of the language of birch bark allowed A. A. Zaliznyak to discover previously unknown strict regularities in the arrangement of enclitics in the Old Russian language, which go back to the Wackernagel law that was in force in the ancient Indo-European languages. The result of these studies was summed up by the book "Old Russian Enclitics" (2008)
"The Tale of Igor's Campaign"
The work "The Tale of Igor's Campaign: a Linguist's View" (2004, 2nd ed. 2007, 3rd ed., revised, 2008) is devoted to the repeatedly discussed question of the authenticity or falsity of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign". From this point of view, the language of the monument is considered. A. A. Zaliznyak shows that a hypothetical falsifier of the 18th century, in order to create the text of the Lay, had to possess a huge amount of accurate knowledge acquired by the science of language already in the 19th-20th centuries. Linguistic arguments against the authenticity of the "Word" put forward by various authors are critically examined. Zaliznyak's general conclusion: the probability of the Slovo being fake is vanishingly small.
Indo-European studies and the history of linguistics
Grammatical sketch of Sanskrit (as part of the "Sanskrit-Russian Dictionary" by V. A. Kochergina, 1978; 3rd edition 2005)
About the "Memoir" of F. de Saussure // F. de Saussure. Works on linguistics. M., 1977, p. 289-301.
Popularization of science
A. A. Zaliznyak is known for his popular lectures on the study of ancient Russian birch bark letters, as well as general lectures “On Historical Linguistics” and a number of lectures on “amateur linguistics”, in which he criticized the ideas of marginal linguistics (especially in the works of A. T. Fomenko according to the "New Chronology") as amateurish and built on primitive associations.
Awards
- Laureate of the Demidov Prize (1997) - "for research in the field of Russian and Slavic linguistics."
- Laureate of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize (2007) - “for fundamental achievements in the study of the Russian language, decoding of ancient Russian texts; for the filigree linguistic study of the primary source of Russian poetry, The Tale of Igor's Campaign, convincingly proving its authenticity.
- He was awarded the Big Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2007) - "for discoveries in the field of the Old Russian language of the early period and for proving the authenticity of the great monument of Russian literature" The Tale of Igor's Campaign "".
- Laureate of the State Prize of Russia for 2007 - "for an outstanding contribution to the development of linguistics".
List of works
Monographs and dictionaries
- "Concise Russian-French educational dictionary". - M .: Gosud. publishing house of dictionaries, 1961. Ed. 2nd, rev. and add.-M.: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1964. Ed. 3rd, rev. and add.-M .: State. publishing house of dictionaries, 1969. Ed. 4th, rev. and additional - M.: Russian language, 1978
- Zaliznyak A. A. Russian nominal inflection.-M .: Nauka, 1967
- Zaliznyak A. A. Grammatical Dictionary of the Russian Language. Inflection. - M., 1977. Ed. 2nd, rev. and additional -M.: Russian language, 1980. Ed. 3rd. - M.: Russian language, 1987. Ed. 4th, rev. and additional -M.: Russian dictionaries, 2003. Ed. 5th, rev. -M.: Ast-press, 2008
- Zaliznyak A. A. From Proto-Slavic accentuation to Russian.-M .: Nauka, 1985
- Novgorod letters on birch bark (From the excavations of 1977-1983). Comments and an index to birch-bark writings (From the excavations of 1951-1983). - M.: Nauka, 1986. [Co-author. V.L. Yanin]
- "The Righteous Standard" of the 14th century as an accentological source. - Muenchen: Otto Sagner, 1990 (=Slavistische Beitrage, Bd.266)
- Novgorod letters on birch bark (From the excavations of 1984-1989). - M.: Nauka, 1993. [Co-author. V.L. Yanin]
- Zaliznyak A. A. Ancient Novgorod dialect. - M.: School "Languages of Russian culture", 1995. Ed. 2nd, revised taking into account the material found in 1995-2003. -M.: Languages of Slavic culture, 2004
- Novgorod letters on birch bark (From the excavations of 1990-1996). Paleography of birch bark writings and their non-stratigraphic dating. - Volume X. -M, 2000. [Ed. V.L. Yanin]
- Zaliznyak A. A. "Russian nominal inflection" with the application of selected works on the modern Russian language and general linguistics. -M.: Languages of Slavic culture, 2002
- Novgorod letters on birch bark (From the excavations of 1997-2000). -T.XI. -M.: Russian dictionaries, 2004 [Coauthor: V.L. Yanin, A.A. Gippius]
- Zaliznyak A. A. Old Russian enclitics. -M.: Languages of Slavic cultures, 2008
- Zaliznyak A. A. From Notes on Amateur Linguistics. M.: Russian World, 2010. - 240 pages (Series: Alexander Solzhenitsyn Literary Prize) ISBN 978-5-98577-132-7
- Zaliznyak A. A. Works on accentology. Volume I. -M.: Languages of Slavic cultures, 2010. Volume II. Old Russian and Old Great Russian accent dictionary-index (XIV-XVII centuries). - M.: Languages of Slavic cultures, 2011
- Zaliznyak A. A. "The Tale of Igor's Campaign": a linguist's view / Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. - Ed. 3rd, add. - M.: Manuscript monuments of Ancient Rus', 2008. - 480 p. - (Studia philologica. Series minor). - 1000 copies. - ISBN 978-5-9551-0261-0 (in translation)
Key Articles
- On the understanding of the term "case" in linguistic descriptions. I //Problems of grammatical modeling. - M.: Nauka, 1973. -S. 53-87
- On the typology of the relative sentence // Semiotics and Informatics. Issue 6: Grammatical and semiotic problems. -M.: VINITI Publishing House, 1975. -S. 51-101 [Coauthor: E.V. Paducheva]
- Grammatical sketch of Sanskrit // Appendix to: V.A. Kochergin. Sanskrit-Russian Dictionary.-M., 1978. - S. 785-895
- The Accentological System of the Old Russian Manuscript of the 14th Century "The Measure of the Righteous" // Slavic and Balkan Linguistics: History of Literary Languages and Writing. -M.: Nauka, 1979. -S.47-128
- Contrasting relative and interrogative pronouns in Old Russian // Balto-Slavic studies 1980. - M .: Nauka, 1981. -S. 89-107
- Contrasting book and "everyday" graphic systems in ancient Novgorod // Finitis duodecim lustris: Collection of articles dedicated to the 60th anniversary of prof. Yu.M. Lotman. - Tallinn: Eesti raamat, 1982. -S. 82-85
- Observations on birch-bark letters // History of the Russian language in the most ancient period. (Questions of historical linguistics. Issue 5). -M.: MGU, 1984. - S. 36-153
- On the language situation in ancient Novgorod // Russian Linguistics. - V. 11. -1987. - No. 2-3. -P. 115-132
- Old Novgorod koine // Balto-Slavic studies 1986. - M .: Nauka, 1988. - P. 164-177
- Transfer of stress to proclitics in Old Great Russian // Historical accentology and comparative historical method. -M.: Nauka, 1989. -S. 116-134
- On some connection between the meaning and stress of Russian adjectives // Slavic and Balkan linguistics: Prosody. -M.: Nauka, 1989. - S. 148-164
- Ogospodin // Problems of Cybernetics: Language of Logic and Logic of Language. - M., 1990. -S. 6-25
- On one use of perfective presence (“presence of vain expectation”) // Metody formalne w opisie j?zyk?w s?owia?skich / Red. Z. Saloni. - Bia?ystok, 1990. -p. 109-114
- The fall of birch bark documents reduced according to the data // Russian Studies Today: Language Functioning: Vocabulary and Grammar. - M., 1992. - S. 82-105
- Participation of Women in Ancient Russian Correspondence on Birch Bark // Russian Spiritual Culture / Ed. Luigi Magarotto and Daniela Rizzi. Department of the History of European Civilization. University of Trento -1992. - E. 127-146
- On one previously unknown reflex of combinations of the type *TъrT in the Old Novgorod dialect // Balto-Slavic studies 1988-1996. -M., 1997. -S. 250-258
- Novgorod code of the first quarter of the 11th century. - the oldest book of Rus' // Questions of linguistics. - 2001. - No. 5. -WITH. 3-25
- Principles of controversy according to A.T. Fomenko // History and anti-history. Criticism of the "new chronology" of Academician A.T. Fomenko. Analysis of A.T. Fomenko. - M., 2001. -S. 546-556
- Anna Yaroslavna's Signature and the Question of Non-Bookish Writing in Ancient Rus' // Anthropology of Culture: On the 75th Anniversary of Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov. - M., 2005. -S. 139-147
- Connection of verbal nouns into -nie, -tie with the verb aspect // Terra Balcanica. Terra Slavica: To the anniversary of Tatyana Vladimirovna Tsivyan. (Balkan Readings; 9). -M. 2007. -S. 43-51
- From Observations on the Language of Athanasius Nikitin // Miscellania Slavica. Collection of articles dedicated to the 70th anniversary of B.A. Uspensky. - M.: Indrik, 2008. - S. 150-163
About him
- S. A. Krylov. “Russian nominal inflection” by A. A. Zaliznyak thirty years later: the experience of a retrospective review // A. A. Zaliznyak. "Russian nominal inflection" with the application of selected works on the modern Russian language and general linguistics. M .: "Languages of Slavic culture", 2002, p. 699-748.
- V. M. Zhivov, V. A. Plungyan. On the linguistic works of A. A. Zaliznyak // Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Literature and Language Series, 2005, vol. 64, no. 3, p. 3-12.
/ Alexey Sergeevich Kasyan
Andrey Anatolievich Zaliznyak. He was an internationally recognized philologist-linguist. Immediately after defending his Ph.D. thesis in 1965 on the topic “Classification and synthesis of Russian inflectional paradigms”, Zaliznyak received a doctorate for this work.
In 1997 he was elected an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, and in 2007 he was awarded the State Prize of Russia. For many years, Zaliznyak worked at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (since 1991 - RAS), taught at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov.
Famous writings
- Full description of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals
In 1967, Zaliznyak published the book "Russian Nominal Inflection". It was a complete description of the declension of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals of the Russian language, the book also clarified a number of basic concepts of Russian morphology.
- Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language
On the basis of this work, in 1977, Zaliznyak published a manually created “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language”. In it, he described and classified the patterns of inflection of almost 100 thousand words of the Russian language. Years later, it was Zaliznyak's work that formed the basis of most computer programs that use morphological analysis: spelling checkers, machine translation, and Internet search engines. “Zaliznyak is a major figure in Russian studies. He is a specialist in the Russian language, in its entire history - from the ancient Russian period to the modern one. One of his great merits is the creation of the “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language”, which you can turn to for information in all sorts of complex cases of the formation of forms of Russian words, given that the Russian language is distinguished precisely by the variability of forms, ”said AiF.ru Elena Kara-Murza, lecturer at the Department of Russian Language Stylistics at the Faculty of Journalism of Moscow State University, linguist.
- Birch bark letters
The linguist gained the greatest fame after he was the first to be able to decipher the birch bark letters of ancient Novgorod. Since 1982, Andrey Anatolyevich participated in the work of the Novgorod archaeological expedition. The study of the features of the graphic system of Novgorod birch bark letters allowed the scientist to identify the features of the dialect of ancient Novgorod, which differed significantly from the dialect of most of Ancient Rus'. “His many years of activity together with the archaeologist academician Yanin, namely the work on reconstruction, on the interpretation of Novgorod birch bark manuscripts, is of great importance for the cultural idea of what were the ideas that worried people at that ancient time in this, one might say, the reserve of the Russian medieval aristocratic democracy,” emphasized Elena Kara-Murza.
- Palimpsest
Zaliznyak also studied the palimpsests (texts hidden under layers of wax) of the Novgorod Codex. This is the oldest book in Rus'. She was discovered in 2000.
- "The Tale of Igor's Campaign"
It was the studies of Andrei Anatolyevich in collaboration with other scientists that made it possible to finally prove the authenticity of the ancient Russian work "The Tale of Igor's Campaign", written at the end of the 12th century. The plot is based on the unsuccessful campaign of the Russian princes against the Polovtsy, organized by the Novgorod-Seversky Prince Igor Svyatoslavich in 1185. In 2004, Zaliznyak's book "The Tale of Igor's Campaign": a linguist's view was published. In it, with the help of scientific linguistic methods, he confirmed that the "Word" was not a fake of the 18th century, as many thought. According to the conclusions of Zaliznyak, in order to successfully imitate all the features of the Russian language of the 12th century. The author-hoaxer had to be not just a genius, but also possess all the knowledge about the history of the language accumulated by philologists by the beginning of the 21st century.
Popularizer of science
Andrey Anatolyevich was actively engaged in the popularization of science, composed linguistic tasks and lectured. Particularly popular were Zaliznyak's lectures on "amateur linguistics" - pseudoscientific theories about the origin of the Russian language and its individual words. In 2010, the scientist published the book “From Notes on Amateur Linguistics”, where he analyzed in detail the pseudoscientific nature of such ideas.
“Zaliznyak made a huge contribution to science, teaching and enlightenment. I would emphasize these moments in his work. What will be most important to Zaliznyak's descendants is his educational work in the field of linguistics. He proved the authenticity of The Tale of Igor's Campaign and was also one of those who opposed such a negative moment as folk linguistics in its obscurantist, that is, hostile to enlightenment, manifestations. In manifestations that undermine truly scientific achievements. In particular, Zaliznyak is known for his very active opposition to the specific historical and linguistic concept of the mathematician Fomenko. (Editor's note - "New Chronology" - concept Anatoly Fomenko that the existing chronology of historical events is incorrect and requires a radical revision. Representatives of science, including authoritative professional historians and philologists, as well as publicists and literary critics, classify the New Chronology as pseudoscience or the literary genre of folk history),” said Kara-Murza.
On December 24, 2017, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Philology Andrei Anatolievich Zaliznyak, a prominent specialist in the history of the Russian language and Novgorod birch bark, died in Moscow at the age of 83. He was known throughout the world as an outstanding Russian scientist.
We decided to briefly talk about his main scientific discoveries and achievements, about why they are of such importance.
1. Substantiation of the authenticity of the famous "Tale of Igor's Campaign"
The problem of the authenticity of The Tale of Igor's Campaign has been actively discussed in the history of literature and linguistics. The manuscript with a single copy of the work was discovered at the end of the 18th century by the well-known collector and chief prosecutor of the Synod, Count Alexei Musin-Pushkin, but it burned down in his palace during the Moscow fire of 1812, which gave reason to doubt the authenticity of the work. For example, the French Slavic philologists Louis Léger (late 19th century) and André Mazon (1930s) spoke of The Lay as a falsification. In their opinion, the "Word" was created at the end of the XVIII century on the model of "Zadonshchina". During the long debate, many arguments for and against were expressed.
Today it is believed that A.A. Zaliznyak. His most persuasive arguments are presented in The Tale of Igor's Campaign: A Linguist's Perspective (2004, 2nd ed. 2007, 3rd ed., revised, 2008). He showed that a hypothetical forger of the 18th century could write this work only if he possessed accurate knowledge, which was obtained by linguistics only in the 19th-20th centuries. Everything that we know today about the history of the Russian language and the laws of its change indicates that the Slovo was indeed written in the 12th century and rewritten in the 15th-16th centuries. Even if a hypothetical imitator wrote on a whim, intuitively after a long reading of analogues, he would still make at least one mistake, but not a single linguistic error was found in the monument.
Zaliznyak's general conclusion is that the likelihood of the Slovo being fake is vanishingly small.
2. An exhaustive formal-scientific description of the laws of change in Russian words
Even in the appendix to the Russian-French dictionary of 1961, intended for the French-speaking user, Zaliznyak gave his first masterpiece - "A Brief Essay on Russian Inflection". After all, it is especially difficult for foreigners studying the Russian language to decline and conjugate Russian words with their complex endings, which are very difficult to remember. The essay very logically outlines the main formal schemes according to which Russian inflection occurs (that is, declension and conjugation). Zaliznyak also came up with a convenient indexing of these schemes.
He summarized his achievements in the famous monograph "Russian Nominal Inflection" (1967), which was included in the golden fund of Russian and world linguistics. It can be said that before this book there was no exhaustive and complete (!) scientific-formal description of Russian inflection.
3. Compilation of the "Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language"
Today, the phrase among scientists “look at Zaliznyak” has become the same formula as “look at Dahl”
A.A. Zaliznyak also compiled the absolutely outstanding "Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language". In it, for each of more than a hundred thousand Russian words, all its forms are given. Work on the dictionary lasted 13 years and ended with the release in 1977 of the first edition of the dictionary. The dictionary immediately became a great event in linguistics and Russian studies. It is necessary not only for Russian scholars, but is also extremely useful for everyone who uses the Russian language. In 2003, its fourth edition was published. Today, the phrase among scientists “look at Zaliznyak” has become the same formula as “look at Dahl”.
4. Deciphering birch bark letters
A.A. Zaliznyak is an outstanding researcher of Novgorod birch bark letters, many of which he first deciphered, commented on and published. In his famous work “The Old Novgorod Dialect” (1995), he cites the texts of almost all birch-bark letters with linguistic commentary. He also laid the foundation for the study of the Old Novgorod dialect.
For some letters, he first established their correct meaning. For example, earlier the phrase “I am sending a pike and pincers” was read in such a way that they made far-reaching conclusions about the development of blacksmithing in the Novgorod region and even about the proximity of the fishing and blacksmithing settlements in Novgorod. But Zaliznyak established that it actually says: “I am sending pike and bream!” Or, say, the phrase "doors of the cell" was understood as "doors of the cell." But it turned out that in fact it was said: “The doors are intact”! What was written was read and pronounced exactly like this - “the doors of the kele”, but the correct understanding is “the doors are intact”. That is, in the language of the ancient Novgorodians, our “ts” was pronounced like “k” and there was no so-called second palatalization (softening of consonants resulting from raising the middle part of the back of the tongue to the hard palate), although earlier scientists were sure of the opposite.
5. Establishing the origin of the Russian language
Having studied the living everyday language of birch bark letters, Zaliznyak established that there were two main dialects in the Old Russian language: the northwestern dialect, which was spoken by the Novgorodians, and the south-center-eastern, which was spoken in Kiev and other cities of Rus'. And the modern Russian language that we speak today, most likely, arose through a merger or convergence (convergence) of these two dialects.
6. Popularization of science
A.A. Zaliznyak was a remarkable popularizer of science, he gave public lectures on linguistics and birch bark. Many of them can be found on the Internet. It is noteworthy that when in September Zaliznyak lectured at the Faculty of Philology. M.V. Lomonosov about the new birch bark letters found in the summer in Veliky Novgorod, then the phrase was written on the board in the audience: "Friends, condense more." The room with great difficulty accommodated everyone.
From a scientific point of view, Zaliznyak severely criticized A.T. Fomenko as a completely amateurish and anti-scientific work, built on primitive associations.
Zaliznyak's lectures are widely known on "amateur linguistics" - pseudoscientific theories regarding the origin of the Russian language and its individual words. Criticism of such ideas is detailed in his book Notes on Amateur Linguistics (2010).
Outstanding scientists about A.A. Zalizniak:
We are lucky that Zaliznyak is not engaged in semantics, otherwise we would have nothing to do
Yu.D. Apresyan, linguist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences: “We are lucky that Zaliznyak is not engaged in semantics, otherwise we would have nothing to do.”
Philosopher V.V. Bibikhin: “Signs are only pointers. You always have to walk the path on your own outside the signs. So, after a long and successful work with birch bark letters, Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak confidently says: it is impossible to read them if the meaning is not guessed. Only when the reader somehow already knows What says in the document, he begins to identify the problematic marks on the birch bark with the letters. It is vain to hope that one can begin with the recognition of letters and proceed from them to words; the icons themselves will not be the same.
A.M. Pyatigorsky, philosopher and orientalist: “A linguist, by the grace of God, by genes, by nature, is Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak. He's just a genius. I would consider learning from him the highest good. I love him so much. I don't know the best linguist (I mean concrete, not applied linguistics). The man who rediscovered the Russian language, who rewrote everything we knew about the Russian language."
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION:
Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak was born on April 29, 1935 in Moscow in the family of engineer Anatoly Andreevich Zaliznyak and chemist Tatyana Konstantinovna Krapivina.
As a boy, Zaliznyak himself asked to be baptized
As a boy and staying in Belarus with relatives in the 1940s, Zaliznyak asked to be baptized.
In 1958 he graduated from the Romano-Germanic Department of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov. In 1956-1957 he trained at the Higher Normal School (Ecole normale superieure) in Paris. Until 1960, he studied at the graduate school of Moscow State University.
In 1965, at the Institute of Slavonic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (USSR Academy of Sciences), he defended his dissertation on the topic “Classification and synthesis of Russian inflectional paradigms”. For this work, Zaliznyak was immediately awarded the degree of Doctor of Philology.
Since 1960, he worked at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences as a chief researcher in the department of typology and comparative linguistics. He was engaged in teaching activities at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (professor since 1973). In the 1960s and 1970s, he took an active part in the preparation and holding of linguistic competitions for schoolchildren. He taught at the University of Provence (1989-1990), Paris (Paris X - Nanterre; 1991) and Geneva Universities (1992-2000). Since 1987 he was a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, since 1997 - an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Member of the Spelling Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences, editorial board of the Dictionary of the Old Russian language of the XI-XIV centuries. and Dictionary of the Russian language of the XI-XVII centuries.
He died on December 24, 2017 at his home in Tarusa at the age of 83. Dmitry Sichinava, an employee of the Russian Language Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), who reported this