In what city was Zaliznyak born? Andrey Zaliznyak
An employee of the Institute of Russian Language named after. V. V. Vinogradov Russian Academy of Sciences (RAN) Dmitry Sichinava.
Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak was born on April 29, 1935 in Moscow in the family of engineer Anatoly Andreevich Zaliznyak and chemist Tatyana Konstantinovna Krapivina.
In 1958 he graduated from the Romance-Germanic department of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University. M. V. Lomonosov. In 1956-1957 he trained at the Ecole normale superieure, Paris. Until 1960, he studied at graduate school at Moscow State University.
In 1965, he defended his dissertation at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (USSR Academy of Sciences) 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 (since 1991 - Russian Academy of Sciences; RAS) as a chief researcher in the department of typology and comparative linguistics. He was engaged in teaching at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (professor since 1973). In the 60s and 70s he took an active part in the preparation and holding of linguistic Olympiads for schoolchildren. He taught at the University of Provence (1989-1990), the University of Paris (Paris X - Nanterre; 1991) and the University of Geneva (1992-2000). Since 1987, he has been a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and since 1997, an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
In the 60s and 70s, Andrei Zaliznyak worked on problems of grammar of the modern Russian language. In 1961, the “Concise Russian-French educational dictionary” compiled by Zaliznyak was published with the appendix “Essays on Russian inflection and information on Russian phonetics.” In 1967, the book “Russian nominal inflection” was published - a complete description of the declension of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals of the Russian language, clarification of a number of basic concepts of Russian morphology.
Based on the “Russian nominal inflection”, Zaliznyak manually created the “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language” (1977), which includes a description and classification of inflection patterns for approximately 100 thousand words of the Russian language. Subsequently, this work, which was repeatedly republished, formed the basis for most computer programs that use morphological analysis: spell checking systems, machine translation, Internet search engines.
In 1978, as part of the “Sanskrit-Russian Dictionary” (author – Vera Kochergina), “A Grammatical Essay on Sanskrit” written by Zaliznyak was published.
Since the second half of the 70s, Andrei Zaliznyak has been mainly engaged in the history of Russian and other Slavic languages. One of the results of the scientist’s research in the field of historical accentology (a branch of linguistics that studies stress) was the monograph “From Proto-Slavic accentuation to Russian” (1985). The book was created based on the analysis of a number of medieval manuscripts; it describes the evolution of the stress system in the Russian language.
Since 1982, Zaliznyak participated in the work of the Novgorod archaeological expedition. He deciphered and analyzed the language of Novgorod birch bark letters and studied their special graphic system. The data obtained allowed the scientist to identify the features of the dialect of Ancient Novgorod, which was significantly different from the dialect of most of Ancient Rus'. Zaliznyak compiled a linguistic commentary for the publication “Novgorod Letters on Birch Bark” (volumes VIII-XI; 1986-2004), and wrote the final book “Ancient Novgorod Dialect” (1995). Zaliznyak is also studying the texts of the oldest book of Rus', the Novgorod Codex, “hidden” under layers of wax, discovered in 2000.
In 2004, Zaliznyak’s book “The Tale of Igor’s Host”: a linguist’s view” was published. In this work, the scientist, using the methods of modern linguistics, proved the inconsistency of the versions that the famous monument of ancient Russian literature was forged in the 18th century. According to Zaliznyak’s conclusions, for successful imitation of all the features of the Russian language of the 12th century, the author of the hoax would have to be a scientific genius and possess the entire huge amount of knowledge about the history of the language accumulated by philologists to date.
Andrey Zaliznyak was actively involved in the popularization of science and was the compiler of many linguistic problems. Zaliznyak’s lectures are widely known on “amateur linguistics” – pseudoscientific theories concerning the origin of the Russian language and some of its words. Criticism of such ideas is detailed in the book “From Notes on Amateur Linguistics” (2010).
For his outstanding contribution to the development of linguistics, Andrei Zaliznyak was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation in the field of science and technology in 2007. The scientist was also a laureate of the Demidov Prize (1997), the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize (2007), and was awarded the Grand Gold Medal. M. V. Lomonosov Russian Academy of Sciences (2007). He was a member of the Paris (since 1957) and American (since 1985) linguistic societies.
Was married. His wife Elena Paducheva and daughter Anna Zaliznyak are famous linguists.
All his life he studied Russian antiquity - the Old Russian language. Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak alone constituted an entire era in Russian historical linguistics, and his contribution to our knowledge of the past of his own language is invaluable.
Almost his entire scientific life, from the early 60s, Andrei Anatolyevich worked at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (RAN). Now, with our crazy pace of life and desire to change jobs every few years, this alone seems surprising. But he was truly a person of a special kind, and it was precisely thanks to his colossal capacity for work and perseverance, the experience accumulated in his place, that he truly became a world-class scientist.
Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak. Photo: inslav.ru
Andrei Anatolyevich was not a bright, flashy person. The whole appearance of his fragile figure, quiet, friendly voice, and attentiveness to his interlocutor spoke of his ancestral intellectual heritage. This is the image of a real Russian intellectual, from the same line as Sakharov, Likhachev, Rostropovich.
In recent years, his work has always been visible. The main theme of his work – the language and texts of Novgorod letters – became unexpectedly popular in the domestic media. However, his authority in a relatively narrow circle of professional historians and philologists was enormous for more than one decade.
“Then rumors spread that some person was talking about birch bark letters from mathematicians. I wondered who it was. Olga Aleksandrovna Knyazevskaya named the name - Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak. In December 1981, the opportunity arose to listen to his report at the readings dedicated to V.V. Vinogradov. The report was devoted to the analysis of the entire preserved letter No. 246 (XI century), in which there was a mysterious word “vyruti”, and the entire text in the first edition was translated inaccurately. V.L. (Historian V.L. Yanin, head of the Novgorod archaeological expedition. - Ed.) and I listened to Zaliznyak with intense attention, afraid to miss a word. It was like unraveling some detective story, at the end of which everything fell into place: the text of the letter became extremely clear, and the word “pull out” became completely understandable. We were conquered!– this is how one of the oldest members of the Novgorod archaeological expedition, E. A. Rybina, described her first impression of A. A. Zaliznyak.
In 2007, Andrei Zaliznyak became a laureate of the State Prize of Russia for his outstanding contribution to the development of linguistics, was awarded the Lomonosov Big Gold Medal, and also became a laureate of the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize for discoveries in the field of the Old Russian language and proof of the authenticity of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” A well-deserved triumph, but at the presentation of the Solzhenitsyn Prize, Zaliznyak talks about things that are really important to him: about the unimportance of ranks and titles, about the search for truth ( “Truth exists, and the purpose of science is to find it”, he said), about real professionalism...
The impression on those who listened to him, whether students or fellow scientists, was made rather by the convincingness and clarity of his presentation of the most complex material, and by his enormous erudition. “Students and researchers hung from chandeliers at his lectures.”, - here is one of many reviews about Zaliznyak the teacher. But he was a successful lecturer primarily because he was able to clearly and intelligibly explain the complex work that he did.
Andrey Zaliznyak became widely known thanks to his scientific works on Russian word formation, historical linguistics and public lectures on the phenomenon of birch bark writing in Ancient Rus'. His September lectures at Moscow University, where he spoke about the latest Novgorod charters found, became traditional.
A. A. Zaliznyak. About birch bark documents from the 2017 season excavations
His work “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign: A Linguist’s View” gained great fame, in which he practically put an end to many years of debate about the authenticity of the famous work. The scientist proved that this text cannot be considered a falsification of the 18th century, as some scientists still believe, since its author was familiar with ancient texts found after the discovery of the “Word”.
A truly fundamental contribution to science was his classic “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language,” first published in 1977. Using a special system of symbols, it indicates modern inflection, i.e., the declension of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and the conjugation of verbs. The dictionary contains 100 thousand words - Zaliznyak compiled it manually, alone. This work also has a completely modern, applied significance: the system proposed in it is used by computer programs for automatic analysis of word changes (including in information retrieval and machine translation).
And of course, A. A. Zaliznyak made a huge contribution to our knowledge of how the Old Russian language was formed. This was the result, first of all, of his persistent and purposeful annual work on the language of Novgorod letters: establishing patterns, identifying grammatical features of texts. His main conclusion: medieval Novgorod had its own dialect, which was quite different from the language of other Eastern Slavs. By the way, it is much stronger than, say, the language of Kyiv from the language of Vladimir-Suzdal Rus, which during the time of Kievan Rus, and even later, was almost the same. The modern Russian language, thus, inherits both ancient branches of the language of the Eastern Slavs - southern and northern (Novgorod). This was a truly new word in our ideas about the ways of development of the Great Russian language.
Andrey Zaliznyak. History of the Russian language
Someone called Zaliznyak the Sherlock Holmes of the world of linguistics. Indeed, his work with real living texts, not printed on paper, but half-erased, scrawled on crumbling birch bark letters, hidden by later notes, was akin to solving a code.
One of these literally deciphered monuments was the “Novgorod Codex,” and A. A. Zaliznyak’s work on it cannot be called anything other than virtuosic.
The Novgorod Codex (Novgorod Psalter) is the oldest known book in Rus' (1010s). This is a completely unique monument, consisting of several linden tablets covered with wax, on which the text was written.
First page of the Novgorod Code. Photo: ru.wikipedia.org
According to A. Zaliznyak himself, “In an extremely limited space of four pages, traces of a whole series of interesting ancient texts are piled up. But access to these texts is unprecedentedly difficult.".
The Novgorod Codex was a kind of palimpsest - the text on the tablets was written down and erased many times, but traces of previous recordings remained. As a result, visually they all merged “in one continuous grid of strokes going in all directions, which are perceived simply as a background, and not as a covered surface”. This text had to be deciphered - a very difficult job that probably only a few could do, and A. A. Zaliznyak coped with it brilliantly.
The phenomenon of Andrei Zaliznyak is not only in his enormous erudition or phenomenal methodology, but in true devotion to science. This is the quality of not just a high-class professional, but a person who understands his work as a duty and service.
There are never many linguists of this level. His death is truly a great loss for Russian and world science. Farewell to Andrei Anatolyevich will take place today, December 28, at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
/ Alexey Sergeevich Kasyan
Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak. He was an internationally recognized philologist and linguist. Immediately after defending his Ph.D. thesis in 1965 on the topic “Classification and synthesis of Russian inflectional paradigms,” Zaliznyak received the academic degree of Doctor of Science for this work.
In 1997 he was elected 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 works
- Full description of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals
In 1967, Zaliznyak published the book “Russian nominal inflection.” This 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
Based on this work, in 1977 Zaliznyak released the hand-crafted “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language.” In it, he described and classified inflection patterns of almost 100 thousand words of the Russian language. Years later, it was Zaliznyak’s work that formed the basis for most computer programs that use morphological analysis: spell checking systems, machine translation, 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 can be consulted in various complex cases of the formation of forms of Russian words, given that the Russian language is distinguished by the variability of forms,” said AiF.ru Elena Kara-Murza, teacher at the Department of Stylistics of the Russian Language 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 decipher the birch bark letters of ancient Novgorod. Since 1982, Andrei 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 was significantly different 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 understanding of what were the ideas that worried people in that ancient time in this, one might say, reserve of the Russian medieval aristocratic democracy,” emphasized Elena Kara-Murza.
- Palimpsest
Zaliznyak also studied palimpsests (texts hidden under layers of wax) of the Novgorod Codex. This is the oldest book of Rus'. It was discovered in 2000.
- "The Tale of Igor's Campaign"
It was Andrei Anatolyevich’s research 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 Polovtsians, 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, using scientific linguistic methods, he confirmed that the Lay was not a fake of the 18th century, as many thought. According to Zaliznyak’s conclusions, 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 language accumulated by philologists by the beginning of the 21st century.
Popularizer of science
Andrei Anatolyevich was actively involved in the popularization of science, composed linguistic tasks and gave lectures. Particularly popular were Zaliznyak’s lectures devoted to “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 examined in detail the pseudoscientific nature of such ideas.
“Zaliznyak made a huge contribution to science, teaching and enlightenment. I would emphasize precisely these moments in his activities. 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 aspect 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 the fact that he very actively opposed 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 reputable 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.
Boris Stern,
astrophysicist, editor-in-chief of TrV-Nauka
“Those who realize the value of truth and the corrupting power
amateurism and quackery and tries to this force
resist, will continue to find themselves in difficult
position of swimming against the current..."
Very often we remember important sayings of wonderful people after their death. Of course, it would be better to remember more often during life, but that’s how we are made.
When Andrei Zaliznyak died, his quote about the truth spread across social networks. I repeat once again: “Truth exists, and the goal of science is to search for it” (a more complete quote is given in the inset). This was said in 2007 when presenting the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Literary Prize. There are other important points in Zaliznyak’s speech, but this one aroused the greatest enthusiasm. At the end of December, I saw at least ten independent quotes from him on my Facebook feed.
It would seem that this statement by the academician is an elementary truth (sorry for the tautology). However, sometimes it is very useful to repeat elementary truths: they are forgotten, or rather, drowned in verbal garbage. A person living in a stream of demagoguery and obscurantism pouring from all irons often ceases to believe in anything at all, including himself: “Is it me who has gone crazy - or the world around me?” And when he hears a clear statement from a respected academician, such as “yes, this elementary truth is true, and that’s what I stand by,” solid ground appears under his feet.
It seems to me that now Andrei Zaliznyak’s statement about truth and trust in professionals is more relevant than in 2007. Since then, the insanity has grown stronger. Some people have completely lost any reference points, but others have only become more homesick for real words and basic concepts that have “gone out of fashion” and been swept away by the verbal blizzard. That is why Andrei Zaliznyak’s theses from a speech ten years ago have now given such resonance. The very concept of “truth” - whether scientific or everyday - is inconvenient for many people. Let's take state propaganda, let's take rabid patriots. Let's take Medinsky's case. Come on, sometimes my like-minded people, wonderful people, begin to feel embarrassed about real words and suggest using, for example, constructs like “effective explanatory model” instead of “truth,” which I would define as some kind of verbal antics in attempts to follow philosophical fads.
Yes, there are philosophical movements where the concept of “scientific truth” is not honored. And science itself, and its representatives, have been accused of appropriating a monopoly on truth. This is reminiscent of a struggle for a place in the sun.
What is truth?
Of course, in this context no one is talking about some kind of absolute, and even with a religious connotation. The truth, whether everyday or scientific, takes on a specific expression; it can be incomplete, limited by certain boundaries. But this does not stop it from being true. Instead of getting bogged down in heavy definitions, it's better to give some examples.
We won’t go far, here are the closest examples of scientific truth:
- The authenticity of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” is true. This is exactly what Andrei Zaliznyak worked on - an area catastrophically far from me, but I completely trust Zaliznyak, having watched the recordings of his lectures on birch bark letters. A conscientious, talented professional can be detected a mile away. I also trust other researchers to support this thesis.
- The origin of man from the ape is true. I cite this example as the most textbook: after all, the subject of a heated century and a half of struggle between scientific and religious views on the world. Andrey Zaliznyak cites him in his speech.
- The expansion of the Universe and its origin from a super-dense state about 14 billion years ago is true. This is already my diocese... Noticeable opposition to this truth exists among the broad masses, since all this is very difficult to imagine, since we are talking about inhuman scales, inhuman conditions, inhuman geometry. But it is here that the power of science appears most clearly, which works perfectly in these “inhuman” areas, perfectly making all ends meet.
But the theory of cosmological inflation, which describes the biography of the Universe before the Big Bang, being the most plausible and fruitful hypothesis, still falls just short of the status of truth. Moreover, it is known what needs to be measured in order for the theory of inflation to become established, but this is a matter of several years. And as for the very first moments of the existence of the Universe (near-Planckian scales) - the truth there is still buried very deeply. This is a challenge for current and future professional researchers. The situation is approximately the same in many other areas of science: something has been established forever, something is just around the corner, and somewhere everything is so unclear that researchers give up.
In each of these examples there are unclear details (the specific author of The Lay, the last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees, the composition of dark matter). So what? This did not make the above statements any more doubtful or dull. They are supported by many facts and are well described in clear scientific language. So what word will we use to characterize them? “Truth” or, for example, “explanatory model”? A matter of taste? Perhaps, but I still encourage you to use real words more often. This refreshes the language and, most importantly, the brain.
Photos used by A. Kasyan and gramoty.ru
On December 12, 2017, Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak read a report at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences on birch bark letters found in the past season; On December 16, he conducted a lesson with Moscow State University students on the historical accentology of the Russian language; On December 24 he passed away. So he said goodbye to the two main spaces of his activity - the Academy of Sciences, where he worked for more than half a century (since 1960), and Moscow University, with which he was associated even longer - as a student (1952–1957), graduate student and teacher (since 1958 of the year).
The unexpectedness of his departure plunged the entire scientific community into deep sorrow, mixed with resentment and a feeling of protest. It was impossible to believe in this, because at the age of 82 AAZ had not yet grown old, he was light and quick, full of youthful enthusiasm and interest in life. We now have to realize that his life is over, that he did what he did and said what he managed to say. We have to comprehend the logic of his life in all its irreparable completeness.
Over the past days, many beautiful words have been said and written - these were not only words of pain of his orphaned students and colleagues, but also first-time, but long-established assessments of the scientist’s works and personality and his role in Russian philology. His name was put on a par with the names of the luminaries of Russian science about the Russian language - A. A. Shakhmatov, N. N. Durnovo, N. S. Trubetskoy; his personality was compared to Mozart and Pushkin.
I met Andrei Anatolyevich in 1958, when he, 23 years old, returned from Paris and began teaching a course in Sanskrit at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University, and then the Vedic language, Old Persian cuneiform, and somewhat later Arabic, Hebrew and linguistic problems. These were elective classes for which students from different courses gathered. All these courses were taught in subsequent years, and others were added to them, already related mainly to the Russian language.
This sharp turn of AAZ from Indo-European studies and Oriental studies to Russian studies seems inexplicable to some. Indeed, there was an element of chance in this, although there was also its own logic and pattern. In fact, a student from the English group of the Romano-Germanic department is unexpectedly sent on an internship to Paris. The choice of Andrei Zaliznyak from all the students of the philology department, despite the randomness of specific circumstances and bureaucratic considerations, was justified not only by his brilliant academic success, but also by his command of French and many other languages.
In Paris, he listens to lectures by prominent linguists and studies ancient Indo-European and Oriental languages. And so, in 1958, a young scientist returned to Moscow, having received excellent training in Indo-European studies and general linguistics, and excellent scientific prospects opened up for him in this particular area.
This is where he begins at Moscow State University, where almost at the same time Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov, a teacher at AAZ, taught classes on Cretan-Mycenaean inscriptions, Hittite cuneiform writing and taught an introduction to comparative grammar of Indo-European languages (however, already in the fall of 1958 Vyach. Vs. Ivanov was fired from Moscow State University for supporting Pasternak and communicating with Roman Yakobson).
In 1960, AAZ, who had not yet completed his graduate studies, was invited to work at the Institute of Slavic Studies, in the department of Slavic linguistics. The head of this department, a famous Slavist, a student of A. M. Selishchev and the head of Russian Slavic studies, Samuil Borisovich Bernstein, was concerned about gathering scientific youth and had already achieved the enrollment of such outstanding linguists as V. A. Dybo and V. M. Illich-Svitych at the Institute, has high hopes for Zaliznyak and invites him to engage in in-depth study of Slavic-Iranian language contacts.
This area of Slavic studies was (and remains) poorly developed, and AAZ, with its deep and varied Indo-European linguistic background, was Bernstein's only hope. But this hope was not destined to come true. I remember well the time when Andrei Anatolyevich had a planned Slavic-Iranian theme; I remember how he languished and suffered, because his scientific interests already lay in a completely different area. As a result, this stage ended with the publication of only two, albeit quite professional and detailed articles in institute publications.
In those years, S.B. Bernstein spoke with annoyance about Zaliznyak: “A smart head, but a fool got it” (recently, in a conversation with AAZ, I remembered this formula, and he laughed cheerfully). Subsequently, Samuil Borisovich fully appreciated the significance of AAZ’s works in the field of Russian studies, and their warm personal relationship remained until S. B.’s death.
This completely different area was the Russian language. Everyone knows AAZ’s phenomenal abilities for foreign languages, which manifested themselves during his school years, but he has repeatedly said that he is not interested in languages, A language, language as a perfect and extremely complex mechanism that made a person human and ensured his continuous progress in understanding the world and himself. Such comprehension of the deep mechanisms of language is possible only on the basis of the native language.
Work with the Russian language as a subject of study began for AAZ with a short essay on the Russian language for the French, which he published as an appendix to the educational Russian-French dictionary, and the dictionary itself became a “by-product” of his internship in France. It is from this application that the threads stretch to the entire further brilliant path of Andrei Anatolyevich as a Russian scholar. Already the work on the application has shown how inaccurate, incomplete and contradictory the descriptions of the morphology of the Russian language were in the existing grammars.
His strict mind could not tolerate such imperfection, and he began to look for ways to more adequately represent linguistic rules. Serious gaps in the science of the Russian language were also discovered: the grammars completely lacked rules regarding stress. The only author whose works on the Russian language were close to AAZ was Nikolai Nikolaevich Durnovo, who was repressed in the 1930s. In the approach that Andrei Anatolyevich chose, the main ones were strict logic and completeness of factual data; nothing had to be left out, it was necessary to find an algorithm for constructing correct grammatical forms taking into account stress - first an exhaustive analysis of the actual forms, and then clear rules for their generation.
A. A. Zaliznyak’s candidate dissertation was entitled “Classification and synthesis of nominal paradigms in the Russian language”, for which, on the recommendation of opponents and the unanimous decision of the academic council of the Institute of Slavic Studies, in 1965 he was awarded the academic degree of Doctor of Philology. In 1967, the dissertation was published in the form of a book “Russian nominal inflection,” which immediately became a classic of Russian studies.
Its natural continuation and development was the “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language”, published ten years later - the first complete description of all grammatical forms of the Russian language, according to which for each of the almost 100 thousand words it was possible to construct all its inflectional forms. And all this enormous work was done before the advent of computers, by hand! Subsequently, this description, which fully satisfies the most stringent requirements for the automatic generation of all inflectional forms of the Russian language, formed the basis of the Russian Internet.
This kind of work, seemingly incommensurate with the capabilities of one person, was only possible for a scientist like AAZ with his need and ability to “put things in order” in the endless sea of facts and “go to the end” along the path of establishing the truth. This was helped by the general scientific atmosphere of the 1960s, interest in exact methods in the humanities, and especially in linguistics, the development of research in the field of machine translation, and then semiotics. In all these directions, one of the leaders was Zaliznyak’s teacher Vyach. Sun. Ivanov.
In the same 1960, when AAZ was hired by the Institute of Slavic Studies, by a special decision of the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences, sectors of structural linguistics were created in three academic institutes: the Institute of Linguistics under the leadership of A. A. Reformatsky, the Institute of the Russian Language under the leadership of S. K. Shaumyan and the Institute of Slavic Studies under the leadership of V. N. Toporov (who was only 32 years old at that time). A. A. Zaliznyak, who taught at the university, recommended several of his students to Vladimir Nikolaevich; I was among them, and this determined my entire future scientific destiny.
A few years later, AAZ moved from the sector dealing with “traditional” Slavic studies to the sector of structural typology (where he worked until his death), which was later headed by Vyach. Sun. Ivanov, then T. M. Nikolaeva, F. B. Uspensky and most recently I. A. Sedakova. In the very first publication of the sector - the collection “Structural-Typological Research” in 1962 - an article by AAZ was published, devoted to a strict formal description of traffic rules as one of the “simple” systems, the study of which is necessary to address such complex systems as language.
This was thus a direct anticipation of his formal morphology. AAZ actively participated in the famous Symposium on the Structural Study of Sign Systems in 1962, in the Tartu Summer Schools on Semiotics, and in many other scientific events and publications of the sector. But still, the main line of his scientific activity was connected precisely with Russian studies - first with the creation of a strict formal description of inflection in the modern Russian language, and later with the history of the Russian language. The turn from modernity to history began very early: already in 1962, AAZ gave a report on the topic “On the possible connection between the operational concepts of synchronic description and diachrony.”
A completely natural stage in Andrei Anatolyevich’s scientific path was the development of accentology of the Russian language. This line also ultimately goes back to the outline of Russian morphology in the short Russian-French dictionary. His first work on this topic (“Accent in modern Russian declension”) appeared already in 1963. AAZ’s interest in the theory and history of Russian accent was supported not only by his own desire for a comprehensive description of Russian inflection, but also by the pioneering work of his closest colleagues at the institute V. A. Dybo and V. M. Illich-Svitych in the field of Slavic accentology. Thanks to the accentological works of A. A. Zaliznyak, a solid building of the history of Russian accent was built for the first time.
From 1982 until the last days of his life, AAZ worked on the decipherment and interpretation of Novgorod birch bark letters, as a result of which he reconstructed a special ancient Novgorod dialect as a variety of the Russian folk language of the most ancient times, created a theory of paleography of birch bark letters and a practical system of paleographic indicators (he called it “ discretization of the continuum"), making it possible to date letters and inscriptions with great accuracy, comparable to the accuracy of dendrological and other dating.
This range of works by AAZ, carried out in collaboration with V.L. Yanin, A.A. Gippius and other fellow “Novgorodians”, received not only the recognition of specialists (archaeologists, historians, linguists), but also great fame in wide circles of society, including thanks to Andrei Anatolyevich’s annual lectures at Moscow State University, which enjoyed unprecedented popularity among students of different faculties and the scientific community.
It was the study of the language of Novgorod letters that allowed AAZ to subject a new analysis to the text of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” disputes about the authenticity and dating of which have not stopped for many decades, and to show that the linguistic features of this text indicate its unconditional antiquity and confirm its attribution to the 12th century.
In the spring of 1992, after one of the lectures on the history of the Russian language at the Russian State University for the Humanities, my daughter Marfa Tolstaya and her colleague Alexandra Ter-Avanesova turned to Andrei Anatolyevich with a question about the prospects for including birch bark materials in the Dictionary of the Old Russian Language of the 11th–14th centuries. AAZ said that he had processed all these materials and was concerned about their safety. Then Marfa offered to type them on the computer.
“Are you serious when you say this?” - asked AAZ. At that time he did not have a computer (he appeared much later, only in 2000). It was decided to try it. Andrei Anatolyevich gave Marfa the texts of letters and comments written by hand (usually in pencil and in very neat handwriting), and she entered all this into the computer. As a result, she typed the entire text of the “Ancient Novgorod Dialect” and made a layout of this book, published in 1995.
She also owned the layouts of all subsequent AAZ books, including an extremely labor-intensive volume on the paleography of birch bark documents, which required the use of a special, specially developed typesetting and layout technique. Over time, AAZ himself mastered the computer perfectly and freely typed the texts of his books and articles, although the computer interface did not fully satisfy his requirements for logic and accuracy.
In 2000, a unique wax book of the 11th century was discovered in Novgorod with the texts of psalms, under which, on a wooden (linden) base, AAZ examined faint traces of numerous texts written on wax earlier, in the form of countless and randomly layered letter strokes. Over the course of several years, Andrei Anatolyevich managed to do the incredible - read, actually decipher, large fragments of these texts.
The difficulties of this reconstruction cannot be overestimated. However, he had to leave this job, including due to problems with his vision. Nevertheless, the fate of this monument and the prospects for its further study never ceased to excite AAZ. It is now impossible to imagine who could continue this work.
The phrase AAZ said at the ceremony of awarding him the A.I. Solzhenitsyn Prize, that truth exists and the task of science is to search for it, has already become an aphorism. This belief was both a philosophy, a religion, and a life strategy for AAZ. It inspired him throughout his arduous scientific path, and it also gave him the strength to raise his voice against pseudoscience and various kinds of scientific speculation such as the historical “reconstructions” of Fomenko and his supporters.
This revealed his social temperament, which was unexpected for many, because he was little involved in the system of relations in the scientific community, rarely responded to the work of his colleagues, did not act as an opponent, did not supervise graduate students, did not hold any positions, was not a member of any scientific councils and Commission, with rare exceptions, did not sign any letters - neither protest nor defensive. Yet his influence on the scientific community - especially through teaching and public speaking - was and remains enormous.
I have never met a happier person in my life than AAZ. Happier and more free. How did he manage in our country and in our time to be free from the shackles of reality, from the circumstances that either broke many of his contemporaries, or shackled and oppressed them? How did he manage to see nothing but life itself, the joy of work and knowledge? He enjoyed his work, communicating with young people, he was happy with his family and friends (some of whom he had been friends with since his school days). In some incomprehensible way, he managed to push away from himself everything that could stop or delay his rapid movement towards scientific truth, towards knowledge of language and penetration into its secrets.
His works, which formed an era in the development of the science of the Russian language, will be studied, published and republished, and new generations of Russian scholars will be educated on them. But there will be no more of his lectures and reports, his lively voice, his provoking questions to his listeners, his children’s laughter, there will be no more of his new books and articles. For those who were lucky enough to know him for many years and learn from him, this is difficult to come to terms with.
Where is the great linguist Andrei Zaliznyak buried?
Vladimir Uspensky
laureate of the Enlightenment Prize
Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak died suddenly on December 24, 2017 at the beginning of five o’clock in the afternoon at his home in Moscow. He was the last of the Russian researchers who earned the combination of his profession in science with the word “great.” Now there are no such people left.
We now have neither great mathematicians, nor great physicists, nor great biologists, nor great economists - no one. “We lived in the era of Zaliznyak, we had the good fortune to be his contemporaries, now this is clearly realized,” said academician V. A. Plungyan. In the same way, during Kolmogorov’s lifetime, those mathematicians in our country who were not poisoned by either vanity or ideological madness realized that they were living in Kolmogorov’s era.
On December 28, Zaliznyak was buried at the Troekurovskoye cemetery in Moscow. For him, the question of his burial place was small and even petty, I know that. But for society and the state this issue is a matter of recognition. In this case, recognition of Zaliznyak’s greatness would consist in the presence of his grave at the Novodevichy cemetery, which serves as a metropolitan pantheon, if not a national one (with an incredible diversity of buried persons, sometimes reaching the point of rejection, but inevitably arising from the concept of “pantheon”).
Permission for burial at the Novodevichy Cemetery is issued by the Moscow City Hall, namely by Mayor Sergei Semyonovich Sobyanin personally. He refused to do so. Responsibility is shared with him by the President of the Academy of Sciences, Alexander Mikhailovich Sergeev, who was obliged to obtain permission. Messrs. Sobyanin and Sergeev are united in this paragraph as the supreme leaders: the first - of the territory in which Zaliznyak lived, the second - of the department in which Zaliznyak worked.
It is in such “small” details that the true attitude of our state towards science is highlighted.
Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak (April 29, 1935, Moscow - December 24, 2017, ibid.) - Soviet and Russian linguist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the Department of Literature and Language (1997), Doctor of Philology (1965, while defending his Ph.D. thesis). He is known for his work in the field of Russian inflection and accentology, as well as for his research on the history of the Russian language, primarily on the language of Novgorod birch bark letters and “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” One of the founders of the Moscow School of Comparative Studies.
Laureate of the State Prize of Russia 2007. Awarded the Great Gold Medal named after M.V. Lomonosov RAS (2007) and many other awards.
He graduated from the Romano-Germanic department of the philological faculty of Moscow State University (MSU) (1958) and postgraduate studies there; in 1957-1958 he studied at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure with the structuralist Andre Martinet. He headed the Scientific Student Society of Moscow State University.
Since 1960, he worked at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (RAN), most recently as chief researcher at the Department of Typology and Comparative Linguistics. In 1965, he defended his thesis on the topic “Classification and synthesis of nominal paradigms of the modern Russian language,” for which he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philology. Along with official opponents (linguists R.I. Avanesov, Yu.D. Apresyan, P.S. Kuznetsov and mathematician V.A. Uspensky), Academician A.N. asked for a doctorate for his work. Kolmogorov in his letter to the academic council of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences dated May 2, 1965.
For more than 50 years he taught at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (mainly in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics), and in the 1990s he lectured at Aix-en-Provence, Paris (Nanterre) and Geneva Universities. He was also a visiting professor at a number of universities in Italy, Germany, Austria, Sweden, England and Spain.
Since December 23, 1987 - Corresponding Member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, since May 29, 1997 - Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences (2001). He was a member of the Orthographic Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the editorial boards of the Dictionary of the Old Russian Language of the 11th-14th centuries. and Dictionary of the Russian language XI-XVII centuries.
Books (8)
Grammar dictionary of the Russian language
The dictionary reflects (using a special system of symbols) modern inflection, i.e., the declension of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, numerals and the conjugation of verbs.
The dictionary contains about 100,000 words arranged in reverse (inversion) alphabetical order, that is, according to the alphabet of the final, rather than the initial, letters of the word. Each word has a grammatical mark and an index that refer to the “Grammar Information”, where samples of declension and conjugation are given, by which the reader can determine the inflection of the word of interest. To speed up the search for a sample, the indexes found on it are listed above each page of the dictionary, indicating the page of the “Grammar Information” where the corresponding pattern of declension or conjugation is given.
The dictionary is intended for specialist philologists, teachers and methodologists of the Russian language; it may also be useful to foreign readers learning Russian.
Old Russian enclitics
The book is devoted to a little-studied problem of the historical syntax of the Russian language - the functioning and historical evolution of Old Russian enclitics, that is, unstressed words that are prosodicly adjacent to the preceding word of the phrase. The enclitics included particles (zhe, li, bo, ti, by), pronominal word forms (mi, ti, si, mya, cha, xia, ny, you, etc.) and connectives (am, ecu, etc. ).
The book, based on the material of a large number of ancient monuments, primarily birch bark letters and chronicles, shows that in the Old Russian language the arrangement of enclitics in a phrase was subject to strict laws, knowledge of which turns out to be essential for the correct understanding of Old Russian texts. The evolution of enclitics during the 11th-17th centuries was also studied in detail, during which some of the enclitics disappeared, and enclitics turned from an independent word into an inseparable component of the verbal word form.
The book is intended for linguists, literary scholars and historians involved in the history of the Russian language and literature, as well as for a wider range of readers interested in the history of the Russian language.
From notes on amateur linguistics
In modern publications, amateur reasoning about the origin of words has become noticeably widespread, based not on the science of the history of languages, but on the naive idea that such reasoning does not require any special knowledge, just simple guesses. At the same time, on the basis of amateur guesses about the origin of words in such works, completely fantastic conclusions are often drawn about the history of entire nations.
A.A. Zaliznyak’s work “From Notes on Amateur Linguistics” shows how such reasoning differs from professional linguistics and why they have no chance of revealing the true history of words.
Particular attention is paid to the most striking example of the use of amateur linguistics to construct a fictitious history of many countries - the so-called “new chronology” of A.T. Fomenko.
From Proto-Slavic accentuation to Russian
The book represents the first comprehensive description of the historical evolution of the accent system of the Russian language from Proto-Slavic to modern.
The monograph is part of a series of works (by a team of authors) on a diachronic examination of Slavic accent systems, preparing the creation of a “Comparative Accentological Dictionary of Slavic Languages.”
Works on accentology. Volume 1
This publication contains works on modern Russian and Old Russian accentology written over several decades, both previously published and new ones. The first volume contains research in the field of modern and historical accentology of the Russian language. Its most important part is the general work “From Proto-Slavic accentuation to Russian”, which contains a statement of the foundations of accentology of the modern Russian language and the foundations of the history of Russian accentuation.
It is followed by works devoted to individual, narrower problems of modern Russian accent and the history of its formation. A special place among them is occupied by a detailed accentological description of two important monuments for the history of Russian accent - “The Measure of the Righteous” of the 14th century and “Cosmography” by Martin Velsky of the 16th century.
The publication is intended both for specialists (linguists, literary scholars, historians) and for everyone interested in the history of Russian words and their accent.
Works on accentology. Volume 2
Old Russian and Old Russian accentological dictionary-index (XIV-XVII centuries).
The second volume contains the Old Russian and Old Great Russian accentological dictionary-index, including about 7400 words.
It consists of two parts - general and special (dedicated to proper names). The index dictionary reflects, firstly, the Old Russian and Old Great Russian material discussed in the first volume, and secondly, additional accentological material extracted directly from more than 70 monuments of the 11th-17th centuries.
The index dictionary combines the function of a regular index with the function of an accentological dictionary. In this latter capacity, it represents a manual that, within the framework of a fairly representative corpus of words, will allow the reader to directly receive an answer to the question of what was the previous stress of a particular modern word and what happened to its stress over the past 500-700 years.
Words in which the modern stress differs from the Old Russian one are highlighted with a special sign. This will give the reader a convenient opportunity to directly survey those groups of words where stress changes occurred in the course of history.
During 1977-1985 vol. Professor A.A. Zaliznyak published a number of articles that were the result of his accentological study of the ancient Russian monument of the 14th century “The Righteous Measure”.
The core of this series consists of three articles from 1978 and 1979. Now, for the convenience of the reader, these three articles are collected together and published as a separate book. The text is supplemented with short author's comments on each chapter and a word index.
As an appendix, the book also contains an article from 1985, where A.A. Zaliznyak argues with Yu.V. Shevelov, who viewed this monument in his own way.
“The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”: A linguist’s view
For two hundred years now, there has been an ongoing debate about whether “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” is a genuine ancient Russian work or a skillful counterfeit of antiquity created in the 18th century. There is a lot of passion put into this debate on both sides, and various non-scientific elements are often introduced into it, so that sometimes it is not easy to separate the scientific argument from the emotional one.
The destruction of the only copy of this work deprives researchers of the opportunity to analyze the handwriting, paper, ink and other material characteristics of the original source. In such conditions, the most solid basis for solving the problem of the authenticity or falsity of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign” turns out to be the language of this monument.
This book is devoted to the study of the linguistic side of this problem.
