Andrey Zaliznyak

Andrey Anatolievich Zaliznyak was born on April 29, 1935 in Moscow in the family of an engineer Anatoly Andreyevich Zaliznyak and a chemist Tatiana Konstantinovna Krapivina.

In 1958 he graduated from the Department of Romance and Germanic Languages at Lomonosov Moscow State University. In 1956-1957 he did an internship at the Ecole Normale Superieure (Paris). Until 1960 he was a postgraduate student at Moscow State University.

In 1965 he defended his thesis at the Institute of Slavonic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (AS USSR) on "Classification and synthesis of Russian inflexional paradigms". For this work Zaliznyak was immediately awarded the degree of Doctor of Philology.

Since 1960 he worked at the Institute of Slavonic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (since 1991 - the Russian Academy of Sciences; RAS) as a chief researcher in the department of typology and comparative linguistics. He taught at the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University (he has been a professor since 1973). In the 60's and 70's he was actively involved in preparing and holding linguistic Olympiads for school children. 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 was a Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, since 1997 he is an Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In the 60s and 70s Andrey Zaliznyak was engaged in problems of grammar of modern Russian language. In 1961 was published "Brief Russian-French Training Dictionary", compiled by Zalizniak, with the addition of "Essays on Russian word formation and information on Russian phonetics". In 1967 he went to print his book "Russian nominal derivation" - a complete description of the declension of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals in Russian, and clarification of a number of basic concepts of Russian morphology.

On the basis of "Russian nominal word pronunciation", Zaliznyakov manually created the "Russian Grammatical Dictionary" (1977), which includes a description and classification of the patterns of word pronunciation of about 100,000 words in the Russian language. Subsequently, this work, which has been republished many times, became 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 (by Vera Kochergina), Zaliznyak's Grammatical Sketch of Sanskrit was published.

From the second half of the 70s Andrey Zalizniak was mainly involved in the history of Russian and other Slavic languages. One of the results of the scientist's research in the field of historical accentology (the section of linguistics, which studies the accentuation) was his monograph "From the Proto-Slavonic Accentuation to the Russian Accent" (1985). The book was created on the basis of the analysis of a number of medieval manuscripts and describes the evolution of the accentuation system in the Russian language.

Since 1982, Zaliznyak participated in the work of the Novgorod archaeological expedition. He was involved in deciphering and analyzing the language of Novgorod birch bark writings and studied their specific graphic system. The received data allowed the scientist to find out the peculiarities of the dialect of the ancient Novgorod which was very different from the dialect of the major part of the Ancient Russia. Zalizniak composed a linguistic commentary for the edition "Novgorod Charters on birch bark" (Volumes VIII-XI; 1986-2004), and he wrote his final book, "Ancient Novgorod Dialect" (1995). Zalizniak is also engaged in the study of the texts "hidden" under layers of wax texts of the oldest book of Russia, the Novgorod Codex, discovered in 2000.

In 2004, Zalizniak published his book "The Lay of Igor's Campaign: A Linguist's View". In this work, using the methods of modern linguistics, he demonstrated the invalidity of the hypothesis that this famous example of ancient Russian literature was forged in the 18th century. According to his conclusions, to succeed in imitating all the features of the 12th century Russian language, the author of the hoax would have had to be a scientific genius and possess a vast body of knowledge about the history of language that philologists had accumulated to this day.

In 2008 he published his book 'Ancient Russian Enclitics' about the evolution in the history of Russian syntax of the system of enclitics - words adjacent to the preceding word in a phrase (zhe, li, by, -sya, etc.).

Andrei Zaliznyak was actively engaged in the popularization of science and was the compiler of many linguistic problems. Zaliznyak's lectures devoted to "amateur linguistics" - pseudoscientific theories concerning the origin of the Russian language and its individual words - are widely known. A critique of such ideas is presented in detail in the book "From Notes on Amateur Linguistics" (2010).

Andrei Zaliznyak was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation in the field of science and technology in 2007 for his outstanding contribution to the development of linguistics. The scientist is also a recipient of the Demidov Prize (1997), the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize (2007) and was awarded the Big Gold Medal named after M. Lomonosov of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2007). He was awarded the Grand Golden Lomonosov Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2007). He has been a member of the Paris Linguistic Society (since 1957) and the American Linguistic Society (since 1985).

On December 24, 2017 it became known that the Russian linguist Andrei Zaliznyak passed away at the age of 83. This was reported in the social network Facebook by an employee of the V. V. V. Institute of the Russian Language. В. The Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS) Dmitry Sichinava, an employee of the Vinogradov Institute of Russian Language.