Zaliznyak Prize in 1997. Biography of Andrey Zaliznyak. Birch bark letters and ancient Novgorod dialect

/ 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 certificates

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),” Kara-Murza said.

Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak - Soviet and Russian linguist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences in the department of literature and language, Doctor of Philology, member of the Paris Linguistic Society, corresponding member of the Göttingen Academy of Sciences.

Biography

Andrey Zaliznyak was born on April 29, 1935 in the family of engineer Anatoly Andreevich Zaliznyak and chemist Tatyana Konstantinovna Krapivina. Zaliznyak's father was an inventor, a specialist in the field of glass melting.

Education

His interest in languages ​​awoke in him at the age of 11, when his parents sent the boy to western Belarus (the city of Pruzhany) for the summer. It was here that he encountered a situation of close coexistence of several languages ​​- Russian, Polish, Belarusian and Ukrainian. I was intrigued by the Polish language - its similarities and dissimilarities with Russian.

Zaliznyak became interested in reading short grammars of different languages ​​that were attached to dictionaries - they quickly gave a general idea of ​​the features of the phonetic and grammatical structure of the language.

In 1951, he took part in the First Olympiad in Russian language and literature among schoolchildren, which was held by the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University (MSU). At it, Zaliznyak received the first prize and understood in which direction he would develop his knowledge further.

In 1952 he graduated from school No. 82 and entered the Romance-Germanic department of the Faculty of Philology of Moscow State University. He completed his graduate studies there. In the process of obtaining an education, the lectures of Mikhail Nikolaevich Peterson, Alexander Ivanovich Smirnitsky, Pyotr Savvich Kuznetsov and Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov were of greatest importance for Zaliznyak. The main range of interests were general linguistics, typology, Indo-European studies and German studies.

In 1957-1958 he studied at the Sorbonne and the Ecole Normale Supérieure with the structuralist Andre Martinet. In Paris, I started teaching Russian language classes for the first time. It was here that Zaliznyak first tried to improve the schemes of declensions and conjugations and make them more convenient for teaching. This also began an in-depth study of modern Russian morphology, which became the main content of work for about 20 years.

Professional and scientific activities

Since 1960, he worked at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (RAN), and was the chief researcher at the Department of Typology and Comparative Linguistics.

In 1965, he received the degree of Doctor of Philology for defending his PhD thesis on the topic “Classification and synthesis of nominal paradigms of the modern Russian language.”

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).

Member of the Orthographic Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the editorial board of the Dictionary of the Old Russian Language of the 11th-14th centuries. and Dictionary of the Russian language XI-XVII centuries.

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.

Contribution to science

In 1980, Zaliznyak became interested in the publication of Novgorod charters. Since 1982, every summer he took part in excavations of the Novgorod archaeological expedition. In the course of this work, for the first time, he completely deciphered the texts of birch bark letters, discovered a previously unknown Old Novgorod dialect, and revised the geography of the distribution of Slavic languages.

But his interests were not limited only to Slavic languages ​​- A. Zaliznyak is also the author of unique courses on the Akkadian language, Sanskrit and other rare languages. So Zaliznyak paid considerable attention to Sanskrit. He wrote a “Grammatical Essay on Sanskrit” (published as part of the “Sanskrit-Russian Dictionary” by V.A. Kochergina in 1978; the dictionary was subsequently republished several times).

Since 2000, Zaliznyak has taken an active part in the discussion about the “new chronology” of Anatoly Fomenko, which proclaims the fallacy of all traditional views on world history and the need for their radical revision. I believed that Fomenko’s books enjoyed some success among the public, and thus the problem of establishing the truth in this matter acquired considerable social significance. Zaliznyak’s works on this topic were compiled into the book “From Notes on Amateur Linguistics” (2010).
Since 2003, Zaliznyak’s scientific interests have included the question of the authenticity or falsity of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign.” Andrei Anatolyevich made a detailed linguistic analysis of this work, proved its authenticity and identified the area where it was written.

Family. Personal life

Andrey Zaliznyak was married. His wife, Elena Viktorovna Paducheva (born 1935) is a Russian linguist, one of the largest specialists in Russian and general semantics.

Daughter - Anna Zaliznyak (born 1959) - Russian linguist, Doctor of Philology, leading researcher at the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IL RAS). Author of more than 80 published works, including five monographs.

Death

Basic books:

• Concise Russian-French educational dictionary. M., 1961.
• Russian nominal inflection. M., 1967 (reprint 2002).
• Grammar dictionary of the Russian language: inflection. M., 1977 (reprinted 1980, 1987, 2003, 2008, 2015).
• A grammatical outline of Sanskrit (appendix to the “Sanskrit-Russian Dictionary” by V.A. Kochergina, M., 1978, reprinted 1987, 2005).
• From Proto-Slavic accentuation to Russian. M., 1985.
• Novgorod letters on birch bark, volume VIII. M., 1986 (together with V.L. Yanin).
• “The Righteous Standard” of the 14th century as an accentological source. Munich, 1990.
• Novgorod letters on birch bark, volume IX. M., 1993 (together with V.L. Yanin).
• Ancient Novgorod dialect. M., 1995 (reprint 2004).
• Novgorod letters on birch bark, volume Kh. M., 2000 (together with V.L. Yanin).
• Novgorod letters on birch bark, volume XI. M., 2004 (together with V.L. Yanin and A.A. Gippius).
• “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign”: a linguist’s view. M., 2004 (reprint 2007, 2008).
• Truth exists. (Speech at the presentation of the Solzhenitsyn Prize on May 16, 2007) // Praise of Philology. M., 2007, p. 73-81 (see also online).
• Old Russian enclitics. M., 2008.
• From notes on amateur linguistics. M., 2010.
• Works on accentology, volumes I-II. M., 2010-2011.
• Linguistic tasks. M., 2013 (reprint of article 1963).
• Old Russian accent: general information and dictionary. M., 2014.
• Novgorod letters on birch bark, volume XII. M., 2015 (together with V.L. Yanin and A.A. Gippius).

Awards and titles

• 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, deciphering ancient Russian texts; for a filigree linguistic study of the primary source of Russian poetry “The Lay of Igor’s Campaign”, convincingly proving its authenticity.”
• Awarded the Big Gold Medal. M.V. Lomonosov RAS (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 Russian State Prize in the field of science and technology for 2007 - “for outstanding contribution to the development of linguistics.”
• Winner of the award named after. A. A. Shakhmatov RAS (2015) - “for the work “Old Russian accent: general information and dictionary.”

Zaliznyak. Video

On December 24, 2017, at the 83rd year of his life, Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Doctor of Philology Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak, a leading specialist in the history of the Russian language and Novgorod birch bark letters, died in Moscow. He was known throughout the world as an outstanding Russian scientist.

We decided to briefly talk about his main scientific discoveries and achievements and why they are so important.

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 the only copy of the work was discovered at the end of the 18th century by the famous collector and Chief Prosecutor of the Synod, Count Alexei Musin-Pushkin, but it burned in his palace during the Moscow fire of 1812, which gave reason to doubt the authenticity of the work. For example, French Slavic philologists Louis Léger (late 19th century) and André Mazon (1930s) spoke about the Lay as a falsification. In their opinion, “The Lay” was created at the end of the 18th century according to the model of “Zadonshchina”. During the long debate, many arguments for and against were expressed.

Today it is believed that A.A. put an end to the protracted discussion. Zaliznyak. His most convincing arguments are presented in the book “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign: A Linguist’s View” (2004, 2nd ed. 2007, 3rd ed., supplemented, 2008). He showed that a hypothetical forger of the 18th century could write this work only if he possessed precise knowledge, which was obtained by linguistics only in the 19th and 20th centuries. Everything that we know today about the history of the Russian language and the laws of its change indicates that the Lay 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 long reading of analogues, he would still have made at least one mistake, but not a single linguistic error has been identified in the monument.

Zaliznyak’s general conclusion is that the probability of the “Word” being fake is vanishingly small.

2. An exhaustive formal scientific description of the laws of change in Russian words

Back 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, foreigners learning the Russian language find it especially difficult to inflect and conjugate Russian words with their complex endings, which are very difficult to remember. The essay very logically sets out the basic 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 findings in the famous monograph “Russian Nominal Inflection” (1967), which was included in the golden fund of Russian and world linguistics. We can say that before this book there was no exhaustive and complete (!) scientific and 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 one hundred thousand Russian words, all its forms are given. Work on the dictionary lasted 13 years and ended with the release of the first edition of the dictionary in 1977. The dictionary immediately became a big event in linguistics and Russian studies. It is necessary not only for Russian scholars, but 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 deciphered, commented on and published for the first time. In his famous work “Ancient 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 was the first to establish their correct meaning. For example, earlier the phrase “I am sending pike and tongs” was read in such a way that far-reaching conclusions were drawn about the development of blacksmithing in the Novgorod region and even about the proximity of the fishing and blacksmith settlements in Novgorod. But Zaliznyak established that it actually says: “I’m sending pike and bream”! Or, let’s say, the phrase “doors of a cell” was understood as “doors of a cell.” But it turned out that it actually said: “The doors are intact”! What was written was read and pronounced exactly like this - “kele doors”, 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 previously 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-central-eastern one, which was spoken in Kyiv and other cities of Rus'. And the modern Russian language that we speak today most likely arose through the merger or convergence (convergence) of these two dialects.

6. Popularization of science

A.A. Zaliznyak was a remarkable popularizer of science, giving public lectures on linguistics and birch bark letters. Many of them can be found on the Internet. It is noteworthy that when in September Zaliznyak gave lectures at the Faculty of Philology. M.V. Lomonosov about new birch bark letters found in the summer in Veliky Novgorod, the phrase was written on the blackboard in the audience: “Friends, become more dense.” It was difficult for the room to accommodate everyone.

From a scientific point of view, Zaliznyak harshly criticized A.T.’s “New Chronology”. Fomenko as a completely amateurish and anti-scientific work, built on primitive associations.

Zaliznyak’s lectures are widely known on “amateur linguistics” - pseudoscientific theories concerning the origin of the Russian language and its individual words. Criticism of such ideas is detailed in his book “From Notes on Amateur Linguistics” (2010).

Outstanding scientists about A.A. Zaliznyak:

We are lucky that Zaliznyak does not deal with semantics, otherwise we would have nothing to do

Yu.D. Apresyan, linguist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences: “We are lucky that Zaliznyak does not study semantics, otherwise we would have nothing to do.”

Philosopher V.V. Bibikhin: “Signs are only pointers. You always have to walk the path yourself outside the signs. So, after a long and successful work with birch bark letters, Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak confidently says: it is impossible to read them if the meaning is not guessed. Only when the reader somehow already knows What stated in the document, he begins to identify the problematic risks on the birch bark with the letters. It is vain to hope that one can begin by recognizing letters and move from them to words; the icons themselves will turn out to be wrong.”

A.M. Pyatigorsky, philosopher and orientalist: “A linguist, by the grace of God, by genes, by nature, is Andrei 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 a better linguist (I mean specific, not applied linguistics). The man who rediscovered the Russian language, who rewrote everything we knew about the Russian language.”

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE:

Andrei 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 while visiting relatives in Belarus in the 1940s, Zaliznyak asked to be baptized.

In 1958, he graduated from the Romance-Germanic department of the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University. M.V. Lomonosov. In 1956-1957 he trained at the Ecole normale superieure in Paris. Until 1960, he studied at graduate school at Moscow State University.

In 1965, at the Institute of Slavic 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 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 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.

Member of the Orthographic Commission of the Russian Academy of Sciences, the editorial board of the Dictionary of the Old Russian Language of the 11th–14th centuries. and Dictionary of the Russian language of the 11th–17th 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 (RAN), reported this.

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.

A popular science book by a major Russian linguist debunking the “New Chronology” and affirming the value of science

A. A. Zaliznyak at the annual lecture on birch bark documents sofunja.livejournal.com

The largest Russian linguist, who scientifically proved the authenticity of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” explained in a popular style how a linguist recognizes a fake, and described how an ordinary person can avoid falling for the bait of falsifiers.

In this book, Andrei Anatolyevich Zaliznyak, the discoverer of the Old Novgorod dialect and the compiler of a unique grammatical dictionary, appears as a true enlightener; The academician is extremely persuasive and writes in an accessible language. And, although Zaliznyak speaks to the general reader, the phrase “amateur linguistics” does not actually mean “linguistics that anyone can do”: it means exactly the opposite. “Amateur linguistics” appears here as the antonym of the concept “professional”: only a specialist who has studied the basics of science for a long time can judge the origin of words. In later speeches, Zaliznyak spoke more directly not about “amateur”, but about “false” linguistics: it is better for an amateur not to take on etymology.

The main part of the book is the destruction of the “New Chronology” of the mathematician Anatoly Fomenko, who suggested that almost all sources on ancient and medieval history are fake, and proposed his own “reconstruction” of history, which turned out to be more compact. Zaliznyak showed that many of Fomenko’s constructions are based on linguistic convergences, only carried out absolutely illiterately, associatively, contrary to the existing and long-discovered laws of language. There is a lot of anger in Zaliznyak’s criticism, but even more wit: “Deprived of linguistic cover, these constructions<А. Т. Фоменко>appear in their true form - as pure fortune telling. They have about the same relation to scientific research as reports about what the author saw in a dream.”

“I would like to speak out 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 goal of science is to search for it;
2) in any issue under discussion, a professional (if he is truly a professional, and not just a bearer of government titles) is normally more right than an amateur.
They are opposed by provisions that are now much more fashionable:
1) truth does not exist, there are only many opinions (or, in the language of postmodernism, many 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 form to present this fact as a serious challenge to biological science.
This fad is no longer purely Russian; it is felt throughout the Western world. But in Russia it is noticeably strengthened by the situation of the post-Soviet ideological vacuum.
The sources of these currently fashionable positions are clear: indeed, there are aspects of the world order where the truth is hidden and, perhaps, unattainable; indeed, there are cases when a layman turns out to be right, and all professionals are wrong. The fundamental shift is that these situations are perceived not as rare and exceptional, as they really are, but as universal and ordinary.”

Andrey Zaliznyak

The above quote is from a speech delivered at the acceptance of the Solzhenitsyn Prize (the book in which this speech was published was published in the prize series); this speech is entitled “Truth Exists.” And it is not surprising: the main meaning of Zaliznyak’s “Notes” is not in the debunking of Fomenko and Fomenkovites, it is in the pathos of affirming the value of science.