Vladislav Illich-Svitych

In this name that follows East Slavic naming customs, the patronymic is Markovich and the family name is Illich-Svitych.

Vladislav Illich-Svitych
Владислав Иллич-Свитыч
Born	Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych (1934-09-12)12 September 1934 Kyiv, Soviet Union (now Ukraine)
Died	22 August 1966(1966-08-22) (aged 31) Shchyolkovo, Soviet Union
Education	Moscow State University
Occupation	Linguist
Scientific career
Workplaces	RAN Institute for Slavic Studies
Academic advisors	Samuil Bernstein
Notable students	Vitaly Shevoroshkin

Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych (Russian: Владисла́в Ма́ркович И́ллич-Сви́тыч, also transliterated as Illič-Svityč; 12 September 1934 – 22 August 1966) was a Soviet linguist and accentologist. He was a founding father of comparative Nostratic linguistics and the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics.

Biography

Of Polish Jewish descent, Illich-Svitych was born in Kyiv. In 1941, he and his parents moved to Chkalov and later to Moscow. His father, Mark Vladislavovich Illich-Svitych (1886–1963), worked as a bookkeeper. His mother, Klara Moiseevna Desner (1901–1955), was chief director of puppet theater in Orenburg.

He resuscitated the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis, originally proposed by Holger Pedersen in 1903.

Death

Vladislav Illich-Svitych died in an automobile accident on 22 August 1966, in the Shchyolkovsky District to the north-east of Moscow. According to the official version, he was embarking on a field trip to collect data on the Hungarian dialects of the Carpathians (which would be south-west of Moscow).

This version was disputed by Aharon Dolgopolsky, who blamed Soviet bureaucracy for the early death of his young colleague. According to him, as Illich-Svitych was not a Moscow native, he required a special residence permit allowing him to reside in the capital, which, like many Soviet citizens in the 1960s, he was not able to secure. As a result, he had to live in a tiny room in a small village close to the city limits, and commuted to the institute daily by car. According to Dolgopolsky, it was actually on a return trip from the institute that Illich-Svitych had his fatal accident, he presumed from being lost in thought behind the wheel.

His death prevented him from completing the Comparative Dictionary of Nostratic Languages, but the ambitious work was continued by his colleagues, including Sergei Starostin and Vladimir Dybo.

Illich-Svitych was buried at the Obraztsovskoye Cemetery in the Shchyolkovsky District of the Moscow Region. A phrase in the Nostratic language is engraved on his tombstone.

Selected publications

• Nominal Accentuation in Baltic and Slavic, translated by R. L. Leed and R. F. Feldstein, Cambridge, London 1979: the MIT Press. (originally edited in Russian in 1963)

See also

• Illich-Svitych's law

References

• Merritt Ruhlen: On the Origin of Languages. Studies in Linguistic Taxonomy. Stanford University Press 1994.
• Sydney M. Lamb and E. Douglas Mitchell (Hrsg.): Sprung from Some Common Source. Investigations into the Prehistory of Languages. Stanford University Press, Stanford (Calif.) 1991.
• Vitaly Shevoroshkin: Reconstructing Languages and Cultures. Abstracts and Materials from the First International Interdisciplinary Symposium on Language and Prehistory. Brockmeyer, Bochum 1989.
• Bomhard, Allan R. and John C. Kerns: The Nostratic Macrofamily. A Study in Distant Linguistic Relationship. Mouton De Gruyter. Berlin - New York 1994.
• Dolgopolsky, Aharon: The Nostratic Macrofamily and Linguistic Palaeontology. The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Oxford 1998.
• Holger Pedersen: Türkische Lautgesetze. ZDMG 57, 1903.
• Holger Pedersen: Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century: Methods and Results. Harvard University Press, Cambridge (Mass.) 1931.

External links

• Example of Illich-Svitych's Nostratic reconstruction