XII Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2020

Evgeny Polivanov is a brilliant linguist, polyglot, a developer of written systems for many young languages (Uzbek, Dungan).

Evgeny Dmitrievich Polivanov was born on March 12 (February 28 according to the old style ) in 1891 in Smolensk into an impoverished noble family . In 1908 he graduated from the Riga Alexander School and went to study in St. Petersburg , where he managed to get two philological education: in 1911 he graduated from the Practical Oriental Academy in Japanese rank, and in 1912 – from the historical and philological faculty of St. Petersburg University. Among his university teachers were two of the largest Russian linguists of the time – I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay and L.V. Shcherba. Polivanov’s linguistic views evolved under their influence.

Polivanov was a broad-based linguist and contributed to many areas of linguistics.

Significant is his contribution to Japanese studies . During his trips to Japan, Polivanov was the first in world science to determine the nature of Japanese stress [15] , and also began a systematic study of Japanese accentuation and dialectology [34] . He described the phonological system of the literary language and a number of dialects, proposed the reconstruction of the Prayapon phonological system and hypothesized that the Japanese language is related to the Austronesian . In 1917, he was offered a system for recording Japanese words in Cyrillic , which bears his name and is widely used to this day. In collaboration with O. V. PletnerPolivanov published a grammar of the Japanese language.

The work of the scientist played a special role in the development of Soviet Sinology . Polivanov noted the features of Chinese phonetics ; Together with A. I. Ivanov, he created a grammar of the Chinese language. He developed a phonetic theory, proposing the concept of a syllable phonemic , and laid the foundations of the compound word theory . His ideas were subsequently developed by other scientists.

Polivanov dealt with issues of kinship in the Korean language . He was one of the first linguists to use the method of internal reconstruction to analyze non-Indo-European languages. In 1923, he formulated a hypothesis about the kinship between Korean and Altai languages , which in 1927 developed into a theory of the Altai origin of the Korean language, backed up by a series of evidence . Regardless of Polivanov, G.-J. came to the same conclusions. Ramstedt , thanks to whose work this theory was recognized in world science.

The scientist participated in language construction, creating letters and literary norms for the languages ​​of the peoples of the USSR, in particular the languages ​​of Central Asia ( Uzbek , Dungan , etc.). He also developed the linguistic and methodological foundations of teaching the Russian language of non-Russians.

Polivanov is one of the founders of Soviet sociolinguistics , who studied language as a social phenomenon. He substantiated the need for social dialectology along with territorial dialectology. He put forward a provision on the dependence of the pace of linguistic evolution on the pace of development of society. In the works of Polivanov of the 1920s, the idea was first expressed that society does not directly affect language, that changes in social life cannot affect the nature and direction of language evolution, although they can accelerate or slow down its course. The concept of Polivanov was developed in the 1960s by M. V. Panov , who formulated the theory of linguistic antinomies.

Polivanov strove to develop a general theory of linguistic evolution (calling it linguistic historiology), trying to combine the ideas of the historian NI Kareev in it with the provisions of dialectical materialism . The scientist did not manage to create an integral theory, but put forward a number of general principles and developed a fragment of it - a convergent - divergent theory, which became the basis of diachronic phonology, and some other sections of diachronic linguistics. Polivanov's formulas, summarizing all previous experience in studying sound changes, are one of the fundamental discoveries of comparative historical phonetics.

He made a certain contribution to the theory and practice of the comparative method , the idea of ​​which was previously theoretically substantiated by Baudouin de Courtenay. The classic application of this method was the study of Polivanov in the 1930s.

Speaking about the difference between syntax , morphology and vocabulary , Polivanov for the first time raised the question of phraseology as an independent linguistic discipline. In 1928, he expressed the idea that phraseology would occupy "a separate and stable position ... in the linguistic literature of the future".

Polivanov also studied folklore. He was one of the first major scholars of the Kyrgyz epos Manas . In the 1930s, many chapters of the epic were first translated into Russian by him.