He tells why his death is an irreparable loss for Russia and the world, what he is remembered for and how he fought modern obscurantism.

Many readers of this text probably do not fully realize the scale of the loss that has befallen our country. Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak was not just a scientist, not just an intellectual, and not just a popularizer of science in those times when scientific knowledge was not particularly in demand. The author of these lines had the honor of being acquainted with him, and upon meeting was struck by his modesty and intelligence. And now there is no person who has deciphered dozens (if not hundreds) birch bark letters Russian Middle Ages and opened the voices of the inhabitants of the Novgorod Republic - a state that modern Russia inherits in exactly the same way as the Grand Duchy of Moscow.

Photo: Vladimir Rodionov / RIA Novosti

Andrei Zaliznyak was born in Moscow on April 29, 1935. In the fifth grade, he took a dictionary of the Russian language to the pioneer camp, and in 1951 he won the first university Olympiad in literature and the Russian language, after which he decided to become a linguist. Then, already during student trips, Zaliznyak learned many other languages ​​​​- from Moldovan to Sanskrit. After studying (which was unthinkable in the USSR of that time), he did an internship at the Sorbonne and the Higher Normal School with the structuralist André Martinet.

What benefit did Andrey Zaliznyak bring to Russia? Firstly, he proved the authenticity of the manuscript "The Tale of Igor's Campaign" found in the Spaso-Preobrazhensky Monastery in the city of Yaroslavl. Secondly, Zaliznyak's algorithms are now used in literacy checks in electronic dictionaries and in morphological descriptions in Internet search engines. It would not be an exaggeration to say that without the work of Zaliznyak, the Russian Internet would have had a completely different look and configuration. Thirdly, Zaliznyak managed to scientifically prove the inconsistency of the arguments of Fomenko and Nosovsky with their notorious “new chronology” and the falsity of the so-called Veles book. In December 2011, at the Festival of World Ideas organized by the Vokrug Sveta magazine, answering questions from guests, the academician reasonably noted that any discussion with such characters is possible only if there is a common scientific foundation, such as that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but nothing not vice versa.

In May 2014, at the height of pseudo-patriotic obscurantism in our country, Andrei Anatolyevich explained to the author of these lines and to his other compatriots the nature of the modern Russian language, and especially its connection with the Novgorod dialect, which differs from the Kiev-Chernigov-Moscow dialect. Yes, that's right: a thousand years ago, there were fewer differences in the speech of the inhabitants of Chernigov and Rostov than between them and the natives of Veliky Novgorod. Zaliznyak clearly showed that the current Russian language has become a synthesis of the dialects of Pskov and Veliky Novgorod with the language of the inhabitants of Kyiv, Chernigov, Vladimir and Moscow.

Every warm season, despite his venerable age, Zaliznyak went to archaeological excavations in Veliky Novgorod. Each time, his lectures on the results of these trips were a colossal success, unthinkable in modern Russia. Largely because of this excitement, the author of this text did not manage to make an interview with him for Lenta.ru. In the fall of 2017, I attended the last (who would have thought!) public event of Andrei Anatolyevich in the main building on Sparrow Hills. A huge queue in front of the entrance to the audience, consisting mainly of young students, inspired the idea that not everything is lost, that thinking people, in spite of everything, in our musty time, are trying to live a conscious life. And Academician Andrei Zaliznyak, who grew up in the late Stalin era, was obvious to all of us and good example the fact that in any "freeze" it is possible and necessary to remain, first of all, a person and a person.

Andrei Anatolyevich, although he became an internationally recognized scientist, was a man of no snobbish disposition, always ready to communicate with journalists. He believed in enlightenment, which, he said, would save today's Russia from the darkness of ignorance.

When presenting him with the Zaliznyak Prize, he said: “In the case of The Tale of Igor's Campaign, unfortunately, the lion's share of the argument is permeated with just such aspirations - those who have patriotism on their banner need the work to be genuine; those who are convinced of the unconditional and permanent Russian backwardness need it to be fake. And the fact that the conversation of the deaf turns out is largely determined precisely by this. (...) I would like to speak 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 purpose of science is its search.

2) In any issue under discussion, a professional (if he is really a professional, and not just a bearer of official titles) is usually more right than an amateur.

They are opposed by provisions that are now much more fashionable.

1) There is no truth, there is only a multitude of opinions (or, in the language of postmodernism, a multitude of 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 manners to present this fact as a serious challenge to biological science.

This craze is no longer purely Russian, it is felt throughout the Western world. But in Russia it is noticeably reinforced by the situation of the post-Soviet ideological vacuum. (...) I am not particularly optimistic that the vector of this movement will somehow change and the situation will correct itself. Apparently, those who realize the value of truth and the corrupting power of dilettantism and quackery and try to resist this power will continue to find themselves in the difficult position of swimming against the current. But the hope is that there will always be those who will do it anyway.

Now one thing can be said: the long-suffering Russian humanities orphaned - and this time, apparently, forever.

We thank Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak and the Moomin school
for providing the transcript of the lecture.

about the author

Andrey Anatolievich Zaliznyak- an outstanding Russian linguist, a specialist in the field of grammar and history of the Russian language, accentology, the study of the most ancient monuments of the Russian language. He owns the following major scientific achievements: the construction of a formal model of Russian inflection and the underlying theory of grammatical categories and morphological paradigms; construction of the theory of Russian accentology in synchronous and historical aspects, based on a thorough study of ancient monuments; a comprehensive reconstruction of the grammar and vocabulary of the language of Novgorod letters on birch bark and a linguistic analysis of the corpus of these texts; rigorous linguistic proof of the authenticity of the Tale of Igor's Campaign. Laureate of the State Prize of Russia in 2007 and the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize (2007).

Linguistics, and especially historical linguistics, unfortunately, is not taught at school. School education in this area is reduced to the knowledge of certain rules for mother tongue and elements of a foreign language. Better or worse, you manage to learn all this, depends on individual situations. But what is the history of languages, where did it come from and how did the situation in modern Russian or in modern English that you study - this is almost never discussed. Meanwhile, a simple observation of what people are interested in, what questions they ask, shows that very many people, even the majority, I would say, are interested in where everything in the language came from.

Very often, for example, people ask: "Where did my name come from?" Or just where the word came from. Often they argue about it. Another frequently asked question is: “What is the oldest language? Is it true that Russian is the oldest language? So I read somewhere (or heard) that the Russian language is older than all the others, is it true or not? Such questions arise in a lot of people. And all this against the background of the fact that the school, unfortunately, usually does not provide even the most basic information about how modern science answers these questions.

Here I will try to improve this situation a little on your example, to tell you something, so that this kind of shortage in school education- to a very small extent, of course, to replenish.

First, perhaps, we will dwell on the question of which language is the most ancient. I have been asked this directly many times, and have repeatedly heard other people talk about it. Now you can read about it. Much has been said and written about these topics. The number of publications, books, magazines has grown many times over compared to what it was 15 years ago. You can read a variety of things, including about words, about what happens to them, about languages, which are ancient and which are not. Unfortunately, I must tell you quite frankly that most of these writings are the personal fantasies of the authors, and have nothing to do with the science of linguistics - alas! Moreover, it is precisely such cheap essays that are gaining popularity that portray the whole thing as very easy: I thought a little and guessed, there is no need to study anything especially deeply. Many people like it. And sometimes you see this on television - I myself watched several such sessions recently, when this kind of perfect nonsense from the point of view of linguistic science is presented as if it were really some kind of serious considerations.

The reason is, of course, the same. If these writers and listeners knew at least something about all this at school, then a significant part of such empty inventions would not exist.

So, the classic question is: what is the oldest language? People who are ready to discuss this issue do not realize that in fact, if you think about it more deeply, it is meaningless. What does it mean that one language is ancient and the other is not?

Well, first of all, of course, it must be said that there is a reasonable use of words ancient language And ancient people . Say, the Scythians are an ancient people, the Scythian language is an ancient language. What does it mean? But the fact that relevant people and their language was in antiquity, some centuries ago, but now there is neither one nor the other, neither the people nor the language. This use of words ancient language understandable and reasonable. But often about modern language they say it is ancient. Here is the Russian language - ancient or not, the Armenian language - ancient or not? And this is nonsense.

Why nonsense? Let's just think. Every generation of people, whoever they are, has its own parents. So? At what point will you consider world history, any people who live at this moment have a previous generation. And so on until the moment of the emergence of man - if you want, until Adam. And all these generations spoke. Man, in fact, differs from the rest of the living world in that he is a speaking creature, so that the emergence of man and the emergence of language are roughly parallel processes. So, from the very beginning of the existence of man as such, there has been human speech, some languages. And whatever generation we take, the current one, or the one that lived twenty centuries ago, it speaks the language of its parents. With small differences. Children, as you know, do indeed differ slightly in language, but in very insignificant ways - some words are used differently, some sounds can be pronounced slightly differently than those of their parents - but all this is insignificant and almost unnoticed. There are no language restructurings so instantaneous and profound that during the transition from one generation to the next new language, that is, the possibility of mutual understanding between parents and children would be lost (dissatisfaction with new words among children is, of course, a trifle). It is true that over the course of many generations, small changes accumulate and the language of distant ancestors becomes incomprehensible, but for simultaneously living generations this process is imperceptible, the language is always felt as one and the same.

It happened, however, in the history of different peoples that in a certain territory one language was replaced by another. It takes at least two or three generations, sometimes much more. Sometimes several hundred years can go by. There are well-known cases in history when a country was conquered by foreigners and a situation arose with two languages: the native language and the language of foreigners. There was a struggle of languages, and it could turn out that then everyone switched to one language. Not necessarily in the language of the winners. There are examples when they switched to the language of the winners, and there are those when, on the contrary, the winners mastered the language of the country they captured. There are quite a few examples of both. But in any case, even when there was such a transition from one language to another, it simply means that after two, three, four generations, the generation of great-grandchildren began to speak a different language than the generation of great-grandfathers.

But this new second language did not come out of nowhere. He perfectly existed among the people to whom he belonged. So no new language emerged at the same time. But there may be a loss of the old language. It could be. The loss of language in such conflicts has occurred many times in many places throughout history. Many languages ​​ceased to exist exactly for this reason. Well, for example, one can imagine a completely barbaric case that such ferocious conquerors came who simply destroyed all the local residents. Then it is clear that the language also died out. But even when the conquerors do not destroy them, but only conquer them, it may well be that they will gradually switch to the language of the conquerors, and their own language will be forgotten. There are a very large number of such forgotten languages, the existence of which we know for sure. And there are many more of those about whom we know nothing, about which there is no memory left. But their fate, of course, was just that.

Where, then, did so many languages ​​come from? Answer: in no case due to the fact that some language suddenly emerged from nothing, but always as a result of the branching of some single old language. Most often this happens as a result of the fact that the inhabitants of a country are divided: a part goes to new places, gradually the connection between the two halves of the people is weakened, sometimes completely lost. At first, of course, they speak the same language, but over the course of centuries, some of their language changes accumulate in each of these halves, and gradually they cease to understand each other. And then it's two different languages. This is the main source of the fact that there are many languages ​​in the world.

Why am I saying all this? To the fact that concepts ancient language, not an ancient language only then would it be meaningful if languages ​​arose at some point, if it were possible to say that, for example, the Armenian language arose in such and such a century, and before that it did not exist. But this is nonsense. As we have seen, no language ever emerges all at once. Therefore, all the languages ​​that now exist are, strictly speaking, of the same age. They go back to some infinitely deep ancestor, perhaps to several ancestors, but, in any case, to the ultimate depth of human life. Here, in fact, is the answer, why the question “which language is ancient?” meaningless.

Why do people, nevertheless, so willingly argue on this topic, and it seems to them that they are talking about something meaningful, although we seem to see that this is nonsense? Here's why. In fact, there is a real difference not in which language exists longer, which is less - this difference does not exist. Is there a difference in longevity? titles languages. The amazing thing is that it is not the language itself that is significant, a huge colossus of thousands, tens of thousands of words, grammar and other things, but just one small element: the name of this language.

And here it turns out: in fact, we call ancient and recognize as ancient those languages ​​about which it is known that many centuries ago they had the same name as now. This fact impresses us psychologically, and we say: an ancient language. Let's say Persian: word parsa- the name of the Persian language - attested already in the VI century. BC e. (exactly in this sound: parsa). This is enough to make it possible to say that the Persian language is ancient, at least in our sense. This means that it has not changed its name for a large number of centuries. Such a seemingly external thing is in fact the basis of the idea that there are younger and older languages. For the very essence of the language, this, of course, means little, but for the corresponding people it has great importance. Therefore, it is really worth understanding something about the names of languages.

Especially many disputes in our midst occur, of course, over the words Russian language. You can read god knows what about it. For example, some essays about what the Russians did seventy thousand years ago. This is utter absurdity. The fact is that, on the one hand, of course, seventy thousand years ago there were some physical ancestors of all of us present here. None of us was born except from our parents. And so all seventy thousand years. But, on the other hand, the language that these ancestors spoke, even if it is in a straight line the ancient basis of what later became the Russian language, was completely Russian to the same extent as any of the other fifty or a hundred, or two hundred other languages. And it is quite clear that there could be no such name.

As for names, it's good to know that they add up in different ways. What are the names of languages, countries and peoples? These are three different things, but they are, of course, very closely related.

Quite often we meet in history with cases when a language is called a term that, generally speaking, belongs to another people, and not to them. For example, French. In Russian - French, French - francais, in Latin respectively francia as the name of the country. For us, naturally, this word is associated with a certain Romanesque people, who descend from the ancient Romans, occupy the territory of present-day France and, of course, belong to this Romanesque world. Meanwhile, the name itself is not at all Romance. This is the name of the Germanic tribe of the Franks. The center of their initial settlement was the lands where the city of Frankfurt in western Germany is located, which you know very well. Quite late, in the 5th-6th centuries, they captured the territory of present-day France. From the Franks came the oldest dynasty of the kings of France. This is exactly the case when the name, which later spread to the country, and to the people, and to the language spoken there, comes from the conquerors. And the conquerors themselves lost their language. This is one of those cases I was talking about. The Franks, who invaded the territory of what was then Gaul, quickly dissolved in terms of language among their conquered subjects, learned a language derived from Latin, that is, the ancestor of modern French. However, they gave it their name. The language, which before that had no name attached to this territory, received it from the conquerors.

This is just one such example, but there are quite a few of them. Here's another example. Prussia - typical german land, part German state; it is believed that Prussia is traditionally the purest embodiment of the German spirit. So: the Prussians, who originally inhabited this country, are not Germans at all. This is a Baltic tribe, related to the Lithuanians, of which nothing is left now. True, they were not killed, just after the capture they gradually switched to German. But the name remains theirs. So Prussia is historically not a German land at all.

Most likely, the name of the Russian language, which is of most interest to us, had a similar history, although this is the subject of controversy. original word Rus was the name not of the Slavs, our ancestors, but of the Varangians, who came to Rus' at the end of the 1st millennium - in the 9th, 10th, 11th centuries. The Varangian squads made up, so to speak, the upper layer of the then Slavic society, and about the same thing happened to them as to the Franks in France. They quickly mastered the Russian language. Already in the second or third generation Varangian princes who ruled Russia spoke Russian. Very little remains of the Varangian language in Rus', there are even very few borrowings in Russian. But the name remains. At the beginning Rus it was the Varangian squads that came, then the state that they created in the Kyiv region, then the country around, then all the subordinate lands that were called. Note that for a long time, the inhabitants of the entire current European part of the territory of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus considered and called Rus only a small part of the country - the territory of the current Kyiv, Chernihiv and Pereyaslav regions of Ukraine. The rest of the territories were not yet perceived as Rus'. So, in birch bark letters, which we find in Novgorod, in the XII century. one Novgorodian writes to another: "I went to Rus'." This means that he traveled from Novgorod either to Kyiv, or to Chernigov, or to Pereyaslavl. In the Novgorod chronicle of the XIII century. it is said that the bishop of Novgorod such and such went to Rus', returned a year later. Novgorodians begin to call themselves Russians not earlier than the 14th century. And this is an example typical of many different countries.

The names that now seem to us to refer to a whole people: all French, all Russians, all Arabs, etc. - almost always, if we delve into antiquity and study them more thoroughly, turn out to be the names of some very small part of them. It's very natural. The fact is that the participants in the current disputes about the antiquity of a language or a people are under the illusion that the German people, the French people or the Russian people a thousand years ago represented a unity of approximately the same type as it is now. Well, except that the people were not so numerous; but it was a certain set of people who understood that they all belonged to one nation, one people. History shows that this is a profound error. The current idea of ​​what a people is is formed late, and in most cases in antiquity we find a completely different idea. People lived in much smaller groups. Here they had their own tribe, and there could be some name for it. Moreover, most often this name was not ethnic, such as French people, Arabs etc. They were called something like this: their. Or: People. To the question “what is the name of your tribe”, the answer, as a rule, was some word that literally meant our people, Just People Or something like that.

Many of today's country names go back to this idea. Even in Europe there are at least two places, one large country and one area whose names begin with its, sve- "mine". This is Sweden, its ancient inhabitants were called swear, originally - "their people". And the name of the Swabians is exactly of the same origin ( svebi), with the same sve- "one's own", the old Indo-European name for one's own. Names with the same meaning (of course, with some of their own sounds) are found in various places in the world. Sometimes there may be more complex names, such as "real people". So many names of distant languages, if translated from their own language, will turn into something similar. A name of this kind was not perceived as national or ethnic. They were just "people", unlike the rest of the world. Often for ethnic groups there was no other name at all. And very often there was no generalized name for the totality of different tribes that spoke similar languages ​​or dialects.

Often we meet with the fact that the name of some people arose not in the language in which this people spoke, but among their neighbors. It is quite natural for neighbors to want to somehow designate strangers. And often not a very pleasant word. For example, you are well aware of the names of the Germanic peoples in Russian. They're called Germans. This is clearly original Russian word, meaning "dumb people", speechless. Note that in such cases it is usually not possible to distinguish what kind of foreigners they are. Maybe they are different from each other. This is completely unimportant, therefore, in ancient times, not only people from Germany were called Germans. Swedes, Danes, Norwegians - all of them in the ancient Russian monuments are exactly the same called Germans. And there are quite a few such names. Sometimes they do not carry a negative meaning, they are just names.

Often the names that we know do not at all correspond to how the peoples call themselves. I don’t know, do you know how the Finns call themselves?

– Suomi.

- Oh, right, you know! Wonderful. Nothing in common, right? What Finns- this is not a Finnish word, it is already clear from the fact that there is no phoneme in the Finnish language f. A remarkable phenomenon: they are called by a word that they themselves are not able to pronounce! Self-name them suomi.

Well, well, if you are so educated, maybe you know how the Armenians call themselves?

- hai.

- hai hayastan- Armenia. Very well, you have the knowledge. And the rest of the world calls them Armenians: Armenians, Armenians etc.

Word Germans completely alien to the Germanic peoples. Well, now they, of course, know him, but in ancient times they were called that by the Romans. Germany- This is the Latin name of the country, the northern neighbor of the Roman Empire. And they did not name themselves, taken all together. Apparently, there was not even a complete and clear awareness that they were tribes speaking similar languages ​​in a separate tribe. But they still call themselves something, right? What do the Germans call themselves?

– Deutsch.

– Deutsch, Right. Absolutely nothing to do with the word Germany. This is just one of those examples. Deutsch- from Old German diot"people, people". That is the word Deutsch in the original meaning - it is "human, folk". Now, of course, it already means "Germanic". This is one of those examples of people calling themselves simply "the people" or simply "the people". And, by the way, initially this word denoted any Germanic tribes. The same word, which now in German sounds like Deutsch, only in ancient form, were called the inhabitants of the British Isles, and the Danes, and others. In the old Latin records, this is what it means.

Quite often the same people are called by their neighbors in different ways. Here are some examples. Take the same Germany. Russians and other Slavs call them Germans. What do the French call the Germans?

– Allemands.

– Allemands. Eh oui. Why? Yes, because they were in contact with the southern and southwestern part of Germany, where in ancient times a tribe lived that called itself Alamanni. The territory they occupied is part of present-day Bavaria. These ones Alemanni and gave a name to all.

Now a more difficult question: what are Germans called in Estonian or in Finnish?

– saxa.

– saxa! Wonderful! Exactly! Well done! In both Finnish and Estonian, the Germans are called Saxon. Why do you think?

– Tribe Saxons...

– Tribe Saxons, Yes. Is it true, Saxons, which we know now, it is a little strange how they came into contact with the Finns. Today's Saxony is an area in the south of the former GDR.

“But they were on the coast of the Baltic Sea.

- Certainly. There is Lower Saxony, Bremen, etc., which is just on the coast of the Baltic Sea. Merchants and other visitors from these places constantly visited all parts of the Baltic Sea and, please, this name came to be: Saxon. So on each side the Germans were called in their own way.

Approximately the same, by the way, with the Russians, if you look at how the neighbors call them. Well, since you are so educated, then maybe someone knows how Latvians call Russians.

– Krievi.

– Krievi right, exactly right! Krievs- Russian. Why do you think?

– Krivichi.

- Yes, krivichi. In fact, their neighbors were the ancient Krivichi. So this name arose, of course, much earlier than the name Russian. Russian, Rus- all this comes later than those contacts, due to which the ancient Latvians could learn the name of their neighbors.

Well, if you have such an education, then maybe you know how the Finns call Russians?

– Vienna.

– Vienna, Right. Why is that?

- Well, Venets, there ...

- Well, Russians and Venets - still a little different nations. But it is, of course, the same word as Veneti. Moreover, vein is the current Finnish form. The ancient Finnish form also had T at the end of the word, it was venet. This T dropped off over time. At the word venet we, of course, think of Venice, but it is far away. And the ancient venet- it is much wider than the current Venice. And most importantly, the ancient form of the name of one of the Slavic tribes was ventichi - Vyatichi. This is the same form. vent-(with nasal en), that is, it is the same name. Vyatichi could contact the ancient Finns, and their name stuck.

Such examples show how a variety of historical reasons lead to the fact that certain names of languages ​​are fixed.

I went a little far into stories about the antiquity or non-antiquity of various names. I hope that I conveyed the main idea to you - that the names of languages ​​have their own history. Some exist longer, others arise late, but this has nothing to do with the antiquity of the languages ​​themselves as such.

I will not dwell on this anymore, because this is only part of our stories. Let's touch more directly on linguistic things. The main thing that, with a naive, amateur attitude to the matter, goes unnoticed and what all these numerous amateur writings that are walking around now are guilty of is a misunderstanding that no languages ​​remain unchanged in the course of time. Takes, for example, an amateur in the hands of a magazine or book, which depicts some Cretan inscriptions of the 15th century. BC e., which is not known how to read. And a guess comes to his mind that such and such a sign is similar to the Russian letter such and such, and such and such a sign is similar to the Russian letter such and such. And it turns out that all this can be read more or less in Russian. Well, some words will have to be changed, but in general it is possible. You cannot imagine how many such "discoveries" happen when it turns out that the ancient Cretans spoke Russian. And the fact that the ancient Etruscans spoke Russian - there is almost no such lover who would not claim this! Why? Yes, it's very simple why. What is their name: Etruscans - they are russians. Funny, right? Funny. But, nevertheless, unfortunately, it is spreading like a kind of epidemic. It is practically difficult to find such an amateur essay, where, among other things, it would not be said that the Etruscans are Russians. And there are countless attempts to read Etruscan texts in Russian.

This is undeniably absurd, from the start. After such statements, you can no longer read further. Why? Because after all, no one will deny that the Etruscans lived about 25 centuries ago. So even if we assume that these are Russians, they spoke the Russian language of twenty-five centuries ago, and not our language. And the difference between today's language and the language that was twenty-five centuries ago is such that you would not recognize a single word. (This is a separate issue, how linguists still have an idea about how the ancestors of Russians spoke twenty-five centuries ago. I won’t touch on this yet, I can only say that linguists have been doing this for a long time and know something about this.) Clearly, that this difference alone is quite sufficient to make any attempt to read twenty-five-century-old texts with modern words absurd.

This is just an illustration of the fact that if you do not understand the general principle that all languages ​​change, then there is no point in trying to guess something like that in the history of languages.

The fact that languages ​​change is, generally speaking, very difficult to establish by observing oneself or others for such short term like the duration of a human life. Short, I say, because for the history of the language it is a trifle. Yes, of course, for an individual it is a whole century. And for the history of a people or the history of a language, some 70, 80, even 100 years is a very short time. Indeed, for such a period you will not notice any changes in the language. True, with subtle observation, you can still catch something. We are just now going through a period when you can notice that some changes have taken place over the past 20 years. Many new words have appeared that your parents no longer know, only they can learn from you. Conversely, you also do not know some of the words that they use. So now the language is going through a period of relatively rapid change. But still, even this rapid change still concerns a very, very small part of the Russian language. Let's say nothing has changed in Russian grammar, even with all your new words that you can flaunt. The grammar remains the same as it was 200 years ago.

So there is a small change, it is enough to say that the language does not stand still, but to really check that the language can turn into something completely incomprehensible to us, we, of course, throughout own life can not. This requires a much greater distance. But when written monuments, a good written tradition give us the opportunity to observe this change, it becomes obvious. For example, it is well known that the Romance languages: French, Italian, Spanish, Romanian - come from Latin. This is a fact that I think is common knowledge. For them, for all, a fairly large number of written monuments are preserved, so that it is possible, starting from about the 3rd century. BC e., and even a little earlier, to read texts in a row up to our time. First, these will be Latin texts, then late Latin, then, for example, early French, then middle French, then current French. Thus, you will get an even row, where you will see a continuous change in language. A modern Frenchman, of course, can read texts from two hundred years ago, can read texts from four hundred years ago with some difficulty. But already in order to read texts of a thousand years ago, he will need special training. And if you take it even deeper - reach Latin, then it will be easy for a Frenchman foreign language in which he will not be able to understand anything until he specifically studies it. So it is quite obvious that over the course of a certain number of centuries, the language can change to the point that you will definitely not understand anything from it.

Different languages ​​change at different rates. It depends on many reasons, they are not all well researched yet. But at least one reason is fairly well known to linguists, although it is clear that it is not the only one. It consists in the fact that languages ​​that live in isolation develop slowly. So, Iceland is an island, and the Icelandic language is one of the slowest developing languages ​​known to us. Or, say, the Lithuanians lived for a long time behind impenetrable forests, separated by these forests from the surrounding peoples. And the Lithuanian language is also very slowly developing. Arabic for a long time he was in the desert, separated from the rest of the world by impenetrable sands. And until it became almost universal, it developed very slowly.

On the contrary, languages ​​that are in contact with each other develop much faster. languages ​​with the most fast rhythm development are at the crossroads of world civilizations.

But there are, of course, other reasons; linguists don't know everything. They are far from being explored yet. For example, the Russian language, generally speaking, refers to a relatively slowly developing languages. The difference between the Russian language of the tenth century. and the twentieth century. much less than, for example, between the English of the same centuries (or French). Over the past thousand years, the English language has changed enormously. If you know modern English, this will give you almost nothing to read. English text 10th century You will only learn some words there, nothing more. You will not understand the meaning of the text; this language should be learned as a new foreign language. Unlike a number of other languages: for example, the Icelandic language has changed very little over a thousand years, Lithuanian has changed little (although we do not have thousand-year data for the Lithuanian language, but this is clear from other considerations). So the difference in the rate of change can be very large.

The only thing that cannot be is a language that does not change at all. The formula here, in general, is very simple: only dead languages ​​do not change. No living language can remain unchanged. Linguistics now knows this rigid law quite firmly. The reason is that language is not a finished product, but a tool that is continuously used. If a language is not used, it is dead, it has stopped in its development. Namely, due to the fact that a living language is used, in each act of its use, some microscopic shift occurs, pushing it in the direction of one or another change. This is such a struggle between the interests of the one who speaks and the one who listens. In simple terms: the desire for economy on the part of the speaker and the desire for economy on the part of the listener. Finally, quite simply: the struggle between the laziness of the speaker and the laziness of the listener. The speaker is too lazy to pronounce all the phonemes, all the sounds of the word one by one, fully articulating them. And, if conditions allow him, he can speak indistinctly, barely pronounce words. Each of us knows that there are moments when the interlocutor speaks to us in such a way, indistinctly. What to do in this case? If it is somehow important for you to understand what the person said, then you ask him again. This is the listener's resistance action. The listener, unlike the speaker, is interested in making sure that everything is said intelligibly, that all words are pronounced clearly. And he protests with his persistent questioning. Or it turns out that he misunderstood what the speaker wanted. So the listener becomes a hindrance to the speaker's tendency to shorten, crumple the word, pronounce it haphazardly, briefly and indistinctly.

This opposition is eternal, it is inherent in the very mechanism of language, and it cannot be eliminated. Therefore, the language is always in an unstable state. Which of these two forces will be slightly stronger depends on very subtle reasons, but there is always some bias.

It is known, for example, that almost all languages, at least those known to us, tend to gradually reduce the length of the word. The reduction goes something like this. Words in a language can end in different ways: some with a consonant, some with a vowel. And now there are many chances that words that end in a vowel will gradually weaken this last vowel, and then lose it. There are many examples in the history of languages ​​when a word had a final vowel, but now it does not. The Russian language is no exception. For example, it is well known that any current camping in ancient times it was Xia: i'm afraid, i'm holding on, you bathe etc. Now there is no final vowel, now you say: I'm afraid.

There are other examples as well. some Russian same. As you know, in modern Russian you can speak without e: instead of you said it Maybe you said it. It's the same effect.

Let's take another language. If you have studied French, then you know what happens there e muet at the end of words. It is written, but muet, that is, not pronounced. And once it was said. In French, wherever in the modern language at the end of words is written e, that's how it was read:,. And now it is read,, with the loss of the final vowel. And such examples can be given from almost any language.

Further, it may well turn out that if a lot of words in a language end in a consonant sound, then final consonants will begin to be lost. The French language is an excellent example of this. Anyone who learns French knows that final consonants are not readable. And these final consonants are nothing but a record of the pronunciation of about five hundred, seven hundred, eight hundred years ago. some french fort is old, where [t] is lost. french gens[žã] is Old French [žеns], where everything was read the same way as it was written. Gradually, a new pronunciation appeared, some sounds were lost - but the spelling was preserved, since the spelling is traditional.

Let's take, for example, latin word digitum. Well, since you're so educated, tell me what that means.

- Oh, that's because there is modern word digital? Yes of course. But this is a very late meaning of the word.

- That's right, it's finger. Absolutely right. I took this word not in nominative case, in the nominative it will be digitus, but in the Latin accusative case, because it is precisely accusative served as the basis for everything further development in Romance languages. Let's see what's up with that digitum happened gradually? I will write on the board how it has changed over time.

So, digitum is the normal form of, say, the era of Julius Caesar.

But among the people in this era, already in the time of Julius Caesar, they could pronounce like this: digital. A classic example of the loss of a final consonant. It was met, generally speaking, even in the era of classical Latin, but as vulgarism, a non-prestigious street pronunciation. But, as you know, this is already a guarantee of future change, most often it will happen over time.

Even later, already on the territory of the future France, we see this form: digtu. In a word digital stress on the first syllable. And now an unstressed vowel is lost between two consonants. Instead of digital Just digtu, though with the preservation of some softness in this dig, softness of such an almost Russian type, which turns the word into this: dijtu. That is, the next move is a change in the soft g V j: dijtu.

Next phase: instead ej it turns out a diphthong ei: date.

The next phase is that instead e sounds like ø : doit. Something like German Deutsch. All this is approximately the second half of the first millennium of our era, some V-IX centuries. We are no longer in the realm of Latin, but of the early stage of the French language. Latin - up to about the stage digtu. Such Latin is called "vulgar", that is, folk. One of the variants of folk Latin is already the beginning of the Old French language.

At the next stage ø turns into normal O, that is, it turns out dose. Here we are approaching the tenth century, the era Songs about Roland.

The next step is to change the accent. In accordance with the general French trend, it becomes like this: doet.

After that there is some sound change O into a related sound u, and this is the pronunciation: duet.

Next step: the syllabic character of this u, that is, it turns out dwet.

It's scary, yes, that so many changes are happening? And we are still far from modern French. All this time living t, but it, of course, is not a tenant. The next step is: dwe.

And, finally, the last step is recorded, from the point of view of linguistics, already yesterday, in the pre-Pushkin era. At the end of XVIII - early XIX V. could still talk dwe, although it already sounded a little old-fashioned. The streets have already spoken dwa. And the same could be said: vive le[rwe]! "Long live the king!"; and it was very elegant. A vive le[rwa]! at that time they were talking in the street. And this is already the modern French pronunciation.

How is it [ dwa] recorded, remember? This is written, mind you, as it was never pronounced: doigt. Most of all, this is similar to the chronological level of about the tenth century: dose. Where do you think it came from g? It's really hard to imagine. Of course, before they wrote without any g, but wise men and experts were ashamed that the French language had lost the wonderful Latin g in a word digitum, and now it was inserted into the written form of the word. It never matched anything because the sound g was lost ten moves ago. Here's a little miracle.

I have given you an illustration of what it takes to trace the path from Latin to French. Only two thousand years, even, in fact, less. Even in the first centuries of our era, in good pronunciation could be preserved digitum.

Serious historical linguistics can do such things for the history of various languages. Languages ​​such as French are very well catered for. All this is explored in detail for each type of sound combination. For the French language, modern historical linguistics can perfectly trace its entire history for any word, if it goes back to Latin, like the one I showed you with a separate example.

In the short time in which I have to tell you something, I can only try to give you the most general impression of historical linguistics. A real story about this science would, of course, require a whole series of plots, each of which would deserve a good lecture or more. So far, unfortunately, only very concise general ideas.

As you can see, in the history of each language, one can trace the successive changes in units, namely words, from the ancient state to the new one. In our example, we were dealing with a happy case when all this is recorded quite well in writing. True, not as literally as it is written on the board - after all, I wrote all this not in spelling, but in phonetic transcription. In fact, in order to analyze what is in the manuscripts, special practice and special discipline are needed. But, nevertheless, in this case, this is a happy option: we have seen the ancient words (Latin) written down, and those that were in the intermediate periods are known from the monuments. For cases where there is no such written tradition, the situation is much more complicated. And yet, in principle, in these cases, linguistics is also able to achieve results of the same type - perhaps less guaranteed, but in the same methodological key.

What is the main thing here? In addition to the principle itself, that language is always changing, there is the following, second principle, which, unfortunately, I do not have the opportunity to present to you in detail, but which, however, I will formulate very insistently. This principle consists in the so-called regularity of phonetic changes. This is a great discovery of nineteenth-century linguistics. Actually, it is considered the beginning of scientific linguistics as such. About some other branches of linguistics, we can say that they arose earlier, but historical linguistics has existed since the first quarter of the 19th century. Usually, two scientists are called its founders: the German linguist Franz Bopp and the Danish linguist Rasmus Christian Rask. But in fact, a whole group of scientists contributed to the first conclusions of historical linguistics.

The main one is that changes, an example of which is any transition from one stage to the next in the evolution of the word we have analyzed digitum, have a remarkable fundamental (and unexpected for mankind) property: they are mandatory for given language during this period of its development. This means that if at some stage in your development, for example, date goes into doit, then some reik certainly goes into roik, peis goes into pois etc. Decidedly in all cases where there is a combination of the same type in a word, the effect will be the same. It is clear that this completely cancels the naive amateur idea that any sound in any word can accidentally turn into some other. There is no randomness in language.

This is the basis for historical linguistics as a scientific discipline, and not just as fortune-telling. It was possible to establish that in single word individual transition, even the simplest, say, transition O V A is almost never found. It does not happen that in one word this happens, but nowhere else does it happen; let's say there was a pronunciation dog, but it became dog- precisely in this word. The transition is carried out in such a way that the shockless O in the Russian language of such and such time in any word where it is present, it will no longer be pronounced as O, but as A. It is this statement: in any word where there is such and such a phoneme or such and such a combination of phonemes, such and such a change will occur, - and there is a fundamental principle of historical linguistics. His discovery was an enormous leap, about as important as the discovery periodic system elements for chemistry, the law of gravitation for physics, etc. All studies of the previous states of languages ​​are based on this principle.

All situations where apparent deviations arise, as if exceptions to the principle of regularity of phonetic changes, have been studied. Due to lack of time, I am unable to give a detailed analysis of examples. I can only say that the following situation was repeated many times. A certain rule was formulated, for example, that in such and such a language in such and such a century, everything b goes into p. Such a change in him was systematically observed. And suddenly it turned out that there were some words where b did not go into p, that is, there are exceptions to the formulated law. This looks like a violation of the main, fundamental principle, and, therefore, the principle itself is called into question.

And here's what we see: many times the following happened. A new phase of studying the subject began, other linguists joined in, the relevant material was studied more deeply, and it turned out that those exceptions, where the general rule for some reason gives an “incorrect” result, obey some other, more particular rule. That is, simply speaking, it turned out that they are not exceptions, but consequences of some previously unknown additional rule.

Well, maybe I will point out one example so that some names sound. Transition p V f, transition t V th, transition k V h This is the so-called Germanic consonant movement. The consonants of the Proto-Indo-European language underwent this change during the transition to the Proto-Germanic language, the ancestor of all modern Germanic languages. The German movement of consonants was already discovered by the founders of historical linguistics. Otherwise, this change p V f, t V th, k V h) is called Grimm's law, after one of the scientists who discovered it. Another linguist who independently established this pattern was Rasmus Rusk. And Grimm is none other than Jacob Grimm, one of the authors of the fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm that you probably know. So they were such wonderful people who could write down and invent fairy tales that live forever, and be great linguists. More precisely, one of the brothers, Jacob Grimm, was a great linguist.

So, exceptions were still observed from Grimm's law, which made it, as it were, not quite reliable. For example, in some cases p gave no f, but some other result. And now, about 40 years after Grimm's discovery, a study by another German linguist, Karl Werner, appeared, to which he gave a very characteristic name: "On one exception to Grimm's law." Werner found a rule that observable exceptions obey, that is, it turned out that these are not exceptions at all. In fact, whether the transitions will obey directly Grimm's law or Grimm's law with correction depends on what stress was in the ancient word. And before Werner, it was generally not assumed that in the Germanic languages ​​there had ever been a heterogeneous stress in words. But a comparison with the stress of the Greek language and Sanskrit showed the researcher that this explains all the deviations from Grimm's law. Now the rule that Carl Werner discovered is called Werner's law. All students of philological faculties know it, they must take it at the exam.

Here is a typical example of how knowledge has developed, how the idea that phonetic laws operate regularly has been strengthened. Modern linguistics stands firmly on this. All current achievements are based on the fact that this rule works flawlessly.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you more. The overall picture is as follows. For each language, it can be established how it has evolved over time. For the studied languages, this has already been established; for a very large number of unexplored languages, linguists have yet to do this. There are about 6,000 languages ​​in the world, the history of perhaps one thousandth of them has been well researched. Well, a little more, a few thousandths, but it is unlikely to reach a percentage. The percentage would be 60 languages, and I think there are not yet 60 languages ​​well served in terms of their history. Well, let it be on an optimistic account - one percent. The rest of the work is yet to be done by linguists.

One way or another, every language has a history, and from a phonetic point of view, it is a long chain of transitions, each of which is mandatory. If some things at first seem to be exceptions, then there are rules that govern these exceptions, which turn them from exceptions into the operation of a more particular rule. And here it only remains for me to announce to you in a slogan that this is the key to comparing related languages ​​with each other. Each of the related languages ​​has its own chain of transitions. For example, the difference between French and Italian is that French has a very long chain of transitions, while Italian has a much shorter one. The Italian language developed much more slowly than French; French is one of the fastest growing languages. See how he crumpled the word digitum before doigt. Maybe someone will remember how to say in Italian finger, since you are so advanced? In Italian it is dito. On our chain of transitions, this corresponds approximately to the level dijtu. See how early language stopped here. Move a little further from this dijtu, and will be the current Italian word. The last vowel is not even lost here, only a simplification took place dijtu V dito.

Comparing related languages, we get the key to identifying the system of transitions in each of these languages. A whole discipline arises (talking about it is a separate topic), which makes it possible, by comparing related languages, to obtain information about what their former states were like. Moreover, this technique can be applied even when we do not have information about the corresponding ancient language(unlike our example with French and Italian when their ancestor - Latin - is well known to us from the texts). For example, by comparing English with German, Swedish, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic, we can get information about what their common ancestor was - Proto-Germanic. Comparing the Slavic languages ​​(Russian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian, Serbian, Slovenian, etc.), we can get information about what their ancestor was - the Proto-Slavic language.

Over the past two hundred years, a whole linguistic technique has been developed that allows you to establish what the ancestral language was. The closer to us the time, the language of which is being studied, the more complete the knowledge. For more distant epochs, such a restoration naturally concerns a much smaller number of elements. One way or another, we can penetrate very far into the depths of time.

And now there are already insanely bold attempts to obtain information about the initial state of the language when it appeared. So far, they are at the level of daring human dreams, but the task itself has already been set. Whether this is possible or not is still an open question. The very idea of ​​monogenesis, that is, a single origin of all languages ​​and branches from some one initial point, is not crazy. It is now being discussed very actively.

On this I will finish.

I. B. Itkin: Please, questions to Andrey Anatolyevich.

A. A. Zaliznyak: Yes, let's do it.

Zhenya Miloslavsky ( 6th grade): I have a question: is it possible that all languages ​​were formed from the language of a single tribe? For example, some tribe came, another captured, and everyone began to speak the same way ...

A. A. Zaliznyak: I understand you, yes. Well, probably, if the hypothesis, which I called the hypothesis of the monogenesis of languages, that is, the common origin of all languages, is correct, then this picture should be imagined approximately like this. With only one small inconvenience that this must be attributed to the time when man descended from the ape, and not to some trifling distance of two thousand years. Not to mention the fact that when some perfect science fiction writer writes to you that he came to the conclusion that all languages ​​\u200b\u200bcame from Russian (unfortunately, alas, I read this with my own eyes), then this is complete nonsense a priori. But in principle such a scheme can be.

Why could it be otherwise? Only if you imagine that when a person was formed, in different places the globe different languages ​​emerged. It's not out of the question, it could be. Then it is called polygenesis. But if the origin of the language took place in one place, as some linguists now suggest, then the picture is approximately the one you describe: a certain tribe, very small, initially quite, probably not numerous, developed a language. Then all this branching happened. But, I repeat, this is insanely far from our time! Moreover, our time is not some hundred years, or even four thousand years.

Zhenya: Well, actually nothing could have come from the Russian language, since the Russian language itself came from the Greek.

A. A. Zaliznyak: No, Russian did not come from Greek. Greek and Russian are descended from a common ancestor, but not one from the other.

D. A. Ermoltsev ( history teacher and foreign literature ): You began your wonderful lecture with some lamentations about how little the public has ideas about all these things, how little knowledge from school, from childhood. And then in a very popular form, very simply, obviously and quickly, some important things were explained.

The question is the following. Why don't you personally, for example, or one of your colleagues write a clever, but very simple and popular book for children? We have wonderful examples: "Entertaining Greece" by M. L. Gasparov, special books of the series by L. E. Ulitskaya: about food, about costume, etc., where experts wrote in a very simple living language.

A. A. Zaliznyak: Yes, I've read those books...

D. A. Ermoltsev: With elements of ethnography, sociology...

A. A. Zaliznyak: Yes, good books...

D. A. Ermoltsev: It would be very nice to write such a book about languages ​​in order to eradicate prejudices and stupid myths. And we'd all have a lot less trouble.

A. A. Zaliznyak: Thank you, as they say, for the wish. These things are not made to order. You need a combination of a number of circumstances: skills, allocation of appropriate time from other activities and much more.

D. A. Ermoltsev: There would be less reason to complain.

A. A. Zaliznyak: I understand you. But I think I do something similar to some extent. True, not in the form of the books you spoke about, but in a more modest form of shorter texts. But I think your wish is very correct. And I would love to know that my younger colleagues have done something similar. Here it is useful, of course, to have a larger supply of life ahead. So, basically, I think that it will somehow come true. I don't think with my hands, although I try to do some similar things. In principle, of course, your idea is correct.

E. I. Lebedeva ( a history teacher): Andrey Anatolyevich, tell me something about V. A. Plungyan’s book about languages.

A. A. Zaliznyak: This is a wonderful book. I recommend her to everyone. After all, Plungyan is not only a linguist, and an excellent linguist, but also a teacher who knows how to convey the material remarkably. So this book is very well written.

V. V. Lukhovitsky ( Russian language teacher, school "Intellectual"): You said at the very beginning that there is almost nothing on historical linguistics in the school curriculum. I, as a Russian language teacher, on the contrary, have the feeling that in our ordinary school textbooks, unfortunately, there is a lot of supposedly historical information...

A. A. Zaliznyak: Oh yes, I agree.

V. V. Lukhovitsky: The history of the language is not singled out, synchrony and diachrony are not separated. And most importantly, what are the Olympiad tasks in the Russian language? Basically, these are questions on the history of the language, and sometimes they are formulated not very correctly. How can children find out about this? So, don’t you think that it is necessary to do some special course in the history of the language, or, conversely, only the current state of the language should be studied at school?

A. A. Zaliznyak: I don't know, I don't have any far-reaching concept on this, because I have always been far from these problems. I rather think that a special course would be too much. It seems to me that it would be enough to give some information along with the Russian language course. But what I have seen in tutorials matches what you said. Not only is the material given inappropriately, but also, among other things, with errors, sometimes just ugly errors. From somewhere, the authors heard about what should be given historical information. And they themselves, apparently not orienting themselves very well in them, put nonsense into textbooks. I came across a couple of examples that really angered me. I haven't checked all the tutorials. But if you do so, then, of course, nothing is better, no doubt.

Probably, some chapters of the type of the story that I tried to offer today could be included in the textbooks. Without the preposterous insistence that the student know any particular thing from history Old Russian language. It should only be an invitation to understand the problem itself, the mechanics itself. And if we are talking about knowing specifically, then specific study is needed, but not within the framework of a modern language course. This is roughly my idea, but, unfortunately, I did not deal with this issue.

V. V. Lukhovitsky: One more information. There is a wonderful article by A. A. Zaliznyak with an analysis of Fomenkov's constructions. She is perceived with a bang by seventh graders. In it, you can take just the popular material that we lack. I can send to anyone.

P. A. Egorova ( psychologist): Pronunciation has changed throughout the history of a language. The question arises: why is the writing lagging behind? Why doesn't the spelling change? I'm interested in the situation Spanish. Did it change there too?

A. A. Zaliznyak: Of course: everything European languages changed. Spanish experienced consonant stunning after spelling stopped. Well, there is nothing to say about English. With regard to the modern spelling of English, French, Spanish, one can indicate the approximate time when everything was read as it is now written. A little arbitrary, but still. IN English language one can imagine that the word business read like beads etc.

By the way, on this occasion: it is wonderful that the same Fomenko constantly operates with the word Rush with the firm conviction that it has always been said so. It has almost become youth jargon to call Russia Rush, our Russia. Meanwhile, quite recently, in the 16th century, in English the word Russia still pronounced Rusia. For the language, this is quite recent - of course, not in the sense in which we talk about our life affairs. It's all about the same conservatism of spelling.

Apparently, this was a common element of the socio-cultural development of Europe. At a certain moment, when, among other things, the idea of ​​the value of antiquity arose - Latin antiquity, to be specific - there was a feeling that each successive deviation in spelling from the original version, following a rude street pronunciation, was an unacceptable corruption of the holy tradition. It's pure social phenomenon. This was not the case in other eras. In the second half of the 1st millennium, they had not yet reached this idea and wrote as they pronounced.

Linguists know this remarkable phenomenon. There are epochs when society easily allows phonetic notation, and there are epochs when there is a strong desire to establish an unshakable spelling. Moreover, it does not matter at all that it goes far from pronunciation. We now believe that our spelling reform was focused on making writing easier and more comfortable. But it is completely wrong to think that mankind has always treated writing in this way. There were whole large epochs and societies in which it was required that it was difficult to write and read, where in writing there was an extremely large amount of completely, from our point of view, meaningless difficulties. Say six different ways spellings of the same phoneme, conditional letters, etc., which made literacy in the highest degree difficult and at the same time incredibly prestigious due to its difficulty. A scribe in Egypt was a person close to sacredness, because of the unthinkable things he knew and could write. And a similar trend existed in a variety of societies. We do not want to write simply, we want to write in such a way that we are respected! Do you understand? And now, when such a tendency wins, spelling stops. This is what happened in different countries Europe.

Lisa Shchegolkova ( 7th grade): I wanted to ask about the word finger. The final form of this word is: dwa. What is written next to it?

A. A. Zaliznyak: It's orthography, modern French orthography. By the way, there is such a wonderful paradox in French orthography. Why if write oi, then it will read wa? Because once normal oi, in all words, and not only in the word finger, went the way that I described. Likewise, any word king once said Roy.

The curious thing, by the way, is that around this time, in 1066, the Normans took over England. Battle of Hastings - maybe you have studied it. Norman rule is established in England, and a strong influence of French on English begins. A lot of words come from French into English. It is remarkable that the Norman invaders are not French at all. They are Norwegian by origin, but have already lost their Norwegian language and already speak French. So, while keeping the name of the Normans, they bring the French language to Britain. And so the mass of borrowings that occurs at this time has the remarkable property that it preserves the French pronunciation of this era. For example, who remembers how it will be Viceroy in English? viceroy which is pronounced Viceroy- and there is no change here Roy V rua. There are plenty of others English words, which have the phonetics of the French language of the X, XI, XII centuries. Let's say it's French chair?

– Chaise.

- And in English?

– Chair.

So here's a question for you: how was chair in French in the 12th century?

– Chaise some.

– Chaise(more precisely, even teare but now it's not about R And h). It is known that the French ch (=w) is the result of the transition h V w around the same time. And the English are h preserved and captured what they borrowed. There has been no change in English w, but left chair. And so resolutely in all borrowings.

D. A. Ermoltsev: When did this transition take place among the French?

A. A. Zaliznyak: I'm afraid to give you the exact century, but somewhere between the 10th and 12th centuries, I think. I can look.

D. A. Ermoltsev: What was their name Carla? Charlemagne?

A. A. Zaliznyak: Charles, Certainly. Charles, without any doubts. Charlemagne was undoubtedly Charles.

D. A. Ermoltsev: That is, King Charles of England is the French form?

A. A. Zaliznyak: Certainly. Charlemagne was Charles Manh, exactly. Correct, absolutely correct: English Charles, including h, completely saved everything. Everyone knows that in French the final s not readable. It is now. But it was read in the word Charles (=Charles), which retained the English language. Exactly.

It is generally a rather curious thing that borrowings into another language can be an invaluable gift for the historian of a language. For example, Finnish is one of the languages ​​that changes very slowly, much more slowly than Russian. But the main thing is not even that it is slow, but that it is completely in its own way. One language changes one thing, another completely different. See how the French language crushed the original word digitum- there is almost nothing left in it. Everything but the sound d, new. And another language may be such that it does not retain the initial sound, and everything else can be preserved very well. Such things are studied very carefully by linguists.

Let's take some word for the Russian language oatmeal. I'm not sure if you know what it is, but there is such a word. With complex calculations, modern historical linguistics comes to the conclusion that the original form was not the same as it is now, but this: tolkuno. After k was a vowel - short at. Not very different from modern form, but a difference nonetheless. This knowledge is obtained by comparing different Slavic languages and in general a set of methods of comparative linguistics. On the other hand, in the Finnish language there is a borrowing from this word, which came into this language no later than the 10th century, but rather earlier. It sounds like this: talkkuna. Of course, it cannot be said that it exactly corresponds to the ancient Slavic word. Let's say kk is such a special Finnish effect that is known to be the correct match for a simple To. But look. The sound that the Slavs recorded as O, once looked like A; it was something in between O And A. In Finnish, simply A. And now look: in reconstruction we have tol, and here tal; there is a vowel in the reconstruction at, and there is a vowel at. That is, simply put, the Finnish language, as in a tin can, kept Russian pronunciation X century.

For a historian of language, such things are extremely valuable. A neighboring language, in itself, can have many features; for example, this is a double kk instead of a simple one, it's a Finnish effect, and we know we have to make allowances for this feature. There were some changes in the Finnish language, but not the same as in Russian. But this is left in its purest form.

And the English language in the same way retained the old French pronunciation, despite the fact that, it would seem, monstrous changes have taken place there. But not everything has changed. Here the British have left h which the French did not keep. Almost everything else in the English language has undergone complex changes, vowels are pronounced there in a completely incredible way from the point of view of the rest of Europe, R gone, and so on and so forth. And here h left. Unlike the French language, where there was a process of change. This is such a nice example of how contacts between languages ​​can be extremely valuable to the historian of language.

Alexander Avramov ( Grade 10): What is the origin of the word mop? I've been wondering for a long time, to be honest.

A. A. Zaliznyak: I don't remember exactly, but if I'm not mistaken, it's just a borrowing from German. The structure is very similar to the German borrowing.

Yaroslav Pilecki ( Grade 10): What else can the word go to doigt that is written on the board?

A. A. Zaliznyak: What else can go into? This is a very exciting question for linguists: can science tell what will happen next. The general answer is as follows.

It is indeed possible to enumerate the possibilities which in such cases come true with a certain probability. Now that the material has been collected a large number languages ​​of the world, you can calculate where when it was ya and what it has become. This is the first side of the matter. And then we can say that if there is no special breaking out of general statistics, then there will be either one, or the other, or the third. And the other side is whether it will happen or not. Linguists do not know how to answer the second question. It is not possible yet. Moreover, there is a theory, very strong in its negative side, that it is as unpredictable as where an earthquake will occur, or some mutation in biology will or will not occur.

So, indeed, the question of when some probable event will or will not occur is something that linguists do not yet know how to decide. And to list what it can go into is possible. Such things as ya have a tendency to combine into something in between like O, For example. So the transition ya V O probable enough. Some other options are also possible. In addition, to be very careful, the answer should not be given with respect to an arbitrary ya in general, but for a given language. As part of the French language transition ya V O don't wait, because the French language is mostly characterized by the reverse movement. Generally in different languages there are some not very precise trends in the general in which direction the changes will take place. In this case, such a merger at And A not very likely. For some language like Arabic - maybe.

Ilya Lebedev ( biology student): But the language that existed in ancient egypt How did it change from start to finish?

A. A. Zaliznyak: You see, there are many specific difficulties, because there is not a phonetic notation, but almost consonantal. Now that we're talking Nefertiti, Ra etc., it's not really Nefertiti and not Ra.

By the way, this very syllable ra how the name of the god Ra has already been repeatedly used for modern Russian inventions: this name of god, they say, is represented in the word intelligence, then in the word rainbow, then somewhere else. In ancient Egyptian, the name of the god Ra in reality most likely sounded like re". In reality, the consonant is known for this name R and the consonant "guttural explosion". Purely conventionally, this is conveyed as ra. The name Nefertiti was most likely pronounced as nofretet. So the phonetic history of the Egyptian language is difficult because the vowels are not written. The consonants that can be traced change little, they are quite stable. The Egyptian language had an heir: the Coptic language. As a matter of fact, all those vowels that are restored are obtained by some extrapolation from Coptic. Coptic is already written normally, with all vowels. But it existed later, there are huge temporal distances, therefore it is impossible to restore the full phonetics specifically for the Egyptian language, only hypothetically. Consonants seem to be - I don't know much about this, so I'm talking rather roughly - as if they have changed little during the entire existence of the language. But the Semitic-Hamitic consonants are generally a stable thing.

M. V. Belkevich ( artist, teacher of world art culture): And can we assume what mutations and changes will be in the Russian language when our grandchildren will be?

A. A. Zaliznyak: Yes, I understand, this is such an interesting occupation. In fact, there is a method that allows you to judge this to some extent. Of course, it works at the level of a specific problem, say, the declension of nouns, or even a specific declension, some combination, or a syntactic phenomenon. Take it in modern language and see how it looks now. You take the history of the Russian language over the last thousand years, there are monuments, you can work. And look how the vector of change from the 10th to the 20th centuries turns out. The maximum probability is that it will continue further. Therefore, I can tell you something based on this reasoning.

M. V. Belkevich: And you can give an example of changing a word. You gave us an example from French, but can you use Russian?

A. A. Zaliznyak: About the word, this is just an unreliable thing, because the word is a single object. On the basis of a single object, generalization is impossible; there will be the most unreliable statements about a single object. More reliable statements will be about mass things when there are some grammatical lines in which hundreds of, say, words participate. Then you can really feel some statistics.

Here is an example that is understandable. If we take a distance of a thousand years for the use of short and full adjectives, this is already a reasonable task, because there are many of them, you will have a lot of material. And then it turns out that in the Old Russian language you cannot have a full adjective in the position of a predicate. This situation is quite clear. You can't say he is brave. You can only say: he is brave, or: he was brave, he was brave, he is talented and so on. Over the course of a thousand years, in some cases, phrases begin to appear when a full adjective is used, for example, he is reckless. Closer to our time, there are much more such combinations. Now in some cases, if you use an adjective in a short form, it will sound too literary. For example, how to say: he is proud or he is proud? What do you say more often? He is calm or he is calm? Well, in this case there is some difference in meaning. But it is quite clear that modern language already uses forms like he is proud, he is defiant etc. Thus, the vector shows that if you take another, no, not twenty or even fifty years - for us this is zero, and if you take the next three hundred years, then most likely this trend will continue. Short forms will be used less and less. The full form will dominate. Moreover, there was even such an idea that short forms would disappear altogether. I even tried to test such a hypothesis myself that there would be no short forms in the Russian language at all, that they would not speak at all the cup is full, she dared etc., but they will say cup full,she is brave and nothing else. It looks like things are moving towards that now. And it turned out that no, the situation is not so straightforward. It is not true that all short forms in general disappear with time. It turns out that they do not disappear if they control something. Let's say a phrase like He is full of energy; there is no way to turn short adjective to the full. This country is rich in oil- cannot be said rich. It turned out that those adjectives that have subordinate members with them retain their short form, contrary to the general trend. Thus, the picture is this: in three hundred years, probably everyone will say: she is brave. If someone says: she dared, they will laugh at him: “You fell on our heads from the 20th century.” But in revolutions like rich in oil the short form of the adjective remains. So we know something. But it cannot be said that linguists have already worked out a lot on this issue.

I. B. Itkin: Well, let's ask Andrey Anatolyevich the last question. Just not about the mop ...

A. A. Zaliznyak: And why not about the mop? ..

I. B. Itkin: You can look it up in a dictionary. You are not the only one who knows about this, Andrey Anatolyevich.

E. V. Paducheva: Can you give examples of words that obey Grimm's law and exceptions that obey Werner's law?

A. A. Zaliznyak: Can. But this will require several lemmas, which are now out of place to state.

Lisa Shchegolkova ( 7th grade): I have another question. Here are different countries, in Central Africa, for example, are they lower in terms of language development of more developed countries?

A. A. Zaliznyak: Yes, this is a very important question for linguists. Unfortunately, he is one of those who get too close to sensitive, emotional moments, so it is sometimes difficult to answer them completely objectively.

Indeed, there were very different points of view on this issue among the participants in the discussion. One point of view is that there are absolutely primitive languages, which can express very little, and there are languages ​​of the highest, namely English, of course, which can express absolutely everything. Another, opposite point of view is that there is no difference between languages. The truth, as usually happens in such cases, apparently does not lie at these extreme poles.

In fact, there are aspects of the language in which they are all exactly the same, and there are aspects in which they are not the same. For example, if you enter such a measure: does the language correspond to the society in which it is used? Does, say, the language of the Papuans correspond to the life that the Papuans lead? - it turns out that the answer to this question is the same for all languages. There are no languages ​​that would not satisfy their speakers well, that would put them in a position where something important for their life cannot be expressed. Another thing is that the living conditions, of course, are very different for the Papuans and, say, for an English businessman.

The other side of the matter is whether there are languages ​​that are richer or poorer in vocabulary, languages ​​with some kind of subtle syntactic rules, or, conversely, with lax rules? Here there is a difference. And it turns out that it no longer depends on the language as such, and not even on the state of society, but on the presence or absence of a literary tradition. Languages ​​with a great and especially a great literary tradition, say, like English, like Russian, like French, like Italian, already have vast experience. A large number of good writers participated in the accumulation of their vocabulary, and in the development of stylistic, syntactic and other details. In this regard, some, for example, the Chukchi language can be much less advanced, because they had very few writers, no relevant experience, at best, there are, say, some folklore works.

This is in favor of the theory that languages ​​are unequal. But they are unequal in some part, unprincipled for the main function of the language. Main function language is performed equally well.

There is something else important here. Once upon a time, when the language arose, it must have been very primitive. But this was at the time of the emergence of the Cro-Magnons, about 60-70 thousand years ago. Then it was still insufficient in its expressiveness. Now we know the written languages ​​of about the last four thousand years at best. Chinese, Egyptian - there are very few examples. Approximately the same or slightly greater depth is achieved with the help of linguistic analysis. Well, you can go up to about seven thousand years. Some things can sometimes be learned beyond that, but only very partially.

And so far, the following is revealed: no matter how deep we descend either from written monuments or from reconstructions, we find languages ​​of exactly the same degree of efficiency and perfection as modern ones. Some ancient Egyptian language four thousand years ago is in no way inferior to modern ones in terms of complexity. In some ways it can be more difficult, in some ways it can be easier. That is, there is nothing in common between the languages ​​\u200b\u200bthat we know now and the proto-language of man, when he began to move from lowing to articulate sounds. Here the distance is huge and so far completely inaccessible to us.

Here is a somewhat difficult answer to your question. And the question itself is very correct, very exciting for linguists.

I. B. Itkin: Thank you very much, Andrei Anatolievich.

Photo by Maria Alexandrovna Smirnova (Moomin school).

See also other lectures by A. A. Zaliznyak at the Moomin school:
1) Some problems of word order in the history of the Russian language, 11/18/2005.
2) On historical linguistics (continued), 02/05/2010.
3) About the language of ancient India, 02/11/2011.
4) On the history of the Russian language, 24.02.2012.
5)

- (b. 1935) Russian linguist, corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1991; corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences since 1987). Works in the field of grammar, Slavic and Russian accentology, as well as general linguistics, the theory of composing linguistic problems, grammar ... ... Big Encyclopedic Dictionary

Full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1997), leading researcher at the Institute of Slavic and Balkan Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences; was born on April 24, 1935 in Moscow; graduated from Moscow State University in 1958; main directions scientific activity: Russian and Slavic linguistics, ... ... Big biographical encyclopedia

- (b. 1935), linguist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1997). Proceedings in the field of grammar, Slavic and Russian accentology, Slavic Russian paleography, general linguistics, the theory of formulating linguistic problems, Sanskrit grammar, etc.; explored… … encyclopedic Dictionary

Andrey Anatolievich Zaliznyak- Today Academician Andrei Zalinyak was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation. Presenting the awards for 2007, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev noted that the linguist Andrei Zaliznyak made a huge contribution to domestic and world linguistics. ... ... Encyclopedia of newsmakers

Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak A. A. Zaliznyak during a lecture on birch bark letters from excavations in 2008 Date of birth: April 29, 1935 Place of birth: Moscow Citizenship ... Wikipedia

- ... Wikipedia

Andrei Anatolyevich (born 1935), linguist, academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1997). Works in the field of grammar, Slavic and Russian accentology, Slavic-Russian paleography, as well as general linguistics, the theory of formulating linguistic problems, Sanskrit grammar ... ... Russian history

Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak A. A. Zaliznyak during a lecture on birch bark letters from excavations in 2008 Date of birth: April 29, 1935 Place of birth: Moscow Citizenship ... Wikipedia

Andrey Anatolyevich Zaliznyak A. A. Zaliznyak during a lecture on birch bark letters from excavations in 2008 Date of birth: April 29, 1935 Place of birth: Moscow Citizenship ... Wikipedia

Books

• Zaliznyak Andrey Anatolievich. 720 pages. The dictionary is recommended by the Order of the Ministry of Education, which determines the list of dictionaries and reference books containing the norms of the modern Russian literary language. The dictionary reflects (using ...
• Grammatical dictionary of the Russian language. Inflection. About 110,000 words, Andrey Zaliznyak. The "Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language" reflects (with the help of a special system of symbols) modern inflection, i.e. declension of nouns, adjectives, pronouns, ...

Reported by an employee of the Institute of the Russian Language. V. V. Vinogradova Russian Academy Sciences (RAS) Dmitry Sichinava.

Andrey 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 Romano-Germanic Department of the Philological Faculty of the Moscow state university them. M. V. Lomonosov. In 1956-1957 he trained at the Higher Normal School (Ecole normale superieure, Paris). Until 1960, he studied at the graduate school of Moscow State University.

In 1965 he defended his dissertation at the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (AN USSR) 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 - the Russian Academy of Sciences; RAS) as a chief researcher in the department of typology and comparative linguistics. was engaged teaching activities 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 competitions for schoolchildren. He taught at the University of Provence (1989-1990), Paris (Paris X - Nanterre; 1991) and Geneva Universities (1992-2000). Since 1987 he has been a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, since 1997 he has been an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

In the 60s and 70s, Andrei Zaliznyak worked on the problems of the grammar of the modern Russian language. In 1961, Zaliznyak's "Concise Russian-French Educational Dictionary" was published with the appendix "Essay 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.

On the basis of 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 repeatedly reprinted work formed the basis of most computer programs using morphological analysis: spelling checkers, machine translation, Internet search engines.

In 1978, as part of the "Sanskrit-Russian Dictionary" (author - Vera Kochergina), Zaliznyak's "Grammatical Sketch of Sanskrit" was published.

Since the second half of the 70s, Andrey 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 section of linguistics that studies stress) was the monograph "From Proto-Slavic Accentuation to Russian" (1985). The book was created on the basis of 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 was engaged in deciphering and analyzing the language of Novgorod birch bark letters, studied their special graphic system. The data obtained allowed the scientist to identify the features of the dialect of Ancient Novgorod, which differed significantly from the dialect of most of Ancient Rus'. Zaliznyak compiled a linguistic commentary on the publication "Novgorod letters on birch bark" (Volumes VIII-XI; 1986-2004), and wrote the final book "Old 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 Campaign": 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 all the vast array of knowledge about the history of the language accumulated by philologists to date.

Andrey Zaliznyak was actively involved in the popularization of science, was the compiler of many linguistic tasks. Widely known are Zaliznyak's lectures on "amateur linguistics" - pseudoscientific theories concerning the origin of the Russian language and its individual 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, Andrey Zaliznyak was awarded the State Prize of the Russian Federation in the field of science and technology in 2007. Also, the scientist was the winner of the Demidov Prize (1997), the Alexander Solzhenitsyn Prize (2007), was awarded the Big Gold Medal. M. V. Lomonosov of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2007). He was a member of the Parisian (since 1957) and American (since 1985) linguistic societies.

Was married. Wife Elena Paducheva and daughter Anna Zaliznyak are famous linguists.

In 1958 he graduated from the philological faculty of Moscow State University (MSU) (Romano-Germanic department), studied at the Sorbonne under the French structuralist Andre Martinet.

He taught and teaches at the Philological Faculty of Moscow State University (mainly at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics), as well as at Aix-en-Provence, Paris and Geneva Universities.

Since 1987 - Corresponding Member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR, since 1997 - Academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Chief Researcher of the Department of Typology and Comparative Linguistics of the Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Zaliznyak's wife E. V. Paducheva and daughter Anna Zaliznyak are also well-known linguists.

Contribution to science

Synchronous description of Russian morphology

The first monograph by A. A. Zaliznyak - “Russian nominal inflection” (1967) was an experience of a consistent algorithmic description of the declension of nouns, adjectives, pronouns and numerals in the Russian language in its written form. The paper touches upon important theoretical problems of morphology, gives strict definitions of the concepts of "word form", " grammatical meaning”, “grammatical category”, “grammatical category”, “consensual class”, “gender”, “accent paradigm”, etc. Special articles were written about the grammatical categories of case, number, gender and concordant class by A. A. Zaliznyak, where these phenomena are also considered from a typological point of view.

Experience was gained during the compilation of the Russian-French Dictionary, published in 1961. For the convenient use of the dictionary by foreigners, the dictionary was accompanied by a “Brief Essay on Russian Inflection”, which establishes the main schemes of declension and conjugation, including convenient indexing for each word.

The continuation of the ideology of “Russian nominal inflection” was the classic “Grammar Dictionary of the Russian Language” (1977, 4th ed. 2003), where for 100 thousand words of the Russian language the exact model of inflection is indicated (and a classification of these models themselves is proposed). The dictionary compiled by A. A. Zaliznyak by hand became the basis for almost all computer programs for automatic morphological analysis (including information retrieval, machine translation, etc.). These ideas are also used in the Russian Wiktionary to describe the morphology of Russian nouns, adjectives, verbs, pronouns, and numerals.

Monograph by A. A. Zaliznyak and his major works on general and Russian morphology were republished in the book: A. A. Zaliznyak. "Russian nominal inflection" with the application of selected works on the modern Russian language and general linguistics. M.: Languages ​​of Russian culture, 2002.

Slavic accentology

"Righteous Standard" of the 14th century as an accentological source (1990).

Old Russian and Old Great Russian Accentological Index Dictionary (XIV-XVII centuries) (2011)

Birch bark letters and Old Novgorod dialect

Since 1982, A. A. Zaliznyak has been systematically studying the language of birch bark letters, both already known and newly discovered during excavations. He is a co-author of the publication "Novgorod letters on birch bark" - volumes VIII (1986), IX (1993), X (2000), XI (2004). These volumes contain his works devoted to identifying the specific features of the Old Novgorod dialect, its differences from the supra-dialect Old Russian language, the spelling and paleography of birch bark letters, and the methods of their dating. The generalizing work of A. A. Zaliznyak in this area was the book "Old Novgorod dialect" (1995; 2nd ed. 2004), which presents a grammatical outline of the Old Novgorod dialect and given with a linguistic commentary (more detailed than in the edition) the texts of almost all birch bark letters.

The study of the language of birch bark allowed A. A. Zaliznyak to discover previously unknown strict regularities in the arrangement of enclitics in the Old Russian language, which go back to the Wackernagel law that was in force in the ancient Indo-European languages. The result of these studies was summed up by the book "Old Russian Enclitics" (2008)

"The Tale of Igor's Campaign"

The work "The Tale of Igor's Campaign: a Linguist's View" (2004, 2nd ed. 2007, 3rd ed., revised, 2008) is devoted to the repeatedly discussed question of the authenticity or falsity of "The Tale of Igor's Campaign". From this point of view, the language of the monument is considered. A. A. Zaliznyak shows that a hypothetical falsifier of the 18th century, in order to create the text of the Lay, had to possess a huge amount of accurate knowledge obtained by the science of language already in XIX-XX centuries. Linguistic arguments against the authenticity of the "Word" put forward by various authors are critically examined. Zaliznyak's general conclusion: the probability of the Slovo being fake is vanishingly small.

Indo-European studies and the history of linguistics

Grammatical sketch of Sanskrit (as part of the "Sanskrit-Russian Dictionary" by V. A. Kochergina, 1978; 3rd edition 2005)

About the "Memoir" of F. de Saussure // F. de Saussure. Works on linguistics. M., 1977, p. 289-301.

Popularization of science

A. A. Zaliznyak is known for his popular lectures on the study of ancient Russian birch bark letters, as well as general lectures “On Historical Linguistics” and a number of lectures on “amateur linguistics”, in which he criticized the ideas of marginal linguistics (especially in the works of A. T. Fomenko according to the "New Chronology") as amateurish and built on primitive associations.

Awards

• 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, decoding of ancient Russian texts; for the filigree linguistic study of the primary source of Russian poetry, The Tale of Igor's Campaign, convincingly proving its authenticity.
• He was awarded the Big Gold Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences (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 State Prize of Russia for 2007 - "for an outstanding contribution to the development of linguistics".

List of works

Monographs and dictionaries

• "Concise Russian-French educational dictionary". - M .: Gosud. publishing house of dictionaries, 1961. Ed. 2nd, rev. and add.-M.: Soviet Encyclopedia, 1964. Ed. 3rd, rev. and add.-M .: State. publishing house of dictionaries, 1969. Ed. 4th, rev. and additional - M.: Russian language, 1978
• Zaliznyak A. A. Russian nominal inflection.-M .: Nauka, 1967
• Zaliznyak A. A. Grammatical Dictionary of the Russian Language. Inflection. - M., 1977. Ed. 2nd, rev. and additional -M.: Russian language, 1980. Ed. 3rd. - M.: Russian language, 1987. Ed. 4th, rev. and additional -M.: Russian dictionaries, 2003. Ed. 5th, rev. -M.: Ast-press, 2008
• Zaliznyak A. A. From Proto-Slavic accentuation to Russian.-M .: Nauka, 1985
• Novgorod letters on birch bark (From the excavations of 1977-1983). Comments and an index to birch-bark writings (From the excavations of 1951-1983). - M.: Nauka, 1986. [Co-author. V.L. Yanin]
• "The Righteous Standard" of the 14th century as an accentological source. - Muenchen: Otto Sagner, 1990 (=Slavistische Beitrage, Bd.266)
• Novgorod letters on birch bark (From the excavations of 1984-1989). - M.: Nauka, 1993. [Co-author. V.L. Yanin]
• Zaliznyak A. A. Ancient Novgorod dialect. - M.: School "Languages ​​of Russian culture", 1995. Ed. 2nd, revised taking into account the material found in 1995-2003. -M.: Languages ​​of Slavic culture, 2004
• Novgorod letters on birch bark (From the excavations of 1990-1996). Paleography of birch bark writings and their non-stratigraphic dating. - Volume X. -M, 2000. [Ed. V.L. Yanin]
• Zaliznyak A. A. "Russian nominal inflection" with the application of selected works on the modern Russian language and general linguistics. -M.: Languages ​​of Slavic culture, 2002
• Novgorod letters on birch bark (From the excavations of 1997-2000). -T.XI. -M.: Russian dictionaries, 2004 [Coauthor: V.L. Yanin, A.A. Gippius]
• Zaliznyak A. A. Old Russian enclitics. -M.: Languages ​​of Slavic cultures, 2008
• Zaliznyak A. A. From Notes on Amateur Linguistics. M.: Russian World, 2010. - 240 pages (Series: Alexander Solzhenitsyn Literary Prize) ISBN 978-5-98577-132-7
• Zaliznyak A. A. Works on accentology. Volume I. -M.: Languages ​​of Slavic cultures, 2010. Volume II. Old Russian and Old Great Russian accent dictionary-index (XIV-XVII centuries). - M.: Languages ​​of Slavic cultures, 2011

• Zaliznyak A. A. "The Tale of Igor's Campaign": a linguist's view / Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. - Ed. 3rd, add. - M.: Manuscript monuments of Ancient Rus', 2008. - 480 p. - (Studia philologica. Series minor). - 1000 copies. - ISBN 978-5-9551-0261-0 (in translation)

Key Articles

• On the understanding of the term "case" in linguistic descriptions. I //Problems of grammatical modeling. - M.: Nauka, 1973. -S. 53-87
• On the typology of the relative sentence // Semiotics and Informatics. Issue 6: Grammatical and semiotic problems. -M.: VINITI Publishing House, 1975. -S. 51-101 [Coauthor: E.V. Paducheva]
• Grammatical sketch of Sanskrit // Appendix to: V.A. Kochergin. Sanskrit-Russian Dictionary.-M., 1978. - S. 785-895
• The Accentological System of the Old Russian Manuscript of the 14th Century "The Measure of the Righteous" // Slavic and Balkan Linguistics: History literary languages and writing. -M.: Nauka, 1979. -S.47-128
• Contrasting relative and interrogative pronouns in Old Russian // Balto-Slavic studies 1980. - M .: Nauka, 1981. -S. 89-107
• Contrasting book and "everyday" graphic systems in ancient Novgorod // Finitis duodecim lustris: Collection of articles dedicated to the 60th anniversary of prof. Yu.M. Lotman. - Tallinn: Eesti raamat, 1982. -S. 82-85
• Observations on birch-bark letters // History of the Russian language in the most ancient period. (Questions of historical linguistics. Issue 5). -M.: MGU, 1984. - S. 36-153
• On the language situation in ancient Novgorod // Russian Linguistics. - V. 11. -1987. - No. 2-3. -P. 115-132
• Old Novgorod koine // Balto-Slavic studies 1986. - M .: Nauka, 1988. - P. 164-177
• Transfer of stress to proclitics in Old Great Russian // Historical accentology and comparative historical method. -M.: Nauka, 1989. -S. 116-134
• On some connection between the meaning and stress of Russian adjectives // Slavic and Balkan linguistics: Prosody. -M.: Nauka, 1989. - S. 148-164
• Ogospodin // Problems of Cybernetics: Language of Logic and Logic of Language. - M., 1990. -S. 6-25
• On one use of perfective presence (“presence of vain expectation”) // Metody formalne w opisie j?zyk?w s?owia?skich / Red. Z. Saloni. - Bia?ystok, 1990. -p. 109-114
• The fall of birch bark documents reduced according to the data // Russian Studies Today: Language Functioning: Vocabulary and Grammar. - M., 1992. - S. 82-105
• Participation of Women in Ancient Russian Correspondence on Birch Bark // Russian Spiritual Culture / Ed. Luigi Magarotto and Daniela Rizzi. Department of the History of European Civilization. University of Trento -1992. - E. 127-146
• On one previously unknown reflex of combinations of the type *TъrT in the Old Novgorod dialect // Balto-Slavic studies 1988-1996. -M., 1997. -S. 250-258
• Novgorod code of the first quarter of the 11th century. - ancient book Rus' // Questions of linguistics. - 2001. - No. 5. -WITH. 3-25
• Principles of controversy according to A.T. Fomenko // History and anti-history. Criticism of the "new chronology" of Academician A.T. Fomenko. Analysis of A.T. Fomenko. - M., 2001. -S. 546-556
• Anna Yaroslavna's signature and the question of non-book writing in ancient Rus'// Anthropology of culture: To the 75th anniversary of Vyacheslav Vsevolodovich Ivanov. - M., 2005. -S. 139-147
• Connection of verbal nouns into -nie, -tie with the verb aspect // Terra Balcanica. Terra Slavica: To the anniversary of Tatyana Vladimirovna Tsivyan. (Balkan Readings; 9). -M. 2007. -S. 43-51
• From Observations on the Language of Athanasius Nikitin // Miscellania Slavica. Collection of articles dedicated to the 70th anniversary of B.A. Uspensky. - M.: Indrik, 2008. - S. 150-163

About him

• S. A. Krylov. “Russian nominal inflection” by A. A. Zaliznyak thirty years later: the experience of a retrospective review // A. A. Zaliznyak. "Russian nominal inflection" with the application of selected works on the modern Russian language and general linguistics. M .: "Languages ​​of Slavic culture", 2002, p. 699-748.
• V. M. Zhivov, V. A. Plungyan. On the linguistic works of A. A. Zaliznyak // Proceedings of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Literature and Language Series, 2005, vol. 64, no. 3, p. 3-12.