Alexander Vovin
Russian-American linguist (1961–2022)
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Education
Vovin earned his M.A. in structural and applied linguistics from the Saint Petersburg State University in 1983, and his Ph.D. in historical Japanese linguistics and premodern Japanese literature from the same university in 1987, with a doctoral dissertation on the Hamamatsu Chūnagon Monogatari (ca. 1056).
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Career
Vovin served as a Junior Researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Studies from 1987–1990. However, because he was unable to get permission to visit Japan and other East Asian countries from the Soviet government, he moved to the United States in 1990. There, he held positions as assistant professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan (1990–1994), assistant professor at Miami University (1994–1995), and assistant, associate, and full professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1995–2014). He was visiting professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto from 2001 to 2002 and again in 2008, a visiting professor at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany (2008–2009), and a visiting professor at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) in Tokyo, Japan from May to August 2012.
In 2014, Vovin accepted the position of Director of Studies at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO) unit of the EHESS, where he remained until his death in 2022.
Early in Vovin's career he was a supporter of the Altaic hypothesis, but beginning in the 2000s, he published several papers arguing against it.
Vovin specialized in Japanese historical linguistics (with emphasis on etymology, morphology, and phonology), and Japanese philology of the Nara period (710–792), and to a lesser extent of the Heian period (792–1192). His last project before his death involved the complete academic translation into English of the Man'yōshū (ca. 759), the earliest and the largest premodern Japanese poetic anthology, alongside the critical edition of the original text and commentaries. He also researched the moribund Ainu language in northern Japan, and worked on Inner Asian languages and Kra–Dai languages, especially those preserved only in Chinese transcription, as well as on Old and Middle Korean texts.
His last work, published in 2021, is on the Bussokuseki no Uta of Yakushi-ji temple in Nara. In the same year, a festschrift was dedicated to Vovin on his 60th birthday.
He had been engaged in coordinating the Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic Languages from 2019 to the time of his death in 2022, with cooperation from several universities and European Union funding of €2,470,200,00. However, the project was terminated upon his death.
Personal life
Vovin was married twice: first to Varvara G. Lebedeva-Vovina (née Churakova), with whom they have a son, Aleksei, born in 1982, and the second time to fellow Japanese language researcher Sambi Ishisaki (Japanese: 石崎賛美) in 2000. Two more children were born to the second marriage.
He died on 8 April 2022, at the age of 61, from cancer.