Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics

History

The founders of the school are Vladislav Illich-Svitych and Aharon Dolgopolsky. Vladimir Dybo, Vyacheslav Ivanov, and Andrey Zaliznyak also played key roles in the founding of the school.

In 1962, Illich-Svitych began working on a book about Nostrative comparative linguistics called A Tentative Comparison of the Nostratic Languages (Russian: Опытом сравнения ностратических языков). After the death of Illich-Svitych, his colleagues, Vladimir Dybo and Aharon Dolgopolsky, completed and published the book. Initially, Illich-Svitych and Dolgopolsky were probably doing research on Nostratic independently of each other. Both Dolgopolsky and Illich-Svitych published their first articles on Nostratic linguistics in 1964. Conferences and seminars on Nostratic comparative linguistics were organized in the 1960s. Originally, they were held informally at Vladimir Dybo's apartment, and were only formally held at the Russian State University for the Humanities since 1992.

The first generation of the school includes the Russian linguists Sergei Starostin, Sergei Nikolaev, Alexander Militarev, Ilia Peiros, Anna Dybo, Oleg Mudrak, Olga Stolbova, and Eugene Helimski. The second generation mainly consists of graduates of the Faculty of Linguistics (now the Institute of Linguistics) of the Russian State University for the Humanities from the 1990s.

During the 1960s and 1970s, the school was centered at the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics of the Faculty of Philology at Moscow State University. In the 1990s, the school moved to the Faculty of Linguistics of the Russian State University for the Humanities (RSUH). Some members are also affiliated with the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

From the 1970s until his death in 2005, Sergei Starostin was the informal "head of the Moscow school," and since 1999, the formal head of the Center of Comparative Linguistics at the RSUH Institute for Oriental and Classical Studies.

Other linguists closely associated with the Moscow School of Comparative Linguistics include Václav Blažek, Irén Hegedűs, Murray Gell-Mann, John Bengtson, and Allan Bomhard.