Porzhezinskii, Viktor Karlovich

Born Aug. 4, 1870, in Morshansk, now in Tambov Oblast; died Mar. 12, 1929, in Warsaw. Russian and Polish linguist, member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1925).

Porzhezinskii graduated from Moscow University in 1892. He studied under F. F. Fortunatov. Porzhezinskii was a professor at Moscow University from 1901 to 1921 and at the universities of Lublin and Warsaw from 1922 to 1929 and was a member of scholarly societies in Russia and Poland. His major works dealt with the history and dialectology of the Baltic languages. (He viewed the Baltic and Slavic languages as primordially related.) Porzhezinskii studied the Slavic languages, especially Polabian. Some of his works dealt with the interaction of the West Slavic languages. His dissertations Toward a History of Conjugational Forms in the Baltic Languages (1901) and The Reflexive Form of Verbs in Lithuanian and Latvian (1903), as well as the textbooks Comparative Morphology of Old Indic, Greek, Latin, and Old Church Slavonic (1916) and Introduction to Indo-European Linguistics (1929), are highly original contributions to comparative-historical and Indo-European linguistics.