Paul Aleksandrovich Ariste

Born Feb. 3, 1905. Soviet linguist. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Estonian SSR (1954).

Ariste graduated from the University of Tartu in 1929. He furthered his studies of the Finno-Ugric languages, especially their phonetics, in Uppsala, Helsinki, and Hamburg. A professor at the University of Tartu, he is an honorary member of international societies in Finland and an honorary member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Ariste is editor in chief of the journal Sovetskoe finno-ugrovedenie. His major works are devoted primarily to the Estonian language and other Baltic-Finnish languages and dialects and to problems of general Finno-Ugric language studies, particularly to the experimental and historical study of Estonian phonetics and phonology. Ariste also studied the Vod’, Li-vian, and Izhora languages, as well as Esperanto.