Boris Mikhailovich Liapunov

Born July 25 (Aug. 6), 1862, in the village of Bolobonovo, in present-day Pil’na Raion, Gorky Oblast; died Feb. 22, 1943, in Borovoe, Akmolinsk Oblast. Russian Slavic scholar. Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR (1923).

In 1885, Liapunov graduated from St. Petersburg University, where he was a student of I. V. lagich. He was a professor at the universities in Odessa (1903-23) and Leningrad (1924-29). Liapunov belonged to the linguistic school of F. F. Fortunatov; he studied the comparative grammar of the Slavic languages, the history of Common Slavic (the formation and interrelations of its dialects, the origin of its declensional forms, problems in phonetics), the history of the individual Slavic languages and language groups, and etymology.

Liapunov criticized the theory about the fragmentation of Common Slavic into protolanguages of different branches. His basic works are An Investigation of the Language of the Synodal Version of the First Novgorod Chronicle (issue 1, 1899), Forms of Declension in Old Church Slavic (1905), and a lithographed course of lectures on the comparative phonetics of the Slavic languages (1913-14). Liapunov was an academician of the Polish Academy of Sciences (1930) and a corresponding member of the Bulgarian and Czech academies of science (1932 and 1934, respectively).