Iakovlev, Nikolai Feofanovich
Iakovlev, Nikolai Feofanovich
Born May 10 (22), 1892, on the khutor (farmstead) of Bulgarin in the Oblast of the Don Host, in what is now Atkarsk Raion, Saratov Oblast; died Dec. 30, 1974, in Moscow. Soviet linguist; specialist in Caucasian languages and general phonetics. Professor (1946); doctor of philological sciences (1947).
Iakovlev graduated from Moscow University in 1916. He became a research worker at the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR in 1936 and headed the institute’s section of Caucasian languages from 1942 to 1950. In 1920, Iakovlev led the first in a series of annual expeditions to study the unwritten languages of the Northern Caucasus and Dagestan. In 1923 he arrived at a linguistically consistent substantiation for the theory of the phoneme. Drawing on this work, Iakovlev created between 1923 and 1940 approximately 70 national writing systems, based at first on the Latin alphabet and subsequently on the Russian alphabets.
WORKS
Ingushi. Moscow-Leningrad, 1925.Sintaksis chechenskogo literaturnogo iazyka. Moscow-Leningrad, 1940.
Grammatika literaturnogo kabardino-cherkesskogo iazyka. Moscow-Leningrad, 1948.
REFERENCES
Panov, M. V. “Teoriia fonem N. F. Iakovleva i sozdanie novykh pis’-mennostei v SSSR.” Narody Azii i Afriki, 1974, no. 4.Miliband, S. D. Biobibliograficheskii slovar’ sovetskikh vostokovedov. Moscow, 1975.
F. D. ASHNIN