January 24, 2018 marks the 145th anniversary of the birth of Dmitry Nikolayevich Ushakov, a lexicographer who compiled a 4-volume explanatory and spelling dictionaries. In our small but informative article, we will tell you about the life of the Russian philologist, his merits in linguistics, and give a few memoirs of colleagues about Ushakov.
Childhood
A talented linguist, the first researcher of Russian orthoepy, and part-time editor and compiler of one of the explanatory dictionaries of the Russian language, Dmitry Nikolaevich Ushakov was born on January 24, according to the new style, in 1873 in Moscow. Together with his family, he lived at the intersection of Krestovozdvizhensky Lane and Vozdvizhenka.
When little Dima was 2 years old, a tragedy occurred in the family: his father, a successful Moscow ophthalmologist, died. Then the child was brought up in the house of his maternal grandfather. His grandfather served as archpriest inAssumption Cathedral of the Moscow Kremlin.
The boy received his primary education at home.
- At the age of 9 (in 1882), little Dima entered the Moscow gymnasium, where he studied for 6 years.
- In 1889, he moved to the 7th grade of gymnasium No. 5, which was located on the corner of Bolshaya Molchanovka and Povarskaya.
- In 1891, a graduate of the gymnasium, Dmitry Nikolaevich Ushakov, whose biography we are considering, enters the university at the Faculty of History and Philology.
At that time, Ushakov's teacher was Professor Philip Fedorovich Fortunatov, far from the last figure in Russian linguistics.
Scientific activity
After graduating from university, Ushakov enters the service of the school, where he teaches children the Russian language and literature for 17 years. In 1907, he simultaneously taught at Moscow State University. He has over 28 years of university teaching experience. During this time, Ushakov held the positions of assistant professor, and then he was promoted to senior assistant, a little later he became a full-time assistant professor, and, finally, he acquired the title of professor. In the late 1930s, Ushakov Dmitry Nikolaevich led the Slavic sector at the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union. Throughout his scientific and pedagogical activity, Dmitry Nikolaevich has lectured at various educational institutions. His speeches were listened to at higher pedagogical courses, at the military pedagogical school, and also at the Bryusov Literary Institute.
He wrote the first domestic textbook onLinguistics, which has been reprinted 9 times!
In January 1936, Ushakov was awarded the degree of Doctor of Linguistics, and 3 years later he became a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the Soviet Union.
When the terrible Great Patriotic War began, he was evacuated to Uzbekistan.
A year later, on April 17, 1942, Dmitry Nikolaevich Ushakov passes away in the city of Tashkent.
Merits of a scientist that every philologist and not only should know about
Dmitry Ushakov became famous among the people as the author and compiler of the explanatory dictionary, which was published in the mid-1930s. Ushakov led a group of authors, which included no less talented scientists: Vinogradov, Vinokur, Ozhegov, Tomashevsky and other philologists.
In addition to the fact that the scientist compiled an explanatory dictionary, Dmitry Nikolaevich Ushakov made a contribution to the Russian language not only in the field of lexicography, but also in spelling and dialectology.
The scientist actively promoted the reform of Russian spelling, and at the beginning of the 20th century he published the book "Russian Spelling". The Academy of Sciences implemented the Russian spelling reform only in 1918.
In 1915, Ushakov Dmitry Nikolaevich, whose photo you see below, headed the dialectological commission at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. The purpose of this commission was to create a dialect map for the European part of the Soviet Union, it reflected the dialects of the Slavic peoples: Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians.
From the memories of contemporaries
- Avanesov Ruben Ivanovich, a Soviet linguist and colleague of Dmitry Ushakov, admired his work in his memoirs. He noted that Ushakov developed and applied a weighty and multifaceted system of marks in stylistic terms. Today, in the dictionary entry of explanatory dictionaries, we see litters: book, colloquial, official. and others.
- Reformatsky Alexander Alexandrovich recalled that Ushakov liked to communicate with people. He actively interacted with teachers and students, actors, doctors, singers and officials of various departments who were semi-literate. He noticed that Dmitry Nikolayevich taught his colleagues not to isolate themselves from the life around them, but to enlighten the Russian people.
In closing
So, our article has come to an end. Russian philologist and linguist Dmitry Ushakov is an example of how to love your native language and work hard. And even in the evacuation in Tashkent, a year before his death, Dmitry Nikolayevich began to study the Uzbek language, and then compiled a small Russian-Uzbek phrasebook.
