Alexander Vovin

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Alexander (Sasha) Vladimirovich Vovin (Russian: Александр Владимирович Вовин; 27 January 1961 – 8 April 2022) was a Soviet-born Russian-American linguist and philologist, and director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, France. He was a world-renowned linguist, well known for his research on East Asian languages.

Education

Alexander Vovin earned his M.A. in structural and applied linguistics from the Saint Petersburg State University in 1983, and his Ph.D. in historical Japanese linguistics and premodern Japanese literature from the same university in 1987, with a doctoral dissertation on the Hamamatsu Chūnagon Monogatari (ca. 1056).^[1]

Career

After serving as a

In 2014, Vovin accepted the position of Director of Studies at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO) unit of the EHESS, where he remained until his death in 2022.^[2]

Alexander Vovin specialized in Japanese historical linguistics (with emphasis on etymology, morphology, and phonology), and Japanese philology of the Nara period (710–792), and to a lesser extent of the Heian period (792–1192). His last project before his death involved the complete academic translation into English of the Man'yōshū (ca. 759), the earliest and the largest premodern Japanese poetic anthology, alongside the critical edition of the original text and commentaries. He also researched the moribund Ainu language in northern Japan, and worked on Inner Asian languages and Kra–Dai languages, especially those preserved only in Chinese transcription, as well as on Old and Middle Korean texts.^[3]

His last work, published in 2021, is on the

He had been engaged in coordinating the Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic Languages from 2019 to the time of his death in 2022, with cooperation from several universities and European Union funding of €2,470,200,00.[5] However, the project was terminated upon his death.

Personal life

He was married twice: first to Varvara G. Lebedeva-Vovina (née Churakova), with whom they have a son, Aleksei, born in 1982, and the second time to Sambi Ishisaki (石崎賛美) from 2000.^[3] Sambi was a fellow researcher of the Japanese language,^[6] whom he later had three children with.

He died on 8 April 2022, at the age of 61 from cancer.^[2][7]

Publications

• Vovin, Alexander (1993). A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu. Leiden: E. J. Brill.
  ISBN 90-04-09905-0
  .
• Vovin, Alexander. (2000). Did the Xiong-nu speak a Yeniseian language?. Central Asiatic Journal, 44(1), pages 87–104.
  JSTOR 41928223
  .
• Vovin, Alexander. (2001). Japanese, Korean and Tungusic. Evidence for genetic relationship from verbal morphology. David B. Honey and David C. Wright (eds.), pages 183–202.
• Vovin, Alexander; Osada Toshiki (長田俊樹), eds. (2003). 日本語系統論の現在 [Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese Language]. Nichibunken sōsho, 31. Kyoto:
  ISSN 1346-6585
  .
• Vovin, Alexander (2003). A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose. London: RoutledgeCurzon.
  ISBN 0-7007-1716-1
  .
• Vovin, Alexander. (2003). Once again on lenition in Middle Korean. Korean Studies, 27, pages 85–107.
  JSTOR 23719571
  .
• Vovin, Alexander (2005). A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese: Part 1: Sources, Script and Phonology, Lexicon and Nominals. Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental.
  ISBN 1-901903-14-1
  .
• Vovin, Alexander (2006). The Manchu-Tungusic Languages. Richmond: RoutledgeCurzon.
  ISBN 978-0-7007-1284-7
  .
• Vovin, Alexander (2008). Korea-Japonica: A Re-evaluation of a Common Genetic Origin. Hawaii studies on Korea. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press.
  ISBN 978-0-8248-3278-0
  .
• Vovin, Alexander (2009–2018). Man'yoshu: A New English Translation Containing the Original Text, Kana Transliteration, Romanization, Glossing and Commentary. Global Oriental/Brill., 20 volumes
• Vovin, Alexander (2009). A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese: Part 2: Adjectives, Verbs, Adverbs, Conjunctions, Particles, Postpositions. Folkestone, Kent: Global Oriental.
  ISBN 978-1-905246-82-3
  .
• Vovin, Alexander. (2011). Why Japonic is not demonstrably related to 'Altaic' or Korean. In Historical Linguistics in the Asia-Pacific region and the position of Japanese, The International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL) XX.
• Vovin, Alexander. & McCraw, D. (2011). Old Turkic Kinship Terms in Early Middle Chinese. Türk Dili Araştırmaları Yıllığı Belleten, 59(1), 105–116.
• Vovin, Alexander. (2017). Koreanic loanwords in Khitan and their importance in the decipherment of the latter[
  doi:10.1556/062.2017.70.2.4
• Vovin, Alexander; Ishisaki-Vovin, Sambi (2021). The Eastern Old Japanese Corpus and Dictionary. Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 5 Japan, Volume 17. Brill.
  ISBN 978-90-04-47119-1
  .
• Vovin, Alexander (2021). The Footprints of the Buddha. The Text and the Language. Leiden: Brill.
  ISBN 978-9-004-44977-0
  .