Max Vasmer

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Max Vasmer
etymologist

Max Julius Friedrich Vasmer (German:

linguist. He studied problems of etymology in Indo-European, Finno-Ugric and Turkic languages and worked on the history of Slavic, Baltic, Iranian
, and Finno-Ugric peoples.

Biography

Born to German parents in

University of Berlin.[citation needed
] In 1941 he published the book "The Slavs in Greece" (Die Slaven in Griechenland) and in 1944 the book "The Greek loanwords in Serbo-Croatian" (Die griechischen Lehnwörter im Serbo-Kroatischen).

In 1944, the bombing of Vasmer's house in Berlin destroyed most of his materials. Nevertheless, Vasmer persevered in his work, which was finally published in three volumes by Heidelberg University in 1950–1958 as Russisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. Vasmer died in West Berlin on 30 November 1962.[citation needed]

The Russian translation of Vasmer's dictionary – with extensive commentaries by Oleg Trubachyov – was printed in 1964–1973. As of 2015, it remains the most authoritative source for Slavic etymology. The Russian version is available on Sergei Starostin's Tower of Babel web site.[citation needed]

Another monumental work led by Max Vasmer involved the compilation of a multi-volume dictionary of Russian names of rivers and other bodies of water.[1] He initiated an even grander project, completed by a team of workers after his death: the publication of a monumental (11 volumes) gazetteer that included virtually all names of populated places in Russia found both in pre-revolutionary and in Soviet sources.[2]

See also

References

  1. ^ "Wörterbuch der russischen Gewässernamen" (Dictionary of Russian Hydronyms); compiled by A. Kerndl, R. Richhardt, and W. Eisold, under leadership of Max Vasmer. Wiesbaden, O. Harrassowitz, 1961
  2. ISBN 3-447-02923-4
    .

External links
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Max_Vasmer&oldid=1204740380"