Max Vasmer was a Russia

Russia

Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n-born German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 linguist

Linguistics

Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....

 who studied problems of etymology

Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words, their origins, and how their form and meaning have changed over time.For languages with a long written history, etymologists make use of texts in these languages and texts about the languages to gather knowledge about how words were used during...

 of Indo-European

Indo-European languages

The Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major current languages of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and South Asia and also historically predominant in Anatolia...

, Finno-Ugric

Finno-Ugric languages

Finno-Ugric , Finno-Ugrian or Fenno-Ugric is a traditional group of languages in the Uralic language family that comprises the Finno-Permic and Ugric language families....

 and Turkic languages and worked on history of Slavic, Baltic, Iranian, and Finno-Ugric peoples.

Vasmer was born of German parents in St. Petersburg and graduated from the St. Petersburg University in 1907. Since 1910, he delivered lectures there as a professor. During the Russian Civil War

Russian Civil War

The Russian Civil War was a multi-party war that occurred within the former Russian Empire after the Russian provisional government collapsed to the Soviets, under the domination of the Bolshevik party. Soviet forces first assumed power in Petrograd The Russian Civil War (1917–1923) was a...

, he worked in the Universities of Saratov

Saratov State University

Saratov State University is a major higher education and research institution in Russia. Founded in 1909 as Imperial Saratov University, the university is located in the Volga River region in the city of Saratov...

 and Yuryev

University of Tartu

The University of Tartu is a classical university in the city of Tartu, Estonia. University of Tartu is the national university of Estonia; it is the biggest and highest-ranked university in Estonia...

 (Tartu

Tartu

Tartu is the second largest city of Estonia. In contrast to Estonia's political and financial capital Tallinn, Tartu is often considered the intellectual and cultural hub, especially since it is home to Estonia's oldest and most renowned university. Situated 186 km southeast of Tallinn, the...

). In 1921 he settled in Leipzig

Leipzig

Leipzig Leipzig has always been a trade city, situated during the time of the Holy Roman Empire at the intersection of the Via Regia and Via Imperii, two important trade routes. At one time, Leipzig was one of the major European centres of learning and culture in fields such as music and publishing...

 but later moved to Berlin

Berlin

Berlin is the capital city of Germany and is one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.45 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city. It is the second most populous city proper and the seventh most populous urban area in the European Union...

. In 1937–38, he delivered lectures at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

. It was there that he started to work on his magnum opus, the Etymological dictionary of the Russian language. He delivered the eulogy for Professor Aleksander Brückner

Aleksander Brückner

Aleksander Brückner was a Polish scholar of Slavic languages and literatures , philologist, lexicographer and historian of literature. He is among the most notable Slavicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the first to prepare complete monographs on the history of Polish language...

 in Berlin Wilmersdorf in 1939 and he took over the chair of Slavistic studies at the Berlin University.

In 1944, Vasmer's house in Berlin was bombed, and most of his materials perished. Nevertheless, Vasmer persevered in his work, which was finally published in four volumes by Heidelberg University in 1950–58 as . Vasmer died in West Berlin

West Berlin

West Berlin was a political exclave that existed between 1949 and 1990. It comprised the western regions of Berlin, which were bordered by East Berlin and parts of East Germany. West Berlin consisted of the American, British, and French occupation sectors, which had been established in 1945...

 on November 30, 1962.

The Russian

Russian language

Russian is a Slavic language used primarily in Russia, Belarus, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. It is an unofficial but widely spoken language in Ukraine, Moldova, Latvia, Turkmenistan and Estonia and, to a lesser extent, the other countries that were once constituent republics...

 translation of Vasmer's dictionary with extensive commentaries by Oleg N. Trubachev was printed in 1964–73. It is the most authoritative source for Slavic-languages etymology to this day. The Russian version is available on Sergei Starostin

Sergei Starostin

Dr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin was a Russian historical linguist and scholar, best known for his work with hypothetical proto-languages, including his work on the reconstruction of the Proto-Borean language, the controversial theory of Altaic languages and the formulation of the Dené–Caucasian...

's Tower of Babel web site.

Another monumental work led by Max Vasmer was the compilation of a multi-volume dictionary of Russian names of rivers and other bodies of water

Hydronym

A hydronym is a proper name of a body of water. Hydronymy is the study of hydronyms and of how bodies of water receive their names and how they are transmitted through history...

. He was the initiator of an even more major project, completed by a team of workers after his death: the creation of a monumental (11 volumes) gazetteer

Gazetteer

A gazetteer is a geographical dictionary or directory, an important reference for information about places and place names , used in conjunction with a map or a full atlas. It typically contains information concerning the geographical makeup of a country, region, or continent as well as the social...

 that included virtually all names of populated places in Russia found both in pre-revolutionary and Soviet sources.

External links

• Query the Russian dictionaries at Sergei Starostin
  Sergei Starostin
  Dr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin was a Russian historical linguist and scholar, best known for his work with hypothetical proto-languages, including his work on the reconstruction of the Proto-Borean language, the controversial theory of Altaic languages and the formulation of the Dené–Caucasian...
  
  's Tower of Babel