Max Vasmer.
(
February 28,
1886 –
November 30,
1962) was a
Russian-born
German linguist who studied problems of
etymology of
Indo-European,
Finno-Ugric 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, he worked in the Universities
of Saratov and
Yuryev (
Tartu). In 1921 he settled in
Leipzig but later moved to
Berlin. In 1937–38, he delivered lectures at
Columbia University in
New York City. 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
Alexander Brueckner 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 on
November 30,
1962.
The
Russian 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'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. 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 that included virtually all names of populated places in Russia found both in pre-revolutionary and Soviet sources.
See also
