Anatoly Liberman


Anatoly Liberman is a linguist, medievalist, etymologist, poet, translator of poetry, and literary critic.
Liberman is a professor in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic and Dutch at the University of Minnesota, where since 1975 he has taught courses on the history of all the Germanic languages and literatures, folklore, mythology, lexicography, European structuralism and Russian formalism. He has published works on Germanic historical phonetics, English etymology, mythology/folklore, the history of philology, and poetic translation. He publishes a blog, "The Oxford Etymologist".
He is an advocate of spelling reform.

Early life

Liberman was born in St. Petersburg on 10 March 1937. His father was killed in action in 1941. He graduated from Leningrad State Herzen Pedagogical Institute in 1959, and then taught English for three years at a boarding school for underprivileged children in the Leningrad region.
During that time he studied on his own and passed what is known in Russia as the candidate minimum.
After returning to Leningrad in 1962, Liberman taught English at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute and became an extramural graduate student at Leningrad University.
Liberman's academic adviser was Professor M. I. Steblin-Kamenskij, at that time a Soviet scholar in Old Icelandic literature and Germanic historical phonology. In 1965 he defended his Candidate of Philological Sciences dissertation on a topic of Middle English historical phonology, and in the same year Nikita Khrushchev ordered all the institutes of the Academy of Sciences to open groups for the study of what he called "the Scandinavian experience." Steblin-Kamenskij was invited to head such a group at the Institute of Linguistics and invited Liberman to be his full-time junior assistant. There he stayed until his emigration in 1975. In 1972 he defended his Doctor of Philological Sciences dissertation titled "Icelandic Prosody." At Minnesota since 1975, he spent one year as a Hill Visiting Professor and two years as an associate professor; after that he was promoted to full professorship.

Phonological theories

Liberman's main ideas in phonology are as follows: 1) A non-contradictory theory of phonology is probably unattainable, because we lack the means of segmenting the speech current into phonemes. 2) The most adequate model of a phonetic change continuing for centuries, such as apocope and consonant shifts, is that of a change caused by some event and is over once the potential of the initial impulse has been used up. The cause of every major change is another change. 3) Stress is not a force but a privileged position in a word, a position in which some oppositions occur that are not allowed in any other syllable. 4) The greatest phonetic changes in the history of Germanic were the concentration of all distinctive features in the root syllable and consonantal lenition as its consequence. 5) Allophones, that is, the phonetic variants of a phoneme, cannot be phonologized In Germanic, systemic changes of short vowels are reactions to changes in long vowels. Likewise, changes of voiced consonants are triggered by changes in voiceless consonants; what appears as voicing is really weakening.

Works on etymology

Liberman seeks to build an exhaustive purview of previous conjectures and hypotheses on word origins. His team has collected tens of thousands of articles on etymology from hundreds of journals, book chapters, and Festschriften, which feed his works. His books in this area include Etymology for Everyone: Word Origins and How We Know Them and A Bibliography of English Etymology. He has also published articles on individual words and groups of related words.

Poetical works

His poetical works include translations and extended commentary on Mikhail Lermontov, Fyodor Tyutchev, and Shakespeare.
Original poetry has appeared in the journals Vstrechi , Poberezh'e , Novyi Zhurnal , and Mosty'' .

Works on the history of philology

At the University of Minnesota : Scholar of the College, McKnight fellowship, Bush fellowship, Fesler-Lampert Professorship, inclusion in The Wall of Discovery, and an award for distinguished contribution to graduate and professional education.
From outside sources : a fellowship from the American-Scandinavian Foundation, Guggenheim Fellowship, Fulbright research fellowship, NEH Summer Seminars, Fellowship at Clare Hall, NEH Summer Scholarship, summer scholarship from the University of Rome, a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies ; a certificate and a prize for a meritorious paper at the International Phonetic Congress 1977, Miami Beach, The Katharine Briggs Folklore Award by the Folklore Society, the Verbatim Dictionary Society of North America award for best project of the year, MLA's annual prize for "a distinguished bibliography". Word Origins… was a selection of the Book of the Month Club and three other clubs. In 2014 Liberman was elected President of the English Spelling Society, and in 2015 Fellow of the Dictionary Society of North America. In 1997 a Festschrift was published under the title Germanic Studies in Honor of Anatoly Liberman, NOWELE 31–32.