25.1434, Let's Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014: Irina Nevskaya

Tue Mar 25 17:12:02 UTC 2014

LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1434. Tue Mar 25 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.1434, Let's Welcome Our Next Featured Linguist for 2014: Irina Nevskaya

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Date: Tue, 25 Mar 2014 13:11:03
From: LINGUIST List [linguist at linguistlist.org]
Subject: TraveLING Along with Featured Linguist Irina Nevskaya

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Today we are traveLING to Eastern Europe and Russia. So let’s welcome our new
Featured Linguist Irina Nevskaya who comes from Mountainous Shoriya in the
heart of southwest Siberia. Read below what led her to the path of linguistics
and what research she is currently undertaking.

How I Became a Linguist by Irina Nevskaya

I was born in 1958 in Mountainous Shoriya, named so after the Turkic
indigenous people – the Shors.  I learned that fact in the Museum of Natural
History of the Region when I was a school-girl. However, I had never suspected
that the Shors had still survived in these mountains until I started to work
as a University teacher at the Chair of Foreign Languages of the Novokuzneck
State Pedagogical Institute, today it is the Kuzbass State Pedagogical
Academy, Russia. At that time, the head of the Chair was Ėlektron Čispijakov,
a Shor person himself. He organized a Circle of the Shor language for young
University teachers of the Chair, graduates of the Faculty of Foreign
Languages of this University. He taught us Turcology and the Shor language in
1980-1986. There were no Shor textbooks, no Shor dictionary at that time. He
wrote textbook and taught us using the written lessons. I learnt that the
Shors still spoke their language which had survived in spite of the absence of
any official support and persecutions. I also learnt that the language had had
a written form, but could not preserve it. At that time, it was neither
written, nor taught at school. I studied the language and the people and went
on field work among the Shors during my summer vacations – by train, by bus,
by boat, on foot, or by a helicopter which was and still is the only way to
get to some Shor villages. The more I learnt about the Shor language and the
people, the more I wanted to help the people to preserve (or even to revive)
their language. I also got interested in Turkic languages and in their
language structure, different from that of the Indo-European languages I had
been familiar with until that time.

You might be interested in the question why teachers of foreign languages were
engaged in language research on indigenous languages. You see, there were no
chairs of indigenous languages of Siberia, where specialists in these
languages could be trained at that time. Foreign language teachers were the
only language specialists available in Siberia. And this is kind of a
tradition in Siberia that foreign language teachers were the first linguists
doing research on indigenous languages of Siberia, starting from Wilhelm
Radloff, a German language teacher in Barnaul in the nineteenth century (who
later became the first Russian Academician – Turcologist and is considered to
be the father of Russian Turcology), followed in the middle of the twentieth
century by Andrey Dulzon in Tomsk and his apprentices, one of which was
Ėlektron Čispijakov.

As a student of the Department of Germanic Languages I was already interested
in various linguistic issues. In my first year at the University, I chose to
write a course paper to the topic “Language as a System of Systems”. A very
ambitious topic for a first-year student! However, the work on the topic
showed me that Language is a well-structured phenomenon, even if one might not
see that at a first glance. I was actually very good at Mathematics and other
Natural Sciences at school and even won various competitions of school
children in Mathematics. But I chose to study Linguistics, partially following
a family tradition – my mother was a teacher of Russian at school, an
excellent one, by the way, and many of my relatives were, - and partially
because I thought that Mathematics would be too easy to deal with for me. To
try to understand language structures and how they reflect reality was much
more exciting. I remember my being absorbed in thoughts on the functions of
the Infinitive in English once to such degree, that I even did not answer when
my fellow-students applied to me. They asked me what I was thinking about, and
I honestly answered that I was thinking about the infinitive functions. You
realize that that became a running gag when they spoke about me after that.
Nevertheless, exactly the functions of gerunds in Shor became the topic of my
Doctoral thesis I wrote in 1986-1989 at the Institute of Philology of the
Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

It was already the time of “perestrojka” in the Soviet Union and that of the
rise of national sentiments of all its nations which was not always peaceful.
It was a very difficult, but also a fascinating time! Students and teachers
were starving. In order to survive I had to do five different jobs at a time –
from teaching at the University to translating cartoons for the local TV.
However, I also wanted to help the Shor people to revive their language.
Together with some colleagues of the Chair of Foreign Languages I organized
Shor language courses, started a Shor electronic database and organized and
headed the club of Shor young people named after a national epic hero Ölgüdek
for a few years. One of the activities of the Club was publishing a Shor Youth
Journal in the Shor language which was the first published book in Shor after
a break of more than half a century. In 1988, the Chair of the Shor Language
and Literature was created at my University; the language got its new
orthography and became to be taught at the University and at schools in
Shoriya, first by the graduates of the Shor language courses, and then by
graduates of the Shor Department. An Association of the Shor people was
created; the Shor language was included into the list of indigenous languages
of Russia to be supported by the Government.

Because of the lack of financing we had to freeze the program of creating a
Shor electronic database. I concentrated on the individual research and wrote
my second Doctorate (called Habilitation in German) on spatial constructions
in Shor and other Siberian Turkic languages. I applied for and got a Humboldt
stipend in Germany. From that time, I have been in Germany teaching in
Frankfurt and Berlin and participating in various projects, most of which I
have conceptualized myself. They are mostly connected with Siberia in some
way. In particular, we have resumed our project on Shor electronic database
thanks to the support of German and Russian Foundations. Another project was
on documenting Chalkan, another endangered South Siberian Turkic variety.
For the last ten years I have been documenting Old Turkic Runic inscriptions
in Mountainous Altai doing field research in the Altai Mountains during my
University vacations. Together with colleagues from the Republic Altai I have
published a “Catalogue of Altai Runic inscriptions” (2012), and created a
database of the collected materials on the Internet. Now I hold a replacement
professorship in Turcology at the Frankfurt University and I am engaged in
deciphering archive materials on Siberian Turkic, in documenting various
Turkic varieties and Old Turkic inscriptions, in investigating various
language categories (Prospective, Depictive, Clusivity, etc.) among other
things. I am very happy that I have an opportunity to do what I really like.
The only problem is that there is so much work to do and so little time to do
all I would love to.

Irina Nevskaya

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-1434	
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