Maria Zajceva in memoriam

[Johanna Laakso]

Dear URA-LISTers,

colleagues in Helsinki just forwarded me sad news from Petrozavodsk: Maria Zajceva passed away yesterday, 27 September.

Maria Zajceva was born in a Vepsian peasant family on 14 April 1927 in Shoksha, on the coast of Lake Onega. When she was 4 years old, her family moved to Petrozavodsk, where she went to a Finnish-language school; Finnish was her school language also during the time of Finnish occupation in the war years. In 1951, she began her studies at the Finno-Ugric department of the University of Petrozavodsk; after graduating, she – like many other Finno-Ugrists of the former Soviet Union – spent some time at the University of Tartu, at the legendary Finno-Ugric department led by Paul Ariste. After her return to Petrozavodsk, she worked at the Research Institute for Language, Literature and History until her retirement in 1986. During these years, she conducted fieldwork in practically all Vepsian-language areas, also in villages which had not yet been "covered" by other, mainly Finnish, linguists. In 1966, she defended her candidate's thesis on suffixal verb derivation in Vepsian at t!
 he University of Tartu, but the work only appeared as a monograph in 1978. Maria Zajceva was also a descriptive grammarian; her Vepsian grammar based mainly on Central Vepsian dialects appeared in 1981. Together with Maria Mullonen, she published a great dictionary of Vepsian (1972); her last major work, a book on Vepsian syntax ("Vepsän lauseoppia") appeared in Finnish translation in the series Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne (MSFOu 241, 2001).

The whole Uralistic community will mourn the loss of one of the very few Vepsian native-speaker linguists ever.

With condolences to Maria Zajceva's family, friends, students and colleagues
JL
--
Univ.-Prof. Dr. Johanna Laakso

Universität Wien, Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft (EVSL), Abteilung Finno-Ugristik
Campus AAKH Spitalgasse 2-4 Hof 7
A-1090 Wien
johanna.laakso at univie.ac.at • http://homepage.univie.ac.at/Johanna.Laakso/
ELDIA: http://www.eldia-project.org/ 




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