[Ura-list] Tiit-Rein Viitso in memoriam

[Johanna Laakso]

Dear URA-LIST Community,

yesterday, sad news came from Estonia: Prof. emer. Tiit-Rein Viitso had passed away at the age of 84 years, after a long career in Finnic linguistics, practically all the time at the University of Tartu, where he was employed since the 1960s.

In the first online obituaries I have seen so far, his role as a researcher and developer of the Livonian language is highlighted. Tiit-Rein Viitso worked with the last "traditional" Livonians and with the first generation of Livonian "new speakers", he was a founding member of the Society of the Friends of Livonians and gave a crucial contribution to the standardization of the modern Livonian orthography. It is impossible to think of  the Livonian language today, its cultivation and activism, without Tiit-Rein's work and his linguistic expertise. In the Livonian community, he is sorely missed.

But Tiit-Rein Viitso's productivity and his empirical and theoretical ambitions included the whole field of the Finnic languages. He published extensively about diverse questions of historical and synchronic phonology and morphology in various Finnic languages but also about loanwords, etymology, and the (pre)history of Estonian, and his work on the questions of Finnic taxonomy is a legend. Now not just a good colleague, a friend of the Livonian community and an experienced researcher of many Finnic languages but a truly great linguist has left us.

Rest in peace, puhka rahus, nov armsõ, tõurõz Tiit-Rein! 

Joining numerous colleagues and friends in mourning

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/
Project ELDIA: http://www.eldia-project.org/ 







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