Desnitskaia, Agniia

Desnitskaia, Agniia Vasil’evna 

Born Aug. 10 (23), 1912, in the village of Sednev, present-day Chernigov Oblast. Soviet linguist; corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR since 1964. Member of the CPSU since 1943. Daughter of V. A. Desnitskii.

Desnitskaia graduated from the A. I. Herzen Pedagogical Institute in Leningrad in 1931 and became a professor at Leningrad University in 1949. In 1963 she became deputy director of the Leningrad Division of the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. Her most important work is in the field of comparative grammar of Indo-European languages and in a number of specialized areas of history and theory of separate groups of Indo-European languages. She is the author of Vowel Alternation in the Germanic Languages: Ablaut (1937), Problems in the Study of the Relation of Indo-European Languages (1955), Slavic Borrowings in Albanian (1963), The Reconstruction of Elements of Old Albanian and General Problems of Balkan Linguistics (1966), and Albanian and Its Dialects (1968).