Tomson, Aleksandr

Tomson, Aleksandr Ivanovich 

Born June 3 (15), 1860, in Livland Province; died Nov. 27, 1935, in Odessa. Soviet Russian linguist. Corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1910).

Tomson graduated from the University of St. Petersburg in 1882. From 1897 to 1932 he was a professor at Novorossiia University in Odessa. He was a student of F. F. Fortunatov and F. E. Korsh, and he developed the concepts of the Fortunatov school. Tomson published works on comparative Indo-European linguistics, the Armenian language, the history of the Slavic languages (mainly the history of the phonetics of the Slavic languages), and the orthography of Russian. He established a laboratory of experimental phonetics at Novorossiia University.

Tomson was the author of the textbook General Linguistics (1906).

WORKS

Lingvisticheskie issledovaniia, vol. 1. St. Petersburg, 1887.
Istoricheskaia grammatika sovremennogo armianskogo iazyka gor. Tiflisa. St. Petersburg, 1890.
Lingvisticheskie issledovaniia. St. Petersburg, 1897.
K sintaksisu i semasiologii russkogo iazyka. Odessa, 1903.
Foneticheskie etiudy. Warsaw, 1905.
“K voprosu o vozniknovenii roditel’no-vinitel’nogo padezha v slavianskikh iazykakh.” Izv. otdeleniia russkogo iazyka i slovesnosti, 1908, vol. 13, book 3.

R. A. AGEEVA