Nikolai Konstantinovich Dmitriev (; 1898-1954) was Doctor of Philology, professor, an outstanding Orientalist-Turkologist, corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences, member of Russian Federation Academy of Sciences, Distinguished Scientist honoree of Turkmenia, Bashkiria, Chuvashia, and recognized member of the world Turkology.
Biography
Dmitriev was born on August 28, 1898, in Moscow, in a professional family. In 1916, after graduating with a gold medal the 3rd Moscow gymnasium, he joined the Historical-Philological faculty of the Moscow University, and in 1918 he entered in parallel Lazarev Near Eastern Institute (former Lazarev Oriental Languages Institute). In 1920. Dmitriev graduated from the Moscow University, and in 1922 Near Eastern Institute (renamed to Oriental Studies Institute) in three majors, Turkish, Persian and Arabic. Dmitriev also studied in depth Classical languages, Serbian, Bulgarian, modern Greek, Armenian, Romanian, Arabic, Persian, Pehlevi, Syrian, Turkish, Tatar, Bashkir and Kazakh, in addition to the main European languages (French, German, English and Italian. Dmitriev was also engaged in Slavic philology and then Turkology.
Information
Dmitriev's linguistic views formed under influence of school of F.W.Radloff, continued by P.M.Melioransky.
The range of Dmitriev scientific interests was very wide. It developed right at the beginning of his career, when the scientist almost simultaneously started to work on Turkish, Tatar, Bashkir, Gagauz, Kumyk, Azeri, Turkmen, and other languages of the extensive Turkic family that soon became a subject of his specialty.
Dmitriev was a convinced supporter of the theory that stipulates a genetic unity of the Turkic languages. That led to the comparative and comparative-historical methods as the main tool in studies of the structure of Turkic languages; and to the synthetic approach to the problems of Turkology, which explain the overall unity of his thematically various research on the languages of Turkic group.
Dmitriev took a primarily historical view of the linguistic phenomena. He was an expert on morphology, syntax, phonetics, lexicology, dialectology, and history of the Turkic languages. When the ideas by N.Ya. Marr began being strenuously propagandized in the Stalinist Soviet Union, Dmitriev remained alien to the attempts to discover in Turkic languages "stadial reorganizations", and to the attempts to discover in Turkic languages inflection, prefixes, etc., which did not escape even some competent foreign Turkologists. He initiated a push against some errors that at times prevented a correct understanding of the phenomena typical for Turkic languages.
After F.W. Radloff and V.A. Bogoroditsky, Dmitriev suggested a new, more specific definition and formulated relationship of palatal and labial vowel synharmonism, pointing to the subordinated character of the labial articulation. His position about phonetic variability of the root in the Turkic languages was an important development that corrected an existing postulate in Turkology according to which a root in the Turkic languages is unchangeable.
A prominent place in the Dmitriev's works held the questions of lexicology. A special place in the Dmitriev's scientific biography addresses the problem of the Türko-Slavic linguistic relations. In the problem of the Turkic loans in Slavic languages, and first of all in Russian, Dmitriev's research brought in new dimensions, studying time, conditions and penetration paths of these loans into the Russian and Slavic languages. His brochure Structure of Turkish language expressed in a compressed form his valuable observations about loans in the Turkish vocabulary, historical conditions of their penetration in Turkish language, and the nearest intermediaries that conducted loans from territorially remote languages. The special Slavophonic training received by Dmitriev before his Turkological education allowed him to turn to Slavic languages and Turkic texts in a Slavic transcription as a major source on the history and dialectology of the Turkic, especially southern Turkic languages. His research in this area had even greater value for the Slavic philology, because it complemented studies on the influences of the Turkic languages on Slavic languages. In his last years Dmitriev started publishing his research on the Russian-Turkic language comparisons.