Kostiantyn Mykolayovych Tyshchenko (; 30 July 1941 – 23 July 2023) was a Ukrainian linguist, teacher, translator, Doctor of Philology (1992), and professor (1995). Tyshchenko is the author of more than 240 works on metatheory of linguistics, sign theory of language, linguistic laws, optimization of morphological descriptions of languages, linguopedagogy, problems of language development, Romance and Oriental linguistics, as well as series of articles on studies of German, Slavic, Celtic, Basque, Finnish and Altaic languages. Teacher and polyglot speaking more than two dozen different languages. He lectures on general linguistics and conducts practical courses in French, Italian, Persian, Finnish, Basque, Welsh, and other languages. From 2001 to 2010, he was the head and leading researcher of the Linguistic Educational Museum, which he founded in 1992 at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv. Professor in the Middle East Department at the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv (since 2011). Recipient of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (2003) and the Order of the White Rose of Finland (2005).
Early life and education
Kostiantyn Tyshchenko was born in the family of architect Mykola Pavlovych Tyshchenko (1911-2004) and schoolteacher Anna Stepanovna Rybalko-Tyshchenko (1917-2002). He graduated from Kyiv Secondary School № 92 with a gold medal. After serving in the army, as a student capable of languages and science he was sent to teach at the Department of Romance Philology at the University of Kyiv.
Tyshchenko studied in a graduate school with professor Andrii Biletsky who noticed the scientific abilities and determination of his graduate student. In 1968, on Biletsky’s recommendation, Tyshchenko was assigned to lead a dialectological expedition at Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv to 5 cities on the Caucasian Black Sea coast. Then 10 volumes of dialectological materials were collected for the Linguistic Atlas of the Mediterranean. In 1970, Tyshchenko was elected a member of its editorial board for high professionalism and outstanding work on the materials from the Caucasus coast for this atlas, which was prepared by scientists from different countries.
A year earlier, in 1969, Tyshchenko had defended his dissertation The Verbal Paradigm of Romance Languages. Comparative and typological research.
Career
Since graduating from the Taras Shevchenko University of Kyiv in 1963, with the exception of two years of military service, Tyshchenko has been working at this university at various departments: before starting his service at the army in the fall of 1963 - at the Department of Romance Philology, after demobilization - 6 years at the Department of General Linguistics and Classical Philology, then - 15 years at the Department of Theory and Practice of Translation (since 1975 - Associate Professor), then - again 8 years at the Department of Romance Philology.
After defending his doctoral dissertation Metatheory of Linguistics (1992), Tyshchenko accepted the rector's proposal to head the Department of Theory and Practice of Oriental Languages, later reorganized into the Department of Oriental Philology, which in 1995 separated from the Middle East. He was a Head of the department for 9 years. Since 2001, Tyshchenko has been the head and leading researcher of the Linguistic Educational Museum, which he founded in 1992.
Research
Metatheory of linguistics
The main scientific achievement of Tyshchenko is the creation of a metatheory of linguistics. This concept became possible due to a theoretical rethinking of the relationship between the content of individual linguistic disciplines and blocks of linguistic knowledge in the system of a unified science of language. It was first briefly described by scientists as a large matrix in a key 1989 article. Linguistics became the first science for which metatheory was developed, which adequately reflects the mutual location and correlation of the accumulated knowledge about the system of world languages and their properties. The seven most general metapolies of linguistic knowledge (ethnopragmatics of language, axiopragmatics, idiopragmatics, syntactics, signification, genetic linguistics, evolutionary linguistics) and several subjectively conditioned concepts of the field of linguistics were singled out due to the nature of the object.