Roman Fedorovich Brandt
Brandt, Roman Fedorovich
Born Dec. 4 (16), 1853, in St. Petersburg; died Mar. 2, 1920, in Moscow. Russian linguist and Slavicist. Professor at Moscow University (1886).
Brandt was a member of the neogrammarian movement. He was one of the first to work in a new field of Slavic linguistics—the study of the stress and length of vowels (Study of Stress in Slavic, 1880). Brandt took a decisive stand in favor of a reform of the old Russian orthography (such as the elimination of ѣ, θ, etc.) He wrote works on the history of Slavic literature—for example, Historical and Literary Analysis of Ivan Gundulic’s Narrative Poem Osman (1879), and others. During the years 1894–1901 he published the Bulgarian work of the late 12th century, Grigorovichev parimeinik. He also worked on problems of an artificial international language.