Fortunatov, Filipp Fedorovich

Born Jan. 2 (14), 1848, in Vologda; died Sept. 20 (Oct. 3), 1914, in Kosalma, in what is now Prionezhskii Raion, Karelian ASSR. Russian linguist, Indo-Europeanist, and Slavicist. Academician of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences (1898). Graduated from Moscow University (1868); professor there from 1884 to 1902.

Fortunatov was the founder of the Moscow linguistic school. Much of his work deals with the phonetics of the Indo-European languages. He emphasized the need for a strict historical approach in the study of phonetic changes. He also studied Sanskrit (Indo-European Liquid Consonants in Old Indie, 1896). In his master’s dissertation, The Samaveda Aranyaka-Samhita (1875), he studied a previously unknown Vedic text and examined the idea of the relationship of language to thought and society. In his series of lectures A Short Sketch of the Comparative Phonetics of the Indo-European Languages (published 1922), Lectures on Old Church Slavonic Phonetics (published 1919), and others devoted to Greek, Armenian, Gothic, and Lithuanian, he presented his view of language as a system.

Strictly differentiating synchrony and diachrony, Fortunatov at the same time as F. de Saussure substantiated the “formalization” of linguistic research and established a law of intonation-dependent stress shift in the Baltic and Slavic languages; this law, called the Fortunatov-Saussure law, was stated in On Stress and Length in the Baltic Languages (1895). Fortunatov discovered the existence of three nasal vowels in the Indo-European parent language and the nasal ȩ in Old Church Slavonic and Old Russian. Proceeding from a theory that regarded word forms as significant for linguistic inquiry, he constructed a special morphological classification of languages.

Fortunatov’s works on the Russian language had a great influence on subsequent research in that field. Fortunatov studied Slavic literary texts and Slavic alphabets (The Composition of the Ostromir Gospel, 1908; On the Origin of the Glagolitic Alphabet, 1913) and edited a series of Old Church Slavonic literary works. His students included A. A. Shakhmatov, D. N. Ushakov, V. K. Porzhezinskii, N. N. Durnovo, A. M. Peshkovskii, M. M. Po-krovskii, O. Brok, A. Belich, and N. van Wijk.