Alexander Alexandrovich Dragunov

Alexander Alexandrowitsch Dragunow ( Russian Александр Александрович Драгунов , Chinese Lóng Guǒfū龍 果 夫; born February 21, 1900 in Saint Petersburg , died February 21, 1955 in Leningrad ) was a Soviet sinologist and linguist .

biography

Dragunov came from a family of officials in Saint Petersburg.

In 1925 he completed a degree in Chinese and linguistics with Lev W. Stscherba at the Leningrad State University . In addition, he mainly dealt with general linguistics , with a focus on Chinese and Tibetan .

In 1928 Dragunov became an employee of the Institute for Asian Studies of the Soviet Academy of Sciences , first in Leningrad and, after the institute moved to Moscow in 1951 - a post he would hold for the rest of his life. From 1928 to 1942 he taught at the Leningrad State University and other educational institutions in Leningrad and Vladivostok .

In 1937 Dragunow completed his doctorate .

His first publications were important contributions to the historical linguistics of Chinese, Tangut and Tibetan. He was the first to systematically analyze two "imported" scripts for Chinese: the 'Phags-pa script and Chinese-language texts in Arabic-Persian script from the 14th century, which allow conclusions to be drawn about the phonology of Chinese in the 13th and 14th centuries .

In connection with the literacy campaigns among Chinese immigrants in the Far East of the Soviet Union, Dragunov published studies on Chinese grammar. His basic course in Chinese grammar (written together with Zhōu Sōngyuán 周松源) first appeared in 1934 in the Soviet Union in Latinxua Sin Wenz , later in Chinese characters in several editions in China . He developed u. a. a system of parts of speech in Chinese that he expanded and specified in other works.

Dragunov was the founder of Chinese dialectology as part of linguistic studies in the Soviet Union and published detailed studies on the phonology of several Chinese dialects . The classification of the Xiang dialects (especially in Hunan ) as a separate dialect group goes back to this work .

Together with his wife Jekaterina Nikolaevna, he published the first descriptions of Dungan , a language of the Hui (Chinese Muslims) who emigrated to the Russian Empire in the second half of the 19th century. Dungan was officially recognized as a minority language in the Soviet Union in 1924 . He described the Gansu dialect, which served as the basis of the Dungan written language .

Dragunov took an active part in the development of alphabets for Chinese and for Dungan. In the 1930s he was one of the creators of the new Latin script Latinxua Sin Wenz , which was initially developed for the Chinese in the Soviet Union, but was also used on a trial basis in several areas of China until 1955. In 1932 he was one of the creators of the Dungan Latin script in Leningrad; from 1952 he was chairman of the committee in Moscow that developed the Cyrillic alphabet for Dungan. This Cyrillic alphabet was officially adopted in Frunze in 1954 and is still used today.

Works

• “Contribution to the Reconstruction of Ancient Chinese,” T'oung Pao 26, 1928, 1-16.
• "Binoms of the Type ni Tsu in the Tangut-Chinese Dictionary", Doklady Akademii nauk SSSR , Series B, 1929, 145-148.
• “The hP'ags-pa Script and Ancient Mandarin”, Izvestija Akademii nauk 7, 1930, 9, 627-648, 10, 775-798.
• “A Persian Transcription of Ancient Mandarin”, Bulletin de l'Académie des Sciences de l'URSS (Classe des Humanités) 11, 1931, 359-375.
• “Dunganskij alfavit” [The Dungan Alphabet], Revoljucija i pis'mennost ' 1–2, 1932, 33–37.
• “K latinizacii dialektov central'nogo Kitaja. Dialekty Sjantan 'i Sjiansjian ”[On the Latinization of the dialects of Central China. Dialects of Xiāngtán and Xiāngxiāng], Izvestija Akademii nauk SSSR (Otdelenie obščestvennyx nauk) 7/3, 1932, 240–269.
• (with Zhōu Sōngyuán) Wenfa chubu giaokoshu [grammar textbook for beginners], Moscow: Dal'krajizdat, 1934.
• "Voiced Plosives and Affricates in Ancient Tibetan," Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology, Academia Sinica 7/7, 1936, 165-174.
• (with Ekaterina N. Dragunova) “About the Dungan language”, Archives Orientální 8, 1936, 34–48.
• (with Ekaterina N. Dragunova) “Časti reči v kitajskom jazyke” [parts of speech in the Chinese language], Sovetskoe jazykoznanie 3, 1937, 117–128.
• (with Ekaterina N. Dragunova) “Dunganskij jazyk [The Dungan language]”, Zapiski Instituta vostokovedenija (Akademija nauk SSSR) 6, 1937, 117–131.
• “Osobennosti fonologičeskoj sistemy drevnetibetskogo jazyka” [Features of the Phonological System of Old Tibetan], Zapiski Instituta vostokovedenija AN SSSR 7, 1939, 284–295. Aleksandrovič
• Issledovanija v oblasti dunganskoj grammatiki. Ategorija vida i vremeni v dunganskom jazyke (dialect Gan'su) [studies in the field of Dungan grammar. Aspect and tense categories in the Dungan language (Gansu dialect)], Trudy Instituta vostokovedenija AN SSSR 27, 1940.
• “Ategorija zavisimoj i nezavisimoj predmetnosti v kitajskom jazyke (suffiksy èr i czy) ”[The categories of the dependent and independent subject in the Chinese language (the suffixes he and zi)], Sovetskoe vostokovedenie 4, 1949, 102–119.
• Issledovanija po grammatike sovremennogo kitajskogo jazyka . 1. Časti reči [Studies on the grammar of the modern Chinese language. 1. Parts of speech], Moscow / Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Akademii nauk SSSR, 1952.
  • Translation into German: Studies on the grammar of the modern Chinese language , Berlin: Akademie, 1960.
• (with Ekaterina N. Dragunova) “Struktura sloga v kitajskom nacional'nom jazyke” [The syllable structure of the Chinese national language], Sovetskoe vostokovedenie 1, 1955, 57–74.
• Grammatičeskaja sistema sovremennogo kitajskogo razgovornogo jazyka [The grammatical system of modern Chinese colloquial language], Leningrad: Izdatel'stvo Leningradskogo universiteta, 1962.
• “Fonologičeskaja sistema sovremennogo kitajskogo jazyka” [The phonological system of the modern Chinese language], in: Sergej Evgen'evič Jaxontov u. a. (Ed.), Razyskanija po obščemu i kitajskomu jazykoznaniju [Studies in General and Chinese Linguistics], Moscow: Nauka, 1980, 4-9.

literature

• Olga Zavyalova: “Dragunov, AA [Александр Александрович Драгунов] (1900–1955)”, in: Rint Sybesma (ed.): Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics , Leiden / Boston: Brill, 2017.
• Sergej Evgen'evič Jaxontov: “AA Dragunov. (Nekrolog) ”[AA Dragunow. (Obituary)], Kratkie soobščenija Instituta vostokovedenija AN SSSR 18, 1956, 89–93; Bibliography: 94-95.
• Abduraxman Kalimov: “AA Dragunov - osnovopoložnik dunganskogo jazykoznanija” [AA Dragunow, founder of Dungan linguistics], in: Sergej Evgen'evič Jaxontov u. a. (Ed.): Razyskanija po obščemu i kitajskomu jazykoznaniju , Moscow: Nauka, 1980, 121-126.