Kazimieras Būga

Kazimieras Būga

Kazimieras Būga (born November 6, 1879 in Pažiegė , Zarasai district ; † December 2, 1924 in Königsberg ) was a Lithuanian linguist . To this day he is considered the most important Lithuanian linguist.

Life

Būga came from a farming family. In 1898, at the insistence of his parents, he enrolled in the seminary in Saint Petersburg . However, he left this and worked as a tutor, assistant in a weather station. In 1900 his first linguistic article appeared under the pseudonym Sėlis. The acquaintance with Kazimieras Jaunius , E. Volter, F. Fortunatow a. a. led to a position as secretary at the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1905 Būga passed his Abitur as an external student and enrolled in the philological faculty of the University of St. Petersburg , where he studied as a student of Jaunius. In 1912 Būga finished his studies and stayed in St. Petersburg with Baudouin de Courtenay , followed by a study visit with Adalbert Bezzenberger in Königsberg in 1914 . In 1916 he was appointed private lecturer and in 1917 associate professor - due to the war in Perm . In 1920 he returned to the now independent Lithuania and became a professor at the newly founded Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas . Būga died in Königsberg in 1924 . He is buried in Kaunas .

reception

Together with the Latvian Jānis Endzelīns , Būga is considered to be the founder of Baltic studies in the Baltic States, as both had both a linguistic education and a native knowledge of the languages ​​studied. Būga founded the name research, both in the reconstruction of personal names from the early days of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and with the study of water names, where he was able to show that the Slavic settlement area was once inhabited by Balts. He works on dialects and initiated the academic (20-volume) dictionary of the Lithuanian language (completed in 2002). His first work Aistic Studies from 1908 is considered grossly flawed under the influence of Jaunius.

Works

• Rinktiniai raštai (3 volumes + index, edited by Zigmas Zinkevičius) Vilnius 1958–1961.

literature

• Algirdas Sabaliauskas. Lietuvių kalbos tyrinėjimo istorija - Iki 1940 m. Vilnius 1979.