Sergei Grigoryevich Chebanov

Sergei Grigorjewitsch Tschebanow ( Russian Сергей Григорьевич Чебанов , scientific transliteration Sergej Grigor'evič Čebanov ; born October 19, 1898 in Saint Petersburg ; † December 2, 1965 Leningrad ) was a Russian military doctor and linguist.

Life

As a soldier in the Red Army , he studied at the Military Medical Academy in Petrograd around 1920 ; he specialized in ear, nose and throat medicine. During this time he also developed an interest in linguistics . In 1938 he attended the Military Medical Academy in Leningrad . In the 1940s he received his doctorate , qualified as a professor and thus rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel . In 1963 he left the service.

Importance for quantitative linguistics

As a linguist, Tschebanow has a special meaning for quantitative linguistics . At the end of 1940 he gave a few lectures on the importance of the Poisson distribution as a law of language and met with violent opposition from linguists. It was not until 1947 that, through the mediation of the mathematician Andrei Kolmogorow , he was able to publish his ideas about the Poisson distribution as the law of the distribution of word lengths in a journal. It is one of the early attempts to establish a mathematically formulated law for linguistic findings. The Aachen physicist Wilhelm Fucks made the same discovery again in 1955 - presumably without knowing anything about Tschebanov.

In quantitative linguistics, one therefore speaks of the “Tschebanow-Fucks distribution” or the “Tschebanow-Fucks function”. (In the specialist literature in the spelling: "Čebanov-Fucks".) Generalizations of the theory in later development have meant that this terminology is no longer maintained. But it is to his lasting merit that Tschebanow was one of the first to enrich modern quantitative linguistics with the proposal for a mathematically formulated language law. He seems to have been the first to propose a model for the distribution of word lengths in texts.

literature

• Karl-Heinz Best , Sergej Viktorovič Čebanov: Biographical note: Sergej Grigor'evič Čebanov (1897–1966) . In: Karl-Heinz Best (Ed.): Frequency distributions in texts . Peust & Gutschmidt, Göttingen 2001, pp. 281–283. ISBN 3-933043-08-5 .
• Sergej Grigor'evič Čebanov: O podčinenii rečevych ukladov 'indoevropejskoj' gruppy zakonu Puassona . In: Doklady Akademii Nauk SSSR. Tom 55/2, 1947, pp. 103-106 . (German version: SG Chebanow: On conformity of language structures within the Indo-European family to Poisson's law . In: Comptes Rendus (Doklady) de l'Académie de l'URS , Volume 55/2, 1947, pp. 99-102 .)
• SV Chebanov, DS Kuznecova: SG Chebanov and his archive. In: Strukturnaja prikladnaja lingvistika , Vypusk 9. Sanct Peterburg 2012, p. 332-341. (in Russian)
• Wilhelm Fucks : Theory of word formation . In: Mathematical-Physical Semester Reports . Vol. 4, 1955, pp. 195-212.
• Rüdiger Grotjahn: A statistical model for the distribution of word length . In: Zeitschrift für Sprachwissenschaft 1, 1982, pp. 44-75.
• Peter Grzybek: History and Methodology of Word Length Studies. The state of the art . In: Peter Grzybek (ed.): Contributions to the Science of Text and Language: Word length studies and related issues . Springer, Dordrecht 2006, pp. 15–90. ISBN 978-1-4020-4067-2 . (Grzybek deals specifically with Čebanov on pages 26–31.)
• RG Piotrowski, KB Bektaev, & AA Piotrowskaja: Mathematical Linguistics . Brockmeyer, Bochum 1985. ISBN 3-88339-453-X .
• Juhan Tuldava: Problems and methods of quantitative-systemic lexicology. Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, Trier 1998. ISBN 3-88476-314-8 . (Revised and supplemented translation of the Russian original from 1987).
• Gejza Wimmer, Reinhard Köhler , Rüdiger Grotjahn, & Gabriel Altmann : Towards a Theory of Word Length Distribution . In: Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 1, 1994, pp. 98-106.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Piotrowski, Bektaev & Piotrowskaja 1985: 256; Tuldava 1998: 101
2. ↑ Grotjahn 1982; Wimmer, Koehler et al. a. 1994