LINKS
- Filtchenko A.U
- Kim A.A.
- Kotorova E.G.
- Osipova O.A.
- Shalamova N.N
- Professor A.P.Dulson
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designed and updated by
A.Filtchenko, 07/10/1999
A.P.Dulson is a coeval of the century, for he was born on
the 9th of February 1900 in a peasant’s family and spent his childhood in the village
of Krasnopolje (formerly Preis) of the Samara region. His father, Peter
Egorovich, having reached the status of a clerk ( a village scribe
in the Soviet village council), was striving to
give a better education for his
children. Andreas Dulson fulfilled his father’s will and all through
his life he studied and worked thoroughly in educational field. He displayed a great
interest in languages and their diversity, even being a secondary school student.
Not only European languages in which he made a considerable progress (Latin, Greek,
French and English) but such as Chinese drew his attention as well.
He proceeded his further education in Saratov University (1924)
where he began to study first at the
faculty of mathematics and then at the philological faculty. It
was under the influence of the famous philologists
N.N.Durnovo and G.Dinges whose lectures A.Dulson
happened to listen several times that he decided to study at the philological
faculty and the rest of his life was connected with philological
problems.
His first investigations concerned the Low German dialects in the Saratov
region.
Those years were difficult enough therefore young Dulson combined his practical work in
the field of education (a rural teacher, an inspector of education) with collecting
dialectal material. From time to time he took part in archaeological work which
interested him greatly. He acquired some skill in these undertakings still being a
schoolboy. Later on all this experience was of great help to the scientist in
organising and
fulfilling broad-scaled work on the problem of the origin of
indigenous peoples and their languages in Siberia.
Then comes his work in Saratov University (1930) and his post
graduate courses in Moscow (1931)
where he had possibilities to be in contact with such well-known
philologists as R.I.Shor, M.N.Peterson, A.M.Selischev, R.I.Avanesov, N.J.Marr and
then the defence of his candidate’s thesis in 1938 "Old
Urbakh dialect" and the doctor’s one in 1939 "The
problem of mixing dialects".
At the beginning of the Second World War in the autumn of 1941 A.P.Dulson was exiled to
Siberia, to Tomsk. Since that time he headed the German Department in the Pedagogical
Institute and delivered lectures in general linguistics at the University.
A.P.Dulson brought up the whole generation of linguists in the field of Germanic
languages (it refers to his first period in Tomsk) and aboriginal languages of Siberia.
48 scientists carried out their research work under his supervision, 7 of them
later on became doctors of philology, professors.
Dulson's love to languages brought him into contact with indigenous peoples of Siberia.
In 1947 A.Dulson worked out a plan of investigation of indigenous peoples and their
languages.
His idea was to investigate and describe not only languages of these peoples but their
history, culture, ethnography and archaeology. As the result of A.Dulson`s
archaeological work there appeared a number of his papers such as "Archaeological
monuments of the Tomsk region", "Archaeological map of the Tomsk region"
(1954), which included 600 monuments and others.
Only using the data of all the aspects it was possible to penetrate into the depth of
the origin of Siberian peoples and their languages and explain many mysterious phenomena
and similarities which were found between languages spoken far away from each other, e.g.
Khanty and Hungarian, Ket and Iberian-Caucausian etc. The territory of Siberia is
very important for linguistic studies: various nationalities settle there. At least
4 groups lived there for certain: Turkic, Selkup, Ugric and Ket. Their ties and
interrelations during a considerable period of time, the mixture of dialects, the place
names left by them represent an exceptionally great interest for science.
First A.Dulson started to collect the materials in history, ethnography, archaeology
and languages alone setting off on expeditions along the rivers of the Tomsk region.
Soon he carried away with this idea many scientists of the University and
Pedagogical Institute. Gradually he drew more and more people into the problem of
the origin of indigenous peoples and their languages. For the sake of a better
exchange of
information and opinions he organised all Union
scientific conferences with the support of the Tomsk
University and Novosibirsk Department of Siberian languages of
the Academy of Science . These conferences were held in Tomsk in 1958, 1969 during
his lifetime and in 1973, 1976 after his death. To collect the material A.Dulson alone or
with his desciples made 35 expeditions to the North of the Tomsk and Krasnojarsk regions.
The expeditions were thoroughly prepared and consisted of 3 stages: 1) the
preliminary work (training in transcription symbols); 2) field work (collecting material,
work with the speakers); 3) detailed study of the collected material. As to the
toponimic material the investigations were directed at analysing all the components of the
place names beginning with the last layer, which was often connected with one of modern
languages, then the next layer - substratum and the inner one (if it existed) -
subsubstratum. But to check the results one had to follow the opposite order:
subsubstratum - substratum and a modern language. In collecting linguistic materials
A.Dulson considered very important to observe the following points of speech situations:
a) communication among the members of the family; b) communication among the village
community; c) communication at meetings and gatherings; d) communication with neighbours;
e) communication with strangers.
A.Dulson investigated and described Chulym-Turkic people and their language, the place
names left by the Kets, Selkups, Khanty, Altaic and other peoples of Siberia, the Selkup
language of the Tomsk region, the structure of Ket, certain features of the languages of
Khanty, Mansy, Nganasans, Shohrs, Evenki. All these languages have no writing and they
refer to the so-called disappearing languages therefore everything that is fixed and
collected is and will be of great value.
The collection of word-stock of Siberian languages was especially important for the
problem of the origin of different people. Thus for example the fact that the
Selkups have many words of Iranian origin testifies that this people who are living in the
far North, were living earlier somewhere in the South close to Iranians. A.Dulson worked
out special program for investigating languages of indigenous peoples. It included
91 groups of words with their forms and 917 sentences, which permitted to define the place
of a certain dialect or a language among the rest of the dialects of this group of
languages and their main grammatical forms. The collection of such materials was
aimed at creating dictionaries of these languages and further comparison of all Siberian
languages. During his life time A.Dulson himself and his disciples gathered word
materials for compiling dictionaries predominantly of Ket (120000 cards), Selkup (80000
cards), less of Chulym-Turkic, Nganasan, Dolgan (334000 word-cards all in all) and a very
rich collection of geographical names (242000 cards) of Siberia, Far East and
Central Asia. All linguistic materials were collected in 155 volumes.
Each volume contains 800-1000 pages of school exercise books.
A.Dulson dedicated a great part of his work to the investigation and description of the
Ket language whose importance is paramount. As it is became known later the Kets
were the most ancient inhabitants of the Southern and Middle part of West Siberia and the
Krasnojarsk region. They lived there earlier than Turkic and samoyedic peoples did,
for the Kets had left the trace in place names on the above-mentioned territory. Ket
refers to such a type of languages in which the building up of verbal forms was not clear
up till recent time.
A.Dulson managed not only to make full description of the language but also to decipher
its verbal system. His book "The Ket Language" was generally recognised
and highly estimated among linguists and A.Dulson got a State Prize for it. He
proved that formerly the Ket population extended to the vast territories of West and
Middle Siberia and typologically their language had many common features with other
languages of Siberia. Judging by the Ket place names they were the earliest inhabitants of
Siberia. But more striking typological and even sometimes material similarities were
discovered between Yenisseian and the languages, which nowadays are spoken far away from
that place: Caucausian, Burushaski, Burmese and American Indian languages.
The similarities among these languages led A.Dulson to hypothesis about a durable
prehistoric contact of the remote forefathers of these peoples in Central Asia and it was
possible to reconstruct the language of a pure noun-class structure. It was a very
ancient linguistic community in Central Asia, which existed 5 thousand years ago.
The linguistic data showed that the contacts of Yenisseian languages with Caucausian
languages were later than with Basque and Burushaski not to speak about the Indian
languages of America. This fact permitted to assume that Indians diverged first from
that Union, then the Basques and Burushaski and later on the Caucausian people.
Taking into consideration the Indian settlements in America to be 15 thousand years ago,
A.Dulson approximately defined the Caucasian-Yenisseian language contact at 6-7 thousand
years ago.
He devoted his last period of life to Yenisseian languages and their comparison with
other language families. Ket having preserved the most ancient structure in the
conjugation system gave the key to the explanation of the conjugation system in such
languages as Finno-Ugric, Uralo-Altaic, and Indoeuropean, which was based on pronouns.
A.Dulson also noticed typological similarities in the structure of case-markers in
Yeniseian and Indo-European. In his opinion the contacts between Yeniseian and
Indo-European peoples could have existed even earlier than the Hun community in the North
of Central Asia, that is not during the contacts of Indo-Europeans with the Huns on the
territory of Europe.
A.Dulson proved that investigation of Siberian languages was not only important for
revealing their contacts and origin but for solving a number of theoretical problems of
general linguistics.
Dulson`s linguistic school proceeds his undertakings in Siberian languages working in
close contacts with specialists in archaeology, ethnography and history organising almost
every year scientific conferences in Tomsk at which further data on the problem are
discussed. The scientists from different cities of Russia and even from Hungary,
Germany and Japan often take part in them. Some joined expeditions with the participants
from these countries were undertaken to the North of the Tomsk region where the indigenous
population resides.