Alexander Vovin
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Alexander Vovin (born 1961 in St. Petersburg, Russia) is an American linguist and philologist in the Department of East Asian Languages and Literatures at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, where he is a Professor of East Asian Languages and the forthcoming Chair of the department from August 1, 2009.
Alexander Vovin earned his M.A. in structural and applied linguistics from the St. Petersburg State University in 1983, and his Ph.D. in historical Japanese linguistics and premodern Japanese literature from the same University in 1987, with a doctoral dissertation on the Hamamatsu chūnagon monogatari (ca. 1056). After serving as a Junior Researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Studies (1987-1990), Assistant Professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan (1990-1994), Miami University (1994-1995), and Assistant and Associate Professor at the University of Hawai’i (1995-2003), he became the full professor at the same university. He has also been a visiting professor at the International Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto (2001-2002, 2008), and a visiting professor at the University of Bochum, Germany (2008-2009).
Alexander Vovin is an authority on Japanese historical linguistics (with emphasis on etymology, morphology, and phonology), and Japanese philology of the Nara period (710-792), and to a lesser extent of the Heian period (792-1192). His most current and ambitious project involves the complete academic translation into English of the Man’yōshū (ca. 759), the earliest and the largest premodern Japanese poetic anthology, alongside with the critical edition of the original text and commentaries. He is also a leading Western specialist on the moribund Ainu language in northern Japan, and he is also well known for his seminal work on Inner Asian languages, especially those only preserved in Chinese transcription, as well as on Old and Middle Korean texts.
[edit] Publications
- Vovin, Alexander (1993). A Reconstruction of Proto-Ainu. Leiden: E. J. Brill. ISBN 90-04-09905-0.
- Vovin, Alexander (2000). "Did the Xiongnu speak a Yeniseian language?". Central Asiatic Journal 44 (1).
- Vovin, Alexander co-edited with Osada Toshiki (長田俊樹) (2003). 日本語系統論の現在 (Perspectives on the Origins of the Japanese Language). Kyoto: International Center for Japanese Studies. ISSN 1346-6585.
- Vovin, Alexander (2003). A Reference Grammar of Classical Japanese Prose. London: RoutledgeCurzon. ISBN 0-7007-1716-1.
- Vovin, Alexander (2005). A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese Vol. 1. Folkestone: Global Oriental. ISBN 1901903141.
- Vovin, Alexander (2009). A Descriptive and Comparative Grammar of Western Old Japanese.Part 2: Adjectives, Verbs, Adverbs, Conjunctions, Particles, Postpositions. Folkestone: Global Oriental. ISBN 9781905246823.
