Vladislav Illich-Svitych

Who was Vladislav Illich-Svitych?

Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych was a linguist and accentologist, also a founding father of comparative Nostratic linguistics.

Of Ukrainian descent, he was born in Kiev but later moved to work in Moscow. He resuscitated the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis, originally expounded by Holger Pedersen in 1903, and coined the modern term Nostratics. His death prevented him from completing the Comparative Dictionary of Nostratic Languages, but the ambitious work was continued by his colleagues, including Sergei Starostin and Vladimir Dybo.