Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan (February 27, 1916 - January 21, 2007) was a Soviet-Armenian and American theoretician of linguistics and an outspoken adherent of structuralist analysis.
He was born in Tbilisi, the polyglot capital of Soviet Georgia, on February 14 (although the shift to the Gregorian calendar a couple of years later made his birthday February 27), 1916. A sickly child, he was mostly tutored at home until he took a course in c...
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Sebastian Konstantinovich Shaumyan (February 27, 1916 - January 21, 2007) was a Soviet-Armenian and American theoretician of linguistics and an outspoken adherent of structuralist analysis.
He was born in Tbilisi, the polyglot capital of Soviet Georgia, on February 14 (although the shift to the Gregorian calendar a couple of years later made his birthday February 27), 1916. A sickly child, he was mostly tutored at home until he took a course in chemistry at a vocational school.
Having learnt German and English in addition to his Armenian, Georgian and Russian, Shaumyan took his degree in philology at Tbilisi State University. At some time in the late 1930s he came across Ferdinand de Saussure's Course in General Linguistics (1916) and, captivated, knew his academic course was set.
World War II briefly interrupted his scholarly aspirations, as he became embroiled in the battles for twice Nazi-occupied Kerch. He applied for a front-line posting, but instead he was sent to the Main...
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