Alexander Militarev

Alexander Militarev (Russian: Алекса́ндр Ю́рьевич Милитарёв; born January 14, 1943) is a Russian scholar of Semitic, Berber, Canarian and Afroasiatic (Afrasian, Semito-Hamitic) languages, comparative-historical linguistics, Jewish and Bible studies.

As a linguist, Militarev is particularly known for his novel and disputable genealogical classification of the said linguistic entities relying on lexicostatistics; for the chronology of their branching relying on Sergei Starostin’s method in glottochronology; and for his endeavor to build up a comprehensive picture of the West Asian Early Neolithic society with its material and intellectual culture based on the reconstructed and dated common Afrasian lexicon.

Militarev authors five books and around a hundred twenty publications on a wide range of linguistic, historical, Jewish and biblical subjects. He is a grandson of Solomon Maizel (1900-1952), a prominent Russian orientalist, linguist and polyglot, expert in comparative Semitic, Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish and Iranian; Maizel’s working draft of his second dissertation “Пути развития корневого фонда семитских языков” (“Ways of Root Derivation in Semitic”) was published in 1983 by Militarev with his introduction, supplements and glossary (in Russian). Militarev was a co-worker of outstanding Russian and international scholars Igor Diakonoff and Sergei Starostin and considers himself their continuator and informal disciple.

Multiple research projects headed by Militarev have been supported by various Russian and US foundations. In 2006, he was nominated by a group of US, European and Russian professors for the Holberg International Memorial Prize. Full professor (since 2004) of the Institute of Oriental and Classic Studies, Russian State University for the Humanities in Moscow, Militarev is now a consulting professor at the same Institute. In 2005-2008, professor at the Dept. of Jewish Studies, Institute of Asian and African Studies, Moscow State Lomonosov University. In 1994-2009, he was elected for four consecutive terms president of the Jewish University in Moscow (in 2002-2009, renamed into Shimon Dubnov Advanced School in the Humanities). Militarev has run the Afrasian section of the Evolution of Human Languages (EHL) project at the Santa Fe Institute. He has been a guest lecturer in top European, US, and Israeli universities and research centers. Militarev is a founding member of the International Association for Comparative Semitics (Barcelona).

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