Anatoly Liberman

Anatoly Liberman (Russian: Анато́лий Си́монович Либерма́н; born March 10, 1937, Leningrad) is a linguist, medievalist, etymologist, poet, translator of poetry (mainly from and into Russian), and literary critic.

Liberman's best-known works are in Germanic historical phonetics, English etymology, mythology/folklore, the history of philology, and poetic translation. He is a professor in the Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch at the University of Minnesota, where since 1975 he has taught courses on the history of all the Germanic languages and literatures, folklore, mythology, lexicography, European structuralism, and Russian formalism. His blog “The Oxford Etymologist” is read in many countries.

For years he has been an active advocate of spelling reform.

Liberman was born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) on March 10, 1937. His father was killed in action in 1941. Though graduating with highest honors in 1954, as a result of the all-pervading climate of state-supported anti-Semitism, he was rejected by St. Petersburg University and entered Leningrad State Herzen Pedagogical Institute (now the Herzen State Pedagogical University, St. Petersburg). He graduated in 1959, and, though first on the official list of about 200 students, Liberman was not admitted to Graduate School, and taught English for three years at a boarding school for underprivileged children in the Leningrad Region.

During that time he studied on his own and passed what is known in Russia as the candidate minimum (Germanic philology, the history of English, German, and philosophy, that is, Marxism and the history of the Communist Party of the USSR).

After returning to Leningrad in 1962, he taught English at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute (now St. Petersburg and University have been substituted for Leningrad and Institute) and became an extramural graduate student at Leningrad University (this status presupposed full employment elsewhere).

His academic adviser was Professor M. I. Steblin-Kamenskij, at that time the most prominent Soviet scholar in Old Icelandic literature and Germanic historical phonology. In 1965 he defended his Candidate of Philological Sciences (= PhD) dissertation on a topic of Middle English historical phonology, and in the same year Nikita Khrushchev ordered all the institutes of the Academy of Sciences to open groups for the study of what he called “the Scandinavian experience.” Steblin-Kamenskij was invited to head such a group at the Institute of Linguistics and invited Liberman to become his full-time junior assistant. There he stayed until his emigration in 1975. In 1972 he defended his Doctor of Philological Sciences dissertation (= West European habilitation) titled “Icelandic Prosody.” At Minnesota since 1975, he spent one year as a Hill Visiting Professor and two years as an associate professor; after that he was promoted to full professorship.

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