Yuriy Tarnawsky

Yuriy Tarnawsky
Born	Yuriy Orest Tarnawsky Turka, Ukraine
Occupation	Writer, Linguist
Language	Ukrainian, English
Nationality	US
Citizenship	US
Education	BSEE, MA, PhD
Alma mater	New Jersey Institute of Technology, New York University
Period	Contemporary

Yuriy Tarnawsky is a Ukrainian-American writer and linguist, one of the founding members of the New York Group, a group of avant-garde Ukrainian diaspora writers, and co-founder and co-editor of the journal New Poetry, as well as member of the US innovative writers’ collaborative Fiction Collective. He writes fiction, poetry, plays, translations, and criticism in both Ukrainian and English. His works have been translated into Czech, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Russian. His New York University PhD dissertation Knowledge Semantics argues against decompositional semantics and combines Noam Chomsky’s and Hilary Putnam’s views on language into one formulation.

Early Years

Yuriy (George Orest) Tarnawsky was born on February 3, 1934 in the town of Turka in Western Ukraine, at that time under Polish rule. His mother was a school teacher and father a school principal. His childhood years (1934-1940) were spent in Poland, near the town of Rzeszów, and then in Ukrainian ethnic lands, near Sanok and in Turka. In 1944 he emigrated with his family to Germany. After the war Tarnawsky lived in a Displaced Persons' camp in Neu Ulm, Bavaria where he attended first Ukrainian and then German High School (Kepler Obreschule in Ulm). He graduated from Ukrainian High School in Munich in February 1952, prior to emigrating with his family to the US and settling in Newark, NJ. There he attended Newark College of Engineering, now New Jersey Institute of Technology, from which he graduated with honors in 1956 with a BS degree in Electrical Engineering.

Professional Life

Upon graduation, Tarnawsky joined IBM Corporation in Poughkeepsie, NY, and remained with it until 1992. At IBM, he worked at first as an electronic engineer and then as computer scientist, primarily on automatic language translation from Russian into English. He managed groups of applied linguists at IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, NY, in the US military school in Syracuse, NY, and at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. The program developed under his leadership was exhibited at the 1964 World's Fair in New York and was the first in the world to have practical application. During the years 1964-65, on leave from IBM, he lived in Spain, devoting his time to literary work. Later, while continuing to work for IBM, he studied theoretical linguistics at New York University, obtaining a PhD degree in 1982. His doctoral dissertation Knowledge Semantics in the field of transformational-generative grammar deals with the semantic component within Noam Chomsky's Revised Extended Standard Theory and argues against decompositional semantics. It has been described as being revolutionary in combining the views of Noam Chomsky and Hillary Putnam into one formulation. After completing his linguistic studies, Tarnawsky worked on computer processing of natural languages and the development of artificial ones as well as in the area of Artificial Intelligence, on Expert Systems. For his work at IBM he received a number of awards. He has authored numerous articles on computational and linguistic topics. After leaving IBM under early retirement program, Tarnawsky joined the staff of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University in New York City and was professor of Ukrainian Literature and Culture in the Department of Slavic Languages as well as co-coordinator of Ukrainian Studies (1993-1996). Knowledge Semantics was published in Ukrainian translation, which Tarnawsky oversaw, as Znannyeva Semantyka by National University of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in 2016. It is the first publication in the field of transformational-generative grammar in Ukrainian language and is augmented by an extensive English-Ukrainian and Ukrainian-English dictionary in which Tarnawsky developed the basic transformational-generative linguistics terms for Ukrainian.

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