Mikhail Oslon

Mikhail Oslon
Михаил Ослон
Born (1979-08-05) 5 August 1979
Tula, Soviet Union
EducationUniversity of Toronto
Russian State University for the Humanities
Known forResearch on Romani dialects
Scientific career
FieldsLinguistics
WorkplacesInstitute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences
Vladimir Dybo
Websiterromanes.org/oslon

Mikhail Oslon (Russian: Михаил Ослон; born 5 August 1979 in Tula) is a linguist specialising in the Romani language and Balto-Slavic accentology.[1][2] He holds a habilitation and works as a researcher at the Institute of Polish Language of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Oslon is the author of a grammar of the Kelderash dialect, described in a review as the most extensive grammatical description of Romani to date,[3] as well as of several dozen scholarly articles and linguistic maps. He is one of the editors of the Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics (Brill), whose editor-in-chief is Marc L. Greenberg.[4]

Biography

Oslon was born in Tula and moved to Toronto as a teenager, where he received his higher education at the University of Toronto. In 2009 he defended a dissertation on the accentual system of the language of Juraj Križanić, supervised by Vladimir Dybo, with Andrey Zaliznyak and I. B. Itkin as opponents, and obtained a Candidate of Sciences degree in philology from the Russian State University for the Humanities.[5]

From 2009 to 2013 he worked at the Institute for Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. For a year and a half he lived next to a Kelderash Romani settlement in the village of Plekhanovo near Tula, one of the largest Kelderash settlements in Russia, studying the community's language and everyday life; he commented as a specialist on the demolition of houses in the settlement in 2016.[6][7]

In 2013 he moved to Lviv, Ukraine, where he studied Romani dialects spoken in the country. During this period he created Rromanes, an online resource devoted to the study of Romani dialects in Ukraine.[8] Since 2020 he has lived in Kraków, where he obtained his habilitation at the Institute of Polish Language of the Polish Academy of Sciences and works as a research fellow. With Kirill Kozhanov he is preparing the first comprehensive etymological dictionary of Romani.

His research interests include the Slavic and Baltic languages, Romani dialects (particularly Kelderash), etymology, accentology and Indology.

Reception

Krzysztof Stroński, reviewing Oslon's work in the habilitation procedure, called the monograph outstanding and unique on a global scale, noting in particular its documentary value and arguing that it should be translated into English and published by a press that would ensure its international circulation.[9]

Axel Holvoet singled out Oslon's article on the reflex of the Old Indo-Aryan neuter in Romani, in which the author argues that the ambiguous plural form of masculine nouns continues an older gender distinction lost in a number of Indo-Aryan languages; Holvoet described this as an evidently important discovery.[10]

Tomasz Wicherkiewicz, head of the research laboratory for language policy and the study of smaller language communities at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, described the Kelderash grammar as complete and exemplary, suggesting it could serve as a model for the grammatical description of a language variety in linguistics teaching; he considered the publication's Russian language of issue its main drawback.[11]

Frederik Kortlandt was critical of Oslon's article on the distribution of the diphthongs ei and ie in Lithuanian, describing it as an instance of uncritically applying a method of assigning dominant patterns to sequences of morphemes and extrapolating them without regard for the phonetic and analogical developments that produced later accentual systems, or for their relative chronology.[12]

Viktor Elšík called the grammar excellent, well researched, well written and well structured, noting that it covers many topics, especially in syntax, not previously described in any grammar or specialised study of Romani, and that it should become a model for Romani grammaticography.[3]

Selected publications

Books

Articles

References

  1. ↑ "ROZMOWA. Złożona tożsamość romska" [Interview: the complex Romani identity] (in Polish). Archived from the original on 5 October 2023. Retrieved 16 October 2023.
  2. ↑ "Zagrebov brat blizanac izlazi iz anonimnosti" [Zagreb's twin brother emerges from anonymity] (in Croatian). tportal.hr. 13 October 2013. Retrieved 15 August 2026.
  3. 1 2 Elšík, Viktor (2024). "A Grammar of the Russian Kelderar Dialect of Romani" (PDF). Slavia Centralis. 17 (1): 240–252. Retrieved 15 August 2026.
  4. ↑ "Encyclopedia of Slavic Languages and Linguistics Online". Brill. Retrieved 15 August 2026.
  5. ↑ "Юбилей В. А. Дыбо" [V. A. Dybo's anniversary] (in Russian). Institute of Slavic Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences. Retrieved 15 August 2026.
  6. ↑ Dorofeev, Roman (18 April 2016). "В таборе" [In the camp]. Colta.ru (in Russian). Retrieved 15 August 2026.
  7. ↑ Babushkin, Yevgeny (15 June 2016). "Быть цыганом" [Being a Gypsy]. Snob (in Russian). Retrieved 15 August 2026.
  8. ↑ "Rromanes". Retrieved 15 August 2026.
  9. ↑ "Krzysztof Stroński. Recenzja dorobku naukowego dra Michaiła Osłona" (in Polish). Institute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 26 October 2023. Retrieved 27 January 2024.
  10. ↑ "Axel Holvoet. Recenzja dorobku naukowego dra Michaiła Osłona" (in Polish). Institute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 26 October 2023. Retrieved 27 January 2024.
  11. ↑ "Tomasz Wicherkiewicz. Recenzja dorobku naukowego dra Michaiła Osłona" (in Polish). Institute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences. Archived from the original on 26 October 2023. Retrieved 15 August 2026.
  12. ↑ Kortlandt, Frederik. "Dominance and monophthongization: method versus insight". Baltistica. Retrieved 15 August 2026.

Further reading

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