Name Nicholas Poppe | Role Linguist | |
 | ||
Died August 8, 1991, Seattle, Washington, United States Education Saint Petersburg State University Awards Guggenheim Fellowship for Humanities, US & Canada Books Grammar of Written Mongolian, Introduction to Altaic Linguistics, Buriat Grammar, Tatar Manual, Bashkir Manual | ||
Nicholas N. Poppe (Russian: Никола́й/Ни́колас Никола́евич Поппе, Nikoláj/Níkolas Nikolájevič Poppe; July 27, 1897 – August 8, 1991) was an important Russian linguist.
Contents
He is also known as Nikolaus Poppe, with his first name in its German form. He is often cited as N.N. Poppe in academic publications.
Poppe was a leading specialist in the Mongolic languages and the larger Altaic language family to which, in the view of many linguists, the Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic languages belong. Poppe was open-minded toward the inclusion of Korean in Altaic, but regarded the evidence for the inclusion of Korean as less strong than that for the inclusion of Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic.
Life
Nicholas Poppe's father was stationed in China as a consular officer in the Russian diplomatic service. Poppe was born in Yantai, Shandong, China, on July 27, 1897.
Poppe’s boyhood and youth were marked by wars: the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, and the Russian Civil War, which was followed by the establishment of the Soviet regime. Later, he experienced Stalin's Great Purge and the Second World War.
Poppe began teaching at the Institute for Modern Oriental Languages in 1920 at the age of 23. Three years later, in 1923, he began teaching at the University of Leningrad. In 1931, he was appointed head of the Department of Mongolian Studies in the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In 1933, at the age of 36, he was elected as the youngest associate member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.
During World War II Poppe lived in the Caucasus, in a region which was overtaken by the Germans. Poppe served as a translator between the local population and the German invaders. When the Germans withdrew he and his family also took the opportunity to leave the Soviet Union. In 1943 Poppe moved with his family to Berlin. There, Poppe began working at the SS-affiliated Wannsee Institut, a research institute that studied the politics and economics of the Soviet Union. After the war, he spent several years underground in hiding from the Soviets. In 1949, he managed to emigrate to the United States, where he joined the faculty of the Far East and Russian Institute at the University of Washington. He continued teaching there up to his retirement in 1968.
In 1968, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bonn. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences in 1968 and again in 1977.
In May 1989, a group of graduate students interested in Central and Inner Asian Studies initiated the first Nicholas Poppe Symposium. Poppe attended its first meeting in 1989 and the second in 1990. He was invited to the third meeting in May 1991 but was unable to attend on account of the state of his health.
Poppe died in June 1991 in Seattle at the age of 94.
Academic career
Poppe spoke fluent Mongolian and attained an unmatched familiarity with Mongolian oral literature. His research focused on studies of the Altaic language family, especially Khalkha-Mongolian and Buriat-Mongolian, and on studies of the folklore of these and related languages. He wrote manuals and grammars of written and colloquial Khalkha-Mongolian and Buriat-Mongolian, Yakut, the Alar dialect, and Bashkir.
His publications in the realm of Mongolian oral literature include eleven volumes of Mongolian epics, collections of Mongolian sayings, songs, and fairy tales, and Mongolian versions of works in Sanskrit.
After 1949, Poppe wrote mostly in German and English, in addition to Russian. Regardless of the language he used, his writing was remarkable for its simplicity and clarity. As a result, his works are easily comprehensible to specialists and non-specialists alike.
Works
Poppe was an exceptionally prolific scholar. A bibliography of his publications from 1924 to 1987 includes 284 books and articles and 205 book reviews. Between 1949 and 1968 — a period during which he was teaching 16 to 17 hours a week at the University of Washington, with only three months in the summer for uninterrupted research — he wrote 217 works, including over 40 books.
The secret of his high productivity, as he jokingly described it, was that while other people were enjoying “the beautiful surroundings of Seattle, climbing the mountains or sailing the waters”, “he sits at his desk, wearing out one typewriter after the other like other people wear out their shoes”.