Gennady Prokopievich Melnikov

1. Gennady Prokopievich Melnikov

Yumatova A. & Darmostuk A.
ShLM-501

2.

Gennady Prokopievich was
the creator of a whole
direction in linguistics, the socalled "system linguistics". He
was a true encyclopaedic
scientist who was drawn from
nuclear physics to linguistics.
Candidate of Technical
Sciences, Doctor of Philology,
Honored Inventor.

3.

Was born in 1928 in a simple Russian
family in the village which carries a
peculiar name — “Старый Карапуз”.
His father was a blacksmith and a
hunter.
The family eventually moved to
Kemerovo, where Gennady, upon
finishing the 10th form, went to study
at Moscow Power Engineering
University.
Yes, it has nothing to
do with linguistics

4.

He chose this university
under the influence of
heightened interest in radio
engineering and physics,
having a three-year
experience as an electrician
at a military factory, where
he had been working since
he was 13 years old.
In 1964 he defended his
thesis on technical
sciences.

5.

In 1959, G.P. Melnikov
made a presentation on
the “limited possibilities of
the machine-translator” at
the All-Union Conference
on Mathematical
Linguistics.
He wrote the first linguistic
article for the journal
Issues of Linguistics, and
then quite often published
his research results in
other journals.

6.

› Turkey, 1966 — the International Congress of Turkology
› Romania, 1967 — the Congress of Linguists
› Germany, 1969 — the International Congress of Altaists
› Warsaw, late 70’s — the Congress of Orientalists
› Varna, 1974 — the International Congress of
Philosophy

7.

At the invitation of Professor Novikov, beginning in 1979
and until his death, worked at the department of general
and Russian linguistics at the University of Peoples'
Friendship, having passed the stages from senior
lecturer to professor — Doctor of Philology.
At PFUR read a course of lectures on "general
linguistics“.

8. System Linguistics

Peculiarities of the internal form of the Russian
language in comparison with the internal form of
other languages.
For more than four decades of his scientific work, the
results obtained have been achieved through the use
and development of a methodological principle,
which he called “modern system linguistics”.

9. System Linguistics

He interprets it as a revival of system linguistics,
going back to the ideas and concepts of such
scientists as W. Humboldt, I.I. Sreznevsky, A.A.
Potebnya and I.A. Baudouin de Courtenay.
This made it possible to synthesize the various
methods and results of theoretical and applied
linguistics that were formed in the twentieth century,
which were often considered as mutually exclusive
in those years.

10. The main points:

Language was regarded as a system; it did not only
include the links between the elements of the
system, but also tried to explain the very nature of
these elements.
For G.P. Melnikov, unlike W. Humboldt and many
other linguists, language was an autonomous
system. He stated that you could actually think
without using the language.

11. The main points:

According to Gennady Prokopievich, the system of
the language depended on these three factors:
› the size of a collective;
› the homogeneity of a collective;
› the constant communication w/o interruptions.
Syntax was considered to be the heart of any language.

12.

The appendix to Melnikov’s doctoral dissertation
provides a wide comparison of the sound structure
of the Turkish languages and their dialects and
shows that, for all their diversity, they reflect only
the difference in the degree of realisation of the
same tendencies inherent in all agglutinative
languages of the Ural-Altai type.

13.

Over 40 years G.P. Melnikov developed such a
synthesising trend in modern science which only
recently began to be recognised by an increasing circle
of scientists and was called cognitology. He wrote and
published about 3000 pages of scientific reports.
Gennady Prokopievich was a very modest and nonpublic person.

14.

Hobbies — hiking trips. G.P. Melnikov spent every
Sunday at the “Green University” — in the tourist trips
near Moscow, where in creative conversations around
the fire problems from various fields of knowledge were
discussed in an effort to understand the integrity of the
world’s structure.
He died on 21 February, 2000 and is buried in Moscow.