Abraham Solomonick

Abraham Solomonick was born in 1927 in Haradok

Abraham Solomonick was born on December 10, 1927, in Haradok, a town near Vitebsk. His father Ben Zion was a pharmacist and his mother Fruma was a pediatrician. In 1933 the family moved to Leningrad.

He finished the Law Institute in Leningrad in 1949 and worked as a barrister in the Vologda district until 1953. He also studied English teaching there and earned a master's degree in early 1954. Back in Leningrad, he taught English and received a doctorate in applied linguistics in 1966.

He then became a senior research fellow at the Research Institute of Adult Education, working on teaching foreign languages to adults. In April 1974 he immigrated to Israel with his wife and two children and settled in Jerusalem. From November 1974 he supervised the ulpans at the Ministry of Education, writing teaching manuals and setting up language laboratories.

He retired in 1993 but kept writing grammars and dictionaries. In the 1990s he turned to semiotics and wrote 10 monographs on it, 8 in Russian and 2 in English. His theory classifies sign-systems by their basic signs and arranges them by growing abstraction.