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Aharon Dolgopolsky

Aharon Dolgopolsky was a Russian-Israeli linguist known as one of the modern founders of comparative Nostratic linguistics.

1930 to 2012Comparative Nostratic linguisticsThe Nostratic comparative dictionaryTeaching linguistics at University of Haifa

Born: 18 November 1930, Moscow
Died: 20 July 2012, Haifa
Occupation: linguist
Education: Moscow State Linguistic University

Aharon Dolgopolsky was born in 1930 in Moscow

Aharon Dolgopolsky was born in Moscow on 18 November 1930.

In the 1960s he took up the Nostratic hypothesis, which holds that many of the world's languages developed from one common language. He reached it independently of Vladislav Illich-Svitych, and together they were the first to compare the proposed daughter languages of Nostratic in a systematic way. He taught at Moscow University for 8 years.

In 1976 he immigrated to Israel and taught at the University of Haifa, later serving as professor emeritus in its linguistics department. In 1994 he appeared in the NOVA documentary In Search of the First Language. In 2008 his comparative Nostratic dictionary was published in 4 volumes by the McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research at the University of Cambridge.

He lived in Haifa with his wife, Tzipi Fleischer, and died there on 20 July 2012. In 2021 his essays for a general audience were published in Hebrew translation.