Yrjö Wichmann

Yrjö Jooseppi Wichmann (born September 8, 1868, Liminka, May 5, 1932, Helsinki) is a Finnish linguist, well known for his knowledge of the Permian languages, the Greek language and the dialect of the Hungarian language. >

On his first research trip to the Votiers (nowadays often called Udmurt) he was sent as a student in June 1891 by Société Finno-Ougrienne. The expedition lasted about a year and Wichmann brought with him a collection of 55 fairy tales, 560 songs, 40 prayers, 440 puzzles, about 100 proverbs and spells, and a manuscript prepared by two local vocabulary teachers of one of the Voting dialects. In the summer of 1894, he went to the Wotiaks for the second time. In 1897 he published his doctorate on the history of the first syllables in the Welsh (udmurt) language. At the same time he was conducting research on the Zyrian language (komi), whose knowledge could be further deepened in Finland thanks to the young Zyrian who was in military service in St. Petersburg, where he was asked by Société to Helsinki to serve Wichmann as a native speaker. In September 1901, Wichmann set out for the University of Helsinki, where his professor was appointed only this year, for a scientific expedition to the Zyrian, from which he returned after a year.

In 1903, he published a monograph on the borrowings of Chuvash in the Permian languages. This is probably the most well-known of his work, still used and cited.

In October 1905 he set out with his wife for an annual expedition to the Czeremis (Marians). The texts of the five Swiss dialects, however, were not published until 1931. After returning to Helsinki in August 1906, he did not stay in the city for long. Already in the autumn of that year went to Moldova to study the Hungarian dialect used there. Within four months he collected a considerable amount of folk poetry, wrote about 6 thousand. words for the planned dictionary and made a description of the grammar of this dialect. However, these materials have not been published yet. It was published posthumously in 1936. He was editor-in-chief of Tietosanakirja (1921), Finnish equivalent of the Nordisk familjebok encyclopedia.

In 1920 he was appointed professor of linguistics.

All of Wichmann's research focused on historical phonetics and etymology. The other branches of linguistics did not really care at all (bypassing one article on the Cherish word for nominalism and one on falsification in permian languages). The most enduring and most valuable element of his work was the undoubtedly collected linguistic material that gave rise to the description of these languages ​​in their state from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. His wife, Julia Maria Wichmann (1881-1974, from Herrmann's home, a German from Pančeva in Vojvodina) accompanied her husband in some expeditions. She published a book on Marian ethnography: Beiträge zur Ethnographie der Tscheremissen (1913). Publications Literature

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