Isaak Iosifovic Revzin (russian: Исаак Иосифович Ревзин; 1923–1974) was a Russian linguist and semiotician associated with the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School.

Life

Isaac Revzin was born in

Istanbul Istanbul ( , ; tr, İstanbul ), formerly known as Constantinople ( grc-gre, Κωνσταντινούπολις; la, Constantinopolis), is the List of largest cities and towns in Turkey, largest city in Turkey, serving as the country's economic, ...

. He worked at the Institute of Foreign Languages. A structural linguist, he proposed that linguistics be developed as a formal

axiomatic theory In mathematics and logic, an axiomatic system is any Set (mathematics), set of axioms from which some or all axioms can be used in conjunction to logically derive theorems. A Theory (mathematical logic), theory is a consistent, relatively-self-co ...

. Despite the fact that he was a specialist in

machine translation Machine translation, sometimes referred to by the abbreviation MT (not to be confused with computer-aided translation, machine-aided human translation or interactive translation), is a sub-field of computational linguistics that investigates t ...

, he only saw a computer (and from a distance) once in his life. He also wrote in collaboration with his wife, Olga Revzina. He died in

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 million ...

. His son,

Grigory Revzin Grigory, Grigori and Grigoriy are Russian masculine given names. It may refer to watcher angels or more specifically to the egrḗgoroi or Watcher angels. Grigory * Grigory Baklanov (1923–2009), Russian novelist * Grigory Barenblatt (1927201 ...

, living in Moscow, is an

art critic An art critic is a person who is specialized in analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating art. Their written critiques or reviews contribute to art criticism and they are published in newspapers, magazines, books, exhibition brochures, and catalogue ...

and a journalist.

Works

* (with Olga Revzina) 'Expérimentation sémiotique chez Eugene Ionesco', '' Semiotica'' 4 (1960), pp. 240–262. * 'The relationship between structural and statistical methods in modern linguistics', ''Foreign developments in machine translation and information processing'', 1961, pp. 43–53 * ''Models of language'', London: Methuen, 1966. Translated by N. F. C. Owen and A. S. C. Ross from the Russian ''Modeli jazyka'' (1962).The English translation has been criticized as "very unsatisfactory and unreliable". '' Language'' 47 (1971), p. 188 * (with others) ''The fundamentals of human and machine translations'', 1966

References

1923 births 1974 deaths Linguists from the Soviet Union Russian semioticians 20th-century linguists Turkish emigrants to the Soviet Union {{russia-linguist-stub