Alexander Vovin

Alexander Vladimirovich Vovin (; 27 January 1961 – 8 April 2022) was a Soviet-born Russian-American linguist and philologist, and director of studies at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (EHESS) in Paris, France. He was known for his research on East Asian languages. His main interest was in Japanese, but he studied many other languages and families, including Korean, Ainu, Tibetan, Mongolic, Tungusic, and Turkic.

Career Vovin served as a Junior Researcher at the St. Petersburg Institute of Oriental Studies from 1987–1990. However, because he was unable to get permission to visit Japan and other East Asian countries from the Soviet government, he moved to the United States in 1990. There, he held positions as assistant professor of Japanese at the University of Michigan (1990–1994), assistant professor at Miami University (1994–1995), and assistant, associate, and full professor at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa (1995–2014). He was visiting professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto from 2001 to 2002 and again in 2008, a visiting professor at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany (2008–2009), and a visiting professor at the National Institute for Japanese Language and Linguistics (NINJAL) in Tokyo, Japan from May to August 2012.

In 2014, Vovin accepted the position of Director of Studies at the Centre de recherches linguistiques sur l'Asie orientale (CRLAO) unit of the EHESS, where he remained until his death in 2022.

Early in Vovin's career he was a supporter of the Altaic hypothesis, but beginning in the 2000s, he published several papers arguing against it.

He had been engaged in coordinating the Etymological Dictionary of the Japonic Languages from 2019 to the time of his death in 2022, with cooperation from several universities and European Union funding of €2,470,200,00. However, the project was terminated upon his death.

Personal life Vovin was married twice: first to Varvara G. Lebedeva-Vovina , with whom they have a son, Aleksei, born in 1982, and the second time to fellow Japanese language researcher Sambi Ishisaki in 2000. Two more children were born to the second marriage.

He died on 8 April 2022, at the age of 61, from cancer.

Publications

Vovin, Alexander. (2000). Did the Xiong-nu speak a Yeniseian language?. Central Asiatic Journal, 44(1), pages 87–104. . Vovin, Alexander. (2001). Japanese, Korean and Tungusic. Evidence for genetic relationship from verbal morphology. David B. Honey and David C. Wright (eds.), pages 183–202.

Vovin, Alexander. (2003). Once again on lenition in Middle Korean. Korean Studies, 27, pages 85–107. .

, 20 volumes

Vovin, Alexander. (2011). Why Japonic is not demonstrably related to 'Altaic' or Korean. In Historical Linguistics in the Asia-Pacific region and the position of Japanese, The International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL) XX. Vovin, Alexander. & McCraw, D. (2011). Old Turkic Kinship Terms in Early Middle Chinese. Türk Dili Araştırmaları Yıllığı Belleten, 59(1), 105–116. Vovin, Alexander. (2017). Koreanic loanwords in Khitan and their importance in the decipherment of the latter. Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 70(2), pages 207–215.