Mario Alinei

Mario Alinei (10 August 1926 – 9 August 2018) was an Italian linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Utrecht, where he taught from 1959 to 1987. He was founder and editor of Quaderni di semantica, a journal of theoretical and applied semantics. Until 1997, he was president of Atlas Linguarum Europae at UNESCO.

Biography Alinei was born in Turin, Italy in August 1926. He authored hundreds of publications and was a prominent scholar in the field of dialectology. Alinei was a pioneer in the use of computers in linguistics. According to Pavle Ivić, "Alinei is one of the not so numerous European linguists who already in the early sixties were willing and able to apply the results of technological innovations to the study of language."

After his retirement, beginning in 1996, Alinei also became known as a proponent of the Paleolithic continuity theory that Indo-European languages originated in Europe during the Upper Paleolithic. He died in Impruneta, Italy in August 2018, two days shy of his 92nd birthday.

In the book Etruscan: An Archaic Form of Hungarian, Alinei proposes, in accordance with the Paleolithic continuity theory, to identify Etruscan as an archaic phase of the current Hungarian language and proposes a reading of various Etruscan texts in this sense. The conclusions of Alinei's book were not accepted by the scientific community: the book was described by the Magyar Angela Marcantonio as a case of 'fantasy-linguistics', and Alinei's hypothesis "to be rejected without delay and without reservations". Alinei was also severely criticized by the linguist Danilo Gheno, professor of Finno-Ugric Philology and substitute teacher of Hungarian Language and Literature, and by numerous Hungarian linguists.

In the following book, Gli Etruschi erano Turchi Alinei, on the basis of presumed and unproven genetic, cultural and linguistic affinities, modified this thesis and identified the Turks as the ancestors of the Etruscans; a thesis that would be confirmed, according to Alinei, also by the Latin ethnonym Tuscus < *Tur-s-cu-s, Umbrian Turskum. He also explains that the Etruscan-Hungarian affinities are also real, but are due to the massive presence of Turkisms in Hungarian, caused by the invasion of prehistoric South-Eastern Europe by the Turco-Altaics, the first domesticators of the horse. Alinei's thesis, once again, is completely rejected by the scientific community on a genetic, cultural and linguistic level.

Timeline Since 1980: General Editor of the journal "Quaderni di Semantica". 1970–1997: Co-founder, Vice-President and President (from 1982) of the Atlas Linguarum Europae, a UNESCO sponsored project. 1968–1987: Full Professor of Italian Linguistics and Literature, University of Utrecht (NL). 1962–1968: Associate Professor of Italian Linguistics and Literature, University of Utrecht (NL). 1959–1962: Assistant Professor of Italian Linguistics and Literature, University of Utrecht (NL). Consultant of Olivetti for advanced research on computational linguistics Consultant of IBM for advanced research on computational linguistics

Fellowships Since 1996: honorary member of the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics 1989–1996: President of the International Society for Dialectology and Geolinguistics 1989: President of the Societas Linguistica Europaea. 1979–1980: Research Fellowship of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies. Since 1996: senior member of the Royal Academy Gustaf Adolf, Uppsala (Sweden). Ordinary member of the Royal Academy Gustaf Adolf, Uppsala (Sweden). Ordinary member of the Accademia Peloritana, Messina. Founding member of the Società Linguistica Italiana. Founding member of the Societé Internationale de Linguistique et Géolinguistique