Academician Petr Slepsov – the ideological inspirer, organizer and creator of the Great Exlanatory Dictionary of the Yakut Language

Abstract

Petr Alekseevich Sleptsov, Chief Researcher of the Department of Yakut Linguistics, Institute for Humanities Research and Problems of Indigenous Peoples of the North (IGIiPMNS), Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a well-known turkologist, the first member of the academy from Yakut linguists, Doctor of Philology, Professor, turned 95 on July 12, 2023. On this occasion, the Institute for Humanities Research and Problems of Indigenous Peoples of the North SB RAS, Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) and the Administration of the municipal district “Verkhnekolymsky ulus (rayon)” are hosting a Russian conference “Languages of the indigenous peoples of Russia in interdisciplinary discourse” on December 14, 2023. Petr Sleptsov developed theoretical and applied directions of the modern Yakut linguistics, including lexicology, lexicography, sociolinguistics, linguo-folkloristics, ethnolinguistics, and history of language. He is a leading Yakut lexicographer, deeply delving into the historical and cultural role of linguistic evidence and written language. Under his leadership, editorship and co-authorship the Yakut-Russian Dictionary (1972) was created, which was the first normative dictionary of medium volume in the Yakut language. After the release of this dictionary, Petr Alekseevich managed to concentrate the main forces of his students – linguists on the creation of a very complex and time-consuming work – a multi-volume Great Academic Explanatory Dictionary of the Yakut Language. Petr Alekseevich begun this tremendous project in 1972, it was successfully completed in 2018 after 46 years in 15 volumes of 769 printed sheets, covering 80 thousand words and phraseological units. During this time, he was the permanent editor-in-chief of all volumes of the dictionary. This dictionary represents a new type of explanatory dictionaries of Turkic languages. First of all, the Dictionary is not only descriptive, i. e. fixing certain rules for usage of words, but also a national dictionary of the descriptive registering type. It means that, taking into account the diversity of the existing vocabulary, the authors sought to cover and present the lexical richness of the language of the Yakut people as fully as possible. This refers to defining a dictionary type as “registering”. Another feature is that the dictionary is bilingual. The goal of the dictionary was to ensure the introduction of the richest material to a wide scholarly audience through the Russian language. With this project, Petr Alekseevich attracted several generations of linguists from his students and like-minded people to a very complex, but always fascinating, interesting and promising field of scientific activity – lexicography. Thanks to this project there exists a team of lexicographers, the Sleptsov school of Yakut lexicographers under the leadership of Member of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia), laureate of the State Prize of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the field of science and technology, Honored Scientist of the Yakut ASSR and the Russian Federation Peter Alekseevich Sleptsov.