Anatoly Liberman

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Anatoly Liberman (Russian: Анатолий Симонович Либерман) (born in 1937) is a professor in the Department of German, Scandinavian and Dutch at the University of Minnesota, Minnesota, U.S.A., where he teaches courses in linguistics, etymology, and folklore. Liberman is a native of St. Petersburg, Russia (previously Leningrad, U.S.S.R.). His main graduate works, written under the auspices of the renowned philologist M.I. Steblin-Kamensky, focused on Middle English and Icelandic phonetics. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1975.

Liberman has written and edited several books and has produced hundreds of smaller works, most all of them aimed at a scholarly audience. He wrote Germanic Accentology in 1982, and translated and edited Writings on Literature by Nikolai Trubetzkoy), Mikhail Lermontov, Major Poetical Works (1983), On the Heights of Creation: The Lyrics of Fedor Tyutchev. His many articles include "The Phonetic Organization of Early Germanic", American Journal of Germanic Languages and Literature (1992), and the amusing "Gone with the Wind: More Thoughts on Medieval Farting", Scandinavian Studies (1996).

Liberman's primary interest has been the history of English words, and is one of the world's best-read individuals on the subject. In 2005, he published a popular book for lay readers entitled Word Origins... and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone (Oxford University Press, 2005). After several years' work his An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology was published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2008. He has also collected more than 20,000 articles for A Bibliography of English Etymology.

In addition to his scholarly work, Liberman is a prolific poet, writing mostly in Russian, and a translator of Russian poetry

Либерман, Анатолий Симонович

[edit] External links

• Anatoly Liberman at the University of Minnesota
• The Oxford Etymologist - Professor Liberman's weekly column on word origins at the Oxford University Press blog.