May 14, 2005 The Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences hosted the first Tenishev readings dedicated to the memory of corresponding members of the Russian Academy of Sciences. RAS by E. R. Tenishev.

Director of the Institute V. A. Vinogradov outlined the main milestones of the creative path of Edgem Rakhimovich Tenishev - Leningrad, China, Moscow. E. R. Tenishev graduated from the Faculty of Oriental Studies of Leningrad State University, having defended in 1949 the thesis " Kipchak language and its connection with modern Kipchak languages (conjugation)"; in 1953 he received the degree of Candidate of Sciences for the dissertation "Kipchak language and its connection with modern Kipchak languages (conjugation)".Grammatical essay of the Old Uighur language based on the composition "Golden Shine""; the head of both works was the outstanding Turkologist S. E. Malov!

In 1956, E. R. Tenishev was sent by the Presidium of the USSR Academy of Sciences to China to study the Turkic languages of China and train turkological personnel. At the special courses of the Institute of National Minorities of the People's Republic of China, he gave lectures on "Introduction to the Study of Turkic Languages" (a monograph on this topic in Chinese went through two editions in Beijing), on the Turkish language and the history of Turkic languages. Of paramount importance for Turkology were three expeditions of E. R. Tenishev, which he made to remote areas of Western China - to the habitats of the Turkic peoples, Uyghurs and Salars.

The rich linguistic and dialect material collected by him was the basis for E. R. Tenishev's scientific activity, which unfolded after completing a business trip at the Institute of Linguistics. Among the monographs published by him, Salar Texts (1984), Uyghur Dialect Dictionary (1990), generalizing descriptions of poorly studied languages - The System of the Salar Language (1976) and the System of the Saryg-Yugur Language (1979) are particularly well known.

E. R. Tenishev described in all its subtleties the dialect division of the Salar and Uyghur languages of Western China and linguistically justified the possibility of including the Salar and Saryg-Yugur languages in the eastern area of the Central Asian language union. He has the honor of discovering such geographically isolated "islands" on the linguistic map as the Kyrgyz language of Fu Yu County (China), the Urum dialect of Praskoveyevka village, and the Kalmyk language of Issyk-Kul.

E. R. Tenishev received a well-deserved recognition of dialectologists of the world community - he adequately represented domestic Turkology in the Linguistic Atlas of Europe (LAE), an international enterprise at UNESCO, and until the last days of his life was a member of the Main Editorial Board of LAE.

V. A. Vinogradov described E. R. Tenishev as an outstanding turkologist and linguist, who always had many ideas in stock, and most of them were implemented during his lifetime.

E. R. Tenishev was elected a member and honorary member of a number of foreign organizations for his great scientific achievements and scientific and organizational work. In 1984, E. R. Tenishev was elected a corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences.

The fundamental collective work performed by Turkologists of the Institute under the supervision of E. R. Tenishev - "Comparative historical grammar of Turkic languages" - was thought out by him in volumes, by authors. A remarkable man, distinguished by an elegant mind, exceptional intelligence, he was able to create around him a field of creative attraction, a field of mutual sympathy of participants in collective work. Academism was inherent in him both in form and content.

L. R. Kyzlasov (MSU) noted that E. R. Tenishev, having discovered and studied the languages of the Eastern Turks living in the bend of the Yellow River, Salars and Saryg-Yugurs, thus fulfilled the long-standing desire of Russian Turkologists. V. V. Radlov began studying the languages of the Central Asian Turks, his student N. F. Katanov continued in Xinjiang, then his student N. F. Katanov S.E. Malov, and S.E. Malov's student E. R. Tenishev completed this chain of indefatigable travelers.

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D. M. Nasilov (ISAA at Moscow State University) in his report "E. R. Tenishev - the successor of the Radlov tradition of studying ancient Turkic monuments" noted that the major Russian Turkologist Academician V. V. Radlov, whose name and activity, according to A. N. Samoilovich, is associated with the whole "Radlov period" of the formation and development of Russian Turkology, and E. R. Tenishev is only one generation of scientists-Turkologists, a prominent representative of it was S. E. Malov, a student and associate of V. V. Radlov in the study of ancient texts. E. R. Tenishev, who adopted the precepts of his famous predecessors, continued to work on ancient Turkic monuments and developed in his works many of their scientific ideas.

E. R. Tenishev's PhD thesis, written under the supervision of S. E. Malov, was devoted to the description of the grammatical structure of one of the largest ancient Uighur Buddhist monuments-the sutra "Golden Shine", the very monument that S. E. Malov discovered during his expedition and brought from East Turkestan to the Asian Museum in St. Petersburg and the publication of which a partial translation into German was carried out jointly by V. V. Radlov and S. E. Malov.

This grammatical sketch of the language of this monument was the first experience in Russian Turkology of interpreting the categories of ancient Uyghur texts written in the Uyghur script. E. R. Tenishev, having prepared the publication of economic records of ancient Uyghur, offered his own reading of a number of legal documents; worked on deciphering small runic inscriptions from Southern Siberia; materials of research on the text of the Uyghur version of the Buddhist the Abhidarma kosha sutras.

His contribution to the study of the history of ancient literary languages deserves special attention. Developing ideas related to the research areas developed by the seminar "Theory and History of Literary Languages" at the Institute of Foreign Languages of the Russian Academy of Sciences under the supervision of M. M. Gukhman, E. R. Tenishev proposed to introduce the concept of stratification of their literary styles into the history of Turkic literary languages, making their explanation directly dependent on the corresponding language situations. Based on the ideas of A. N. Samoilovich's well-known article " On the History of the Literary Middle Asian-Turkish Language "(1928), the history of literary languages appeared in the works of E. R. Tenishev as a continuous line of ancient literary traditions. In specific periods of development of literary languages-Old Turkic, Old Uighur, Chagatai, etc. - there was a certain dependence on the content of literature with specific content, which reflected the specifics of the socio - economic conditions of life of the Turkic society, the language situation, the interaction of nomadic and settled civilizations (respectively, different Turkic dialects), the composition of the writing environment and many other factors.

A.V. Dybo spoke about the activities of E. R. Tenishev as the head of the fundamental project "Comparative Historical Grammar of Turkic Languages" (SIGTYA), which for a quarter of a century was constantly carried out by Turkologists of the Institute and volunteer assistants from ISAA and Moscow State Pedagogical University (MSPU) in the report "Early Turkic-Yenisei language relations". R. Tenishev, she noted, was one of the developers of the SIGT concept; at the same time, he skillfully and with great confidence involved young cadres in the process of creating this capital work. Despite the objective difficulties of the transition period in the country's life, E. R. Tenishev firmly adhered to the planned six-volume implementation of his idea. Currently, five volumes of SIGT have been published (the Lexicon volume has been published twice). The last, 6th volume, which E. R. Tenishev so dreamed of seeing, was completed after his death and is currently in the Nauka publishing house.

In the last volume of the SIGT, based on pre-Turkic language reconstructions, the picture of the world seen through the eyes of the pre-Turkic ethnic group is restored. This work allows us to highlight the problem of ancient borrowings in a new way, which made it possible to describe the contacts of the Turkic ethnic group to a certain extent. Thus, contacts with the Chinese (Late Ancient Chinese and Middle Chinese) are quite fully revealed. We can talk about contacts with the Tochars, and the massive borrowing occurs rather from Turkic to Novotokhar in connection with the realities of nomadic life. Proto-Turkic borrowings from Iranian languages are insignificant: most of the ancient Iranisms are not Proto-Turkic, but inter-Turkic in nature. There are a number of borrowings between the Yenisei and Siberian-Turkic languages in historical times. The report suggests a new list of possible borrowings to the Proto-Yenisei and to certain Yenisei groups from the Proto-Turkic and from certain Turkic groups.

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In the report of G. Ts. Pyurbeev (Institute of Linguistics) "Professor E. R. Tenishev and Mongolian Linguistics", it was noted that the scientist's research interests and studies were not limited to Turkology, but he was also interested in a related field of knowledge - Mongolistics. E. R. Tenishev was one of the first to analyze the peculiarities of phonetics, morphology, and vocabulary of the Issyk-Kul Kalmyks ' language; based on the results of the analysis, he concluded that their dialect is an isolated (geographically isolated) division (See: Voprosy Yazykoznaniya. 1976. N 1). The review " On the development of Soviet Mongolian Studies (Linguistics)", written by E. R. Tenishev together with L. D. Shagdarov, not only summarizes the results, but also outlines the prospects for further development of this discipline (See: Problems of Mongolian Linguistics. Novosibirsk. 1988).

As the head of the joint branch of Turkic and Mongolian languages of the Institute for almost 30 years, E. R. Tenishev initiated and intensified the historical and comparative study of Mongolian languages. He was the scientific editor of two generalizing monographs (A. A. Darbeeva. Historical and comparative studies on the grammar of Mongolian languages. Phonetics, Moscow, 1966; G. Ts. Pyurbeev. Historical and comparative studies on the grammar of Mongolian languages. Syntax of a word combination, Moscow, 1993).

K. M. Musaev (Institute of Linguistics) reported on his linguistic research on the translation of the Bible into Karaite.

In the report of I. G. Dobrodomov (MSPU) "Turkic geographical terminology", the main attention is paid to the distribution in the old and new toponymy of Eastern Europe of the original Turkic geographical term kermen 'fortress', 'city' and the term sala, which penetrated to the Turks from the Eastern Slavs. "village"). The changing language situation in this region is reflected in the interaction of the Russian language with the Turkic languages. These stories are related to the speaker's work on the last (sixth) volume of SIGTYA.

Yu. V. Shcheka (ISAA at Moscow State University) in his report "On the interdisciplinary theory of language evolution and its place in synchronous linguistics" elaborated on the methodology of this theory, which makes it possible to reveal the essence of language evolution [see: Yu.V. Shcheka. Kritika absolutizatsii razuma [Criticism of the absolutization of reason]. He noted that E. R. Tenishev always favourably considered new approaches to the problems of proto-linguistic reconstruction.

In the two reports below, attention was paid to the problems of ancient Turkic runic monuments and related topics that interested E. R. Tenishev.

I. L. Kyzlasov (Institute of Archeology of the Russian Academy of Sciences) showed that word division signs serve as a classification feature of different runic scripts. The relationship between the Yenisei and Orkhon letters is shown in the use of the colon sign. In the Yenisei script, this role begins to be played by the rune "a", which is read at the end of words; in the Altai version of the Yenisei script, it also means the end of the text and is no longer voiced, although it is placed only after consonants. In the Talas letter, "a" is also written after vowels in these functions, i.e. it completely completes the evolution as a mute sign of both the word section and the ending. This feature may indicate a later (approximately X century) appearance of the Talas script and its continuity with the Altaian version of the Yenisei script.

In" Notes on the language and Culture of the Danube Bulgars " O. A. Mudrak (Institute of Linguistics) emphasizes the importance of the material of the Bulgar Turkic monuments for studying the linguistic and cultural situation in the Balkans at the turn of the IX-X centuries. The report examines the coherent Bulgarian inscriptions, which were deciphered using readable scripts.

A. S. Mirbadaleva (IMLI) spoke about the work of E. R. Tenishev at the Gorky Institute of World Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. For almost 15 years, E. R. Tenishev led the group for the preparation of academic publications of epic monuments and was the editor-in-chief of the series "Epos of the Peoples of Eurasia". At the international scientific symposium dedicated to the 1000th anniversary of Manas (Bishkek. 1995), E. R. Tenishev made the first attempt to recreate the language in which the epic "Manas"was composed several centuries ago. In the series" Epos of the Peoples of Eurasia "such volumes as" Narts. Heroic epic of the Balkars and Kabardins", " Kozy Korpesh and Bayan Suluu. Kazakh romantic epic", " Manas. Kirghiz Heroic Epic" (Book 3. Moscow, 1990; kn. 4. Moscow, 1995). Each meeting of the group on publishing an epic or editorial board, led by E. R. Tenishev, was held in a creative atmosphere with deep respect for colleagues. In fact, Edgem Rakhimovich was able to turn any meeting into an interesting scientific discussion concerning the problems of translation, commentary, etc.

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Unfortunately, E. R. Tenishev did not have time to see the publication of the two-volume edition of "Russian Epics" and "Tatar folk Tales".

T. D. Medikov (IMLI) He highlighted the activities of E. R. Tenishev as chairman of the Soviet (later - Russian) Committee of Turkologists and called on those present to make efforts to activate the work of this committee.

Yu. V. Psyanchin (Ufa) said that E. R. Tenishev, who considered Bashkortostan the homeland of his fathers, first came to Ufa in 1962 to give lectures at the Bashkir University on the newly examined Turkic languages of China. Subsequently, E. R. Tenishev repeatedly visited Bashkortostan as a member of commissions of the USSR Academy of Sciences. Thanks to his initiative, the IX Regional Conference on dialectology of Turkic languages was held in Ufa on September 8-10, 1982.

E. R. Tenishev participated as a scientific consultant in the training of nine doctors of Philology in Bashkir linguistics. E. R. Tenishev's contribution to Bashkir linguistics is highly appreciated: he was elected an Honorary Academician of the Academy of Sciences of the Republic of Bashkortostan and awarded the title of Honored Worker of the Republic.

M. S. Poluboyarov (Moscow) in the report "Penza Homeland in the life and scientific heritage of E. R. Tenishev" highlighted the long-term studies of the dialect of Tatar Mishars, residents of the large Tatar village of Ust-Uza in the Penza region. The scientist summarized his observations in the field of phonetics, morphology and syntax in the article "The Language of the Tatars of Ust-Uza" [sat. "Tatarica". Vammala. (Finland), 1987]. M. S. Poluboyarov also spoke about the participation of E. R. Tenishev in the organization of the Tatar society "Yaktashlar", in the work of the Council of the Lermontov Humanitarian Foundation (as a member of it), in the preparation for the publication of the"Penza Encyclopedia".

A student of E. R. Tenishev, Z. N. Ekba, presented the Bashkir-Russian Dictionary of Words of Arabic and Persian Origin (Ufa, 2004), prepared by her under the editorship of her supervisor, and the collection " Edgem Rakhimovich Tenishev. Life and creativity. 1921-2004" (Moscow, 2005); the compiler of the collection is the wife of the late E. A. Tenishev, whose memoirs, along with the preface by Ya. N.Gibadulin and the obituary "In Memory of E. R. Tenishev" (A.V. Dybo), open the collection. Here are published for the first time 17 letters of S. E. Malov to E. R. Tenishev and an article by E. R. Tenishev "In Memory of S. E. Malov" (published in Chinese in 1975), as well as his unpublished report "History of the Turkic written literary Languages of the pre-national era".

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