On March 21, 2005, the Department of Ural-Altaic Languages of the Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of Sciences celebrated the anniversaries of Turkologists L. A. Pokrovskaya and D. M. Nasilov, scientists whose destinies reflected the peculiar combination of two Oriental schools - St. Petersburg and Moscow.

Professor, PhD student. Lyudmila Aleksandrovna Pokrovskaya, whose 80th anniversary the first part of the meeting was dedicated to, graduated from the Faculty of Oriental Studies of Leningrad State University in 1949. After defending his PhD thesis " Song creativity of the Gagauz people "(1953), at the invitation of the then head of the Turkic Languages sector, a corresponding member. N. K. Dmitrieva moved to Moscow in 1954 to work at the Institute of Linguistics of the USSR. Here she worked long and fruitfully. She defended her doctoral dissertation "Syntax of the Gagauz language in a comparative light" in 1974 at the Faculty of Oriental Studies of Leningrad State University. In 1977. she returned to her native city and began working in the Balkan Languages group (headed by A.V. Desnitskaya), beginning the study of Gagauz as a joint of the Balkan languages of the union.

Acting Head of Department The Department of Ural-Altaic Languages A.V. Dybo focused on the scientific biography of L. A. Pokrovskaya, whose efforts actually created Gagauz linguistics. Its only predecessor-the first researcher of the Gagauz ethnos and folklore, artillery Colonel V. A. Moshkov was an ethnographer, anthropologist, and historian of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He is known for his recordings (and translation) of folklore texts of the Bessarabian Gagauz people (Dialects of Turkic languages. I department. Samples of folk literature of the Turkic tribes, published by V. Radlov. Ch. Kh. Dialects of the Bessarabian Gagauz. Texts collected and translated by V. Moshkov (St. Petersburg, 1904).

L. A. Pokrovskaya, studying the Gagauz language in comparison with other Turkic languages of the Oghuz group, was able to identify its specific features. A comprehensive grammatical and lexicological description of the Gagauz language is the first in world Turkology and so far the only scientific "Grammar of the Gagauz language. Phonetics and morphology" (M., 1964)," Syntax of the Gagauz language in comparative terms "(M., 1978)," Gagauz-Russian-Moldavian dictionary " (M., 1973 - co-author), numerous articles on this topic allowed her to establish the place of the Gagauz language in the Oghuz group. L. A. Pokrovskaya also paid close attention to the problem of the specific development of the Gagauz language in a foreign language environment; she also developed linguistic criteria for the periodization of the Gagauz language, formulated provisions on the dialect division of the Gagauz language, on the relation of the Gagauz language of Moldova and Ukraine to the language of the Gagauz people living in Bulgaria. Describing the whole dialect system of the Gagauz language, she considered the existing dialect differences in the diachronic aspect and at the same time determined the historical and ethnic factors of the formation of such differences.

The study of the "Balkanisms" she discovered in the Gagauz language and dialects led L. A. Pokrovskaya to the topic "Gagauz language in the Balkan language Union". The development of a special methodology allowed her to study how phonetic, grammatical and syntactic convergence of the Balkan languages is reflected in the Gagauz and Balkan-Turkish dialects. At the same time, she based her thesis on concrete material: Gagauz is an independent language of the "Balkan-Oguz type", and not a dialect of Turkish, as Turkish linguists believe.

Until recently, L. A. Pokrovskaya systematically taught at the University of Comrat and actively participated in language development in Gagauzia. &

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Together with G. A. Gaidarzhi and E. K. Koltsa, the project "Rules of spelling and punctuation of the Gagauz language" was compiled (1994).L. A. Pokrovskaya published the methodological manual "Theoretical Foundations and Principles of Gagauz orthography" (1998). Under her leadership and scientific editorship, the "Spelling Dictionary of the Gagauz Language" was published. L. A. Pokrovskaya is the author of a number of university textbooks on the Gagauz language.

In recognition of her services to Gagauzia, L. A. Pokrovskaya was awarded the title "Honorary Citizen of Gagauzia "(Comrat, 1999) and awarded the medal "10 Years of the Gagauz Republic".

G. F. Blagova (Institute of Linguistics) reminded the audience about L. A. Pokrovskaya's studies of Gagauz ethnography and their folklore, including musical ones. Back in the 1970s, she released a record with recordings of Gagauz songs. In recent years, Lyudmila Alexandrovna has been actively studying Gagauz proverbs.

L. A. Pokrovskaya entered the Eastern Faculty of LSU on the advice of her repressed father A. M. Pokrovsky, professor of the History of Religion, one of the founders of the Museum of the History of Religion of the USSR Academy of Sciences (formerly located in the Kazan Cathedral). Alexander Mikhailovich expressed a desire for his daughter to study the life of little-explored peoples. True to her father's precept, L. A. Pokrovskaya, on the advice of N. K. Dmitriev and O. I. Ivanova-Shatskaya from the 4th year, turned to studying the then very little-studied Gagauz language.

L. A. Pokrovskaya, who led a summer expedition of students of the LSU Turkic department to Moldova, thanks to her perseverance and determination, managed to make an ethnographic film about the Gagauz people together with cameraman E. M. Ostroumov. She even found a person in Moldova who knew the first researcher of the Gagauz ethnic group V. A. Moshkov. N. K. Dmitriev liked the film about the Gagauz people, and the fate of the post-graduate student L. A. Pokrovskaya was decided: together with her supervisor O. I. Ivanova-Shatskaya, she was included in the Gagauz Studies Commission of the USSR Academy of Sciences, and after defending her PhD thesis, N. K. Dmitriev invited her to work at the Institute of Linguistics.

Thus, L. A. Pokrovskaya became a linguist-Gagauz scholar, retaining in her heart an interest in ethnographic problems, in the issues of relations between the Gagauz people and the peoples of the Balkan Peninsula.

The department staff congratulated Professor Dmitry Mikhailovich Nasilov, Doctor of Philology, on his 70th birthday.

Director of the Institute of Linguistics V. A. Vinogradov made a welcoming speech. After graduating from the Institute of Oriental Languages at Moscow State University in 1958, D. M. Nasilov taught at Samarkand State University. After postgraduate studies at the Institute of Linguistics (1960-1963), he worked for three decades in the Leningrad Branch of the Institute of Linguistics (now the Institute of Linguistic Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences) - in the Altai sector (1963 - 1975), the grammar theory sector (1975 - 1985); in 1986 - 1993 - head of the Altai sector. After returning to Moscow, he became Deputy Director of the Institute of Languages of the Peoples of the Russian Federation. Since 1996, he has been teaching at the Institute of Asian and African Countries (Department of Turkic Philology).

D. M. Nasilov has a wide range of research interests. He pays a lot of attention to the history of the Turkic languages, especially the Old Turkic languages and runics, the old Uyghur language [his PhD thesis: "The structure of indicative tenses in the Old Uyghur language (according to the monuments of the Uyghur script)", 1964], as well as the historical grammar of the Turkic languages (participation in two volumes of "Comparative Historical Grammar of the Turkic Languages" 2002, 2005) and historical lexicography (participation in the compilation and scientific editing of the "Ancient Turkic Dictionary", Leningrad, 1969). His contribution to the development of synchronous morphology of Turkic languages was the monograph " Problems of Turkic aspectology: actionality "(L., 1989), defended as a doctoral dissertation in 1990.

Typology of Turkic languages and Altaistics, as well as the history of science, are also important components of D. M. Nasilov's scientific work. He devotes a lot of effort to developing problems of the national school, preserving the languages of small nations, as well as creating textbooks for the national school. Actively participates in the training of highly qualified personnel of Turkologists for universities in Uzbekistan, Siberia (Tuva, Altai), China (Uyghur language) and Turkey.

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