Isaak Iosifovic Revzin (Russian: Исаак Иосифович Ревзин; 1923–1974) was a Russian linguist and semiotician associated with the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School.

Life

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Isaac Revzin was born in Istanbul. He worked at the Institute of Foreign Languages. A structural linguist, he proposed that linguistics be developed as a formal axiomatic theory. Despite the fact that he was a specialist in machine translation, he only saw a computer (and from a distance) once in his life.[1] He also wrote in collaboration with his wife, Olga Revzina. He died in Moscow.

His son, Grigory Revzin, living in Moscow, is an art critic and a journalist.

Works

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  • (with Olga Revzina) 'Expérimentation sémiotique chez Eugene Ionesco', Semiotica 4 (1960), pp. 240–262.
  • 'The relationship between structural and statistical methods in modern linguistics', Foreign developments in machine translation and information processing, 1961, pp. 43–53
  • Models of language, London: Methuen, 1966. Translated by N. F. C. Owen and A. S. C. Ross from the Russian Modeli jazyka (1962).[2]
  • (with others) The fundamentals of human and machine translations, 1966

References

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  1. ^ Slava Gerovitch, From Newspeak To Cyberspeak: A History Of Soviet Cybernetics, MIT Press, 2004, pp.230-235.
  2. ^ The English translation has been criticized as "very unsatisfactory and unreliable". Language 47 (1971), p. 188