Balticists

Ferdinand de Saussure (26 November 1857 – 22 February 1913) was a Swiss linguist, semiotician and philosopher. His ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in both linguistics and semiotics in the 20th century. He is widely considered one of the founders of 20th-century linguistics and one of two major founders (together with Charles Sanders Peirce) of semiotics, or semiology, as Saussure called it.

Vladimir Nikolayevich Toporov (Russian: Влади́мир Никола́евич Топоро́в; 5 July 1928 in Moscow – 5 December 2005 in Moscow) was a leading Russian philologist associated with the Tartu-Moscow semiotic school. His wife was Tatyana Elizarenkova.

Algirdas Julien Greimas (born Algirdas Julius Greimas; 9 March 1917 – 27 February 1992), was a Lithuanian literary scientist who wrote most of his body of work in French while living in France. Greimas is known among other things for the Greimas Square (le carré sémiotique). He is, along with Roland Barthes, considered the most prominent of the French semioticians. With his training in structural linguistics, he added to the theory of signification and laid the foundations for the Parisian school of semiotics. Among Greimas's major contributions to semiotics are the concepts of isotopy, the actantial model, the narrative program, and the semiotics of the natural world. He also researched Lithuanian mythology and Proto-Indo-European religion, and was influential in semiotic literary criticism.

Marija Gimbutas (Lithuanian: Marija Gimbutienė, January 23, 1921 – February 2, 1994) was a Lithuanian-American archaeologist and anthropologist known for her research into the Neolithic and Bronze Age cultures of "Old Europe" and for her Kurgan hypothesis, which located the Proto-Indo-European homeland in the Pontic Steppe.

Georg Heinrich Ferdinand Nesselmann (February 14, 1811 in Fürstenau, near Tiegenhof, West Prussia (now Kmecin, within Nowy Dwór Gdański) – January 7, 1881 in Königsberg) was a German orientalist, philologist with interests in Baltic languages, and a mathematics historian.

Christian Schweigaard Stang (15 March 1900 – 2 July 1977) was a Norwegian linguist, Slavicist and Balticist, professor in Balto-Slavic languages at the University of Oslo from 1938 until shortly before his death. He specialized in the study of Lithuanian and was highly regarded in Lithuania.

Suniti Kumar Chatterji (26 November 1890 – 29 May 1977) was an Indian linguist, educationist and litterateur. He has coined the name of the State, Meghalaya carved out from Assam in 1972. He was a recipient of the second-highest Indian civilian honour of Padma Vibhushan.

Konstantinas Sirvydas (rarely referred as Konstantinas Širvydas; Latin: Constantinus Szyrwid; Polish: Konstanty Szyrwid; c.– August 23, 1631) was a Lithuanian religious preacher, lexicographer, and one of the pioneers of Lithuanian literature from the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, at the time a confederal part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was a Jesuit priest, a professor at the Academia Vilnensis, and the author of, among other works, the first grammar of the Lithuanian language and the first trilingual dictionary in Lithuanian, Latin, and Polish (1619). Famous for his eloquence, Sirvydas spent 10 years of his life preaching sermons at St. Johns' Church in Vilnius (twice a day – once in Lithuanian and once in Polish).

Frederik Herman Henri (Frits) Kortlandt (born June 19, 1946, Utrecht) is a professor of descriptive and comparative linguistics at Leiden University in the Netherlands. He writes on Baltic and Slavic languages, the Indo-European languages in general, and Proto-Indo-European, though he has also published studies of languages in other language families. He has also studied ways to associate language families into super-groups such as controversial Indo-Uralic.

Louis Trolle Hjelmslev (3 October 1899 – 30 May 1965) was a Danish linguist whose ideas formed the basis of the Copenhagen School of linguistics. Born into an academic family (his father was the mathematician Johannes Hjelmslev), Hjelmslev studied comparative linguistics in Copenhagen, Prague and Paris (with Antoine Meillet and Joseph Vendryes, among others). In 1931, he founded the Cercle Linguistique de Copenhague. Together with Hans Jørgen Uldall he developed a structuralist theory of language which he called glossematics, which further developed the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. Glossematics as a theory of language is characterized by a high degree of formalism. It is interested in describing the formal and semantic characteristics of language in a strict separation from sociology, psychology or neurobiology, and has a high degree of logical rigour. Hjelmslev regarded linguistics — or glossematics — as a formal science. He was the inventor of formal linguistics. Hjelmslev's theory became widely influential in structural and functional grammar, and in semiotics.