Isaak Revzin

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

Life

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

• (with Olga Revzina) 'Expérimentation sémiotique chez Eugene Ionescu, 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

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