Jalil Keyekbaev


Jalil Giniyatovich Keyekbaev was a Bashkir linguist, Turkologist, doctor of philological sciences, professor, writer and member of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic Writers' Union. He is the founder of Bashkir linguistics and of the modern Bashkir school of Ural–Altaic languages.
He received awards for Excellence in Public Education of the RSFSR and an Honored Worker of Science of the BASSR.

Biography

Jalil Keyekbaev was born in 1911 to a peasant family in the village of Karan-Yelga in the Ufa Governorate. His father, Giniyatulla, graduated from the madrasah in the village of Utyakovo, where he was taught by the one of the best educators in the region, Khabibnazar Utyaki. Keyekbaev's mother was Garifa.
He studied at Makarovskaya Secondary School in the village of Makarovo. From 1929 to 1932 he studied at the pedagogical college in Ufa. During these years, he began to print his poems under the pseudonym Zhalil Tabyn.
He graduated from the Faculty of Germanic Philology of the First Moscow State Pedagogical Institute of Foreign Languages, then worked as a German teacher for one year at Roshalsky secondary school in the Moscow Region. In 1938, he began working at the Ufa Institute of Foreign Languages. During World War II, he temporarily left for his native district due to the need to accommodate evacuated teachers in the city of Ufa. In 1942, he served as director of the Saitbabinskaya secondary school of the Gafuri District.
He taught foreign languages in various secondary schools and higher educational institutions of the republic. Since 1943 to 1944, he was the chief editor of a Bashkir book publishing house. Since 1944 to 1953, he worked at the Ufa Aviation Institute. In 1948, he defended his Ph.D. thesis on the topic "Orthoepy of the Bashkir literary language" at Moscow State University. He then worked at Temiryazev Bashkir Pedagogical Institute, where he was employed as a senior lecturer and later dean of the faculty of foreign languages.
His scientific views were largely shaped by his dissertation advisor, Turkologist and orientalist Nikolai Dmitriev.
From 1951 to 1968 he headed the Department of Bashkir Linguistics at Temiryazev Bashkir Pedagogical Institute. From 1957 to 1961 he was Vice-Rector for Academic Affairs. In 1960, he defended his doctoral dissertation, "Phonetics of the Bashkir language ". In 1961 he was awarded the title of professor, in 1967, he earned the title of Honored Scientist of the Bashkir Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.
Keyekbayev came to literature in the 1930s. Along with writing his own poetry, he translated from German into Bashkir the works of Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Erich Weinert, Willi Bredel, Friedrich Wolf, and the Brothers Grimm. During World War II he wrote cubiars, essays, and stories on patriotic themes. He is the author of a book for children in the Bashkir language Urman әkiәttәre, and translated the tales of Jacob Grimm and Hungarian folk tales.
He performed Bashkir folk songs and played the piano, mandolin, and quray.

Scientific work

Keyekbaev used a new approach to studying the phonetics, morphology, lexicology and lexis of the Bashkir language. He is the founder of modern Bashkir linguistics, and author of many textbooks.
Keyekbaev for the first time in Turkology substantiated the phoneme as a unit that serves not only for the formation of words and morphemes, but also for distinguishing their meanings. The ability of a phoneme to differentiate words is its social function. In 1966, he published a fundamental work, "Vocabulary and Phraseology of the Modern Bashkir Literary Language". The monograph pays particular attention to lexical borrowings from Russian, Arabic, Persian and other languages.
In 1966, he published a textbook on the Bashkir language for students of the correspondence department of the philological faculty of Bashkir State University, which describes in detail the grammatical categories of the nominal parts of speech and verbs. Keyekbaev's monograph "Fundamentals of the Historical Grammar of the Ural-Altai Languages" was published posthumously in 1996; it bases a comparative examination of languages on the category of certainty and uncertainty.
Keyekbaev was the first to create a historical Bashkir grammar. In his monograph, Introduction to Ural-Altai Languages, he was the first to show the genetic affinity of Uralic and Altaic.
Keyekbaev made a significant contribution to the training of scientific and pedagogical staff. More than ten candidate's and doctoral theses were defended under his guidance.

Memorials

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