Władysław Kotwicz
Open-knowledge reference entry
Władysław Kotwicz (20 March 1872 – 3 October 1944), also known as Vladislav Lyudvigovich Kotvich (Russian: Владисла́в Лю́двигович Ко́твич) was a Polish-Russian linguist and Orientalist. He mainly studied the Mongolic languages.
Life and work
Kotovich was born on March 20, 1872, in the village of Ossów near Lida. Kotovich began his studies at the Faculty of Oriental Studies at Saint Petersburg University in 1891. He majored in Mongolian but also studied Manchu and Chinese. After graduating in 1895, he worked as a clerk at the Ministry of Finance from 1896.
In 1900, after his doctoral dissertation was approved, Kotovich was appointed Privatdozent and Head of the Department of Mongolian Language and Literature at Saint Petersburg University. He participated in several scientific expeditions to Kalmykia (1894, 1896, 1910, 1917), but the most important scientific journey was the expedition to Northern Mongolia (1912), where he studied the Old Turkic script and the Erdene Zuu Monastery. After the October Revolution, Kotwicz participated in the establishment of the Central Oriental Languages Institute. The establishment work continued until the autumn of 1920, at which time he was appointed director of the newly established institute and held that position until 1922.
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This entry incorporates text from “Władysław Kotwicz” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.