Kostruba, Petro

Kostruba, Petro [Коструба, Петро], b 25 May 1903 in Yaholnytsia Stara, Chortkiv county, Galicia, d 19 April 1979 in Lviv. Linguist; a docent at Lviv University; brother of Teofil Kostruba. His annotated translation into modern Ukrainian language of the epic poem Slovo o polku Ihorevi appeared in Lviv in 1928. After the Second World War his academic career was interrupted by arrest and imprisonment in the 1940s and 1950s. A specialist in Ukrainian phonemics and phonetics, he is the author of several articles, the monograph Fonetyka suchasnoï ukraïns'koï literaturnoï movy (The Phonetics of Contemporary Literary Ukrainian, 1963), and the chapters on phonemics in the collective work Suchasna ukraïns'ka literaturna mova: Vstup, Fonetyka (Contemporary Literary Ukrainian: Introduction, Phonetics, 1969), published by the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR. Because the editor of the latter work, Ivan Bilodid, distorted some of Kostruba’s views in order to bring Ukrainian closer to Russian, Kostruba addressed a letter of protest to Ukrainian linguists abroad. Among his contributions are also works on modern Ukrainian syntax.

[This article was updated in 2021.]