Melnychuk, Oleksander

Melnychuk, Oleksander [Мельничук, Олександер; Mel'nyčuk], b 12 July 1921 in Pysarivka, Balta county, Podilia gubernia, d 19 March 1997 in Kyiv. Linguist; corresponding member of the USSR Academy of Sciences from 1981 and full member of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR (now National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine) from 1985. A graduate of Kyiv University (1947), he joined the staff of the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the Ukrainian SSR in 1950 and served as head of its division of general and Slavic linguistics (from 1961), academic secretary of the academy’s Section of Literature, Language, and Art Scholarship (1971–8), and a member of the academy’s presidium. He proposed an original classification of simple sentences in contemporary Ukrainian, and wrote a book on the development of Slavic sentence structure (1966) and articles on Ukrainian syntax, dialects, and toponymics. He edited the institute’s collective monographs on the comparative historical study of Slavic languages (1966), the syntax of modern literary Ukrainian (1972), the historical typology of the Slavic languages (1986), the institute’s Ukrainian dictionary of loanwords (1974), and its projected seven-volume Ukrainian etymological dictionary (vol 1, 1982; vol 2, 1985; vol 3, 1989).

[This article originally appeared in the Encyclopedia of Ukraine, vol. 3 (1993).]