![]() His publications in the realm of Mongolian oral literature include eleven volumes of Mongolian epics, collections of Mongolian sayings, songs, and fairy tales, and Mongolian versions of works in Sanskrit.Īfter 1949, Poppe wrote mostly in German and English, in addition to Russian. He wrote manuals and grammars of written and colloquial Khalkha-Mongolian and Buriat-Mongolian, Yakut, the Alar dialect, and Bashkir. His research focused on studies of the Altaic language family, especially Khalkha-Mongolian and Buryat-Mongolian, and on studies of the folklore of these and related languages. Poppe spoke fluent Mongolian and attained an unmatched familiarity with Mongolian oral literature. ![]() Poppe died on 8 August 1991 in Seattle at the age of 94. He was invited to the third meeting in May 1991 but was unable to attend on account of the state of his health. Poppe attended its first meeting in 1989 and the second in 1990. In May 1989, a group of graduate students interested in Central and Inner Asian Studies initiated the first Nicholas Poppe Symposium. He was elected a Foreign Member of the Finnish Academy of Sciences in 1968 and again in 1977. In 1968, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Bonn. He continued teaching there up to his retirement in 1968. In 1949, he managed to emigrate to the United States, where he joined the faculty of the Far East and Russian Institute at the University of Washington. After the war, he spent several years underground in hiding from the Soviets. In 1943 Poppe moved with his family to Berlin. When the Germans withdrew he and his family also took the opportunity to leave the Soviet Union. Poppe served as a translator between the local population and the German invaders. In 1933, at the age of 36, he was elected as the youngest associate member of the Soviet Academy of Sciences.ĭuring World War II Poppe lived in the Caucasus, in a region which was overtaken by the Germans. In 1931, he was appointed head of the Department of Mongolian Studies in the Institute of Oriental Studies at the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Three years later, in 1923, he began teaching at the University of Leningrad. He began teaching at the Institute for Modern Oriental Languages before he had completed his studies in 1920 at the age of 23. Poppe graduated from the Mongolian Department of the Faculty of Social Sciences of Petrograd University in 1921 where his main mentor B. Later, he experienced Stalin's Great Purge and the Second World War. Poppe's boyhood and youth were marked by wars: the Boxer Rebellion, the Russo-Japanese War, the First World War, and the Russian Civil War, which was followed by the establishment of the Soviet regime. Poppe was born in Yantai, Shandong, China, on 27 July 1897. Nicholas Poppe's father was stationed in China as a consular officer in the Russian diplomatic service. Poppe was open-minded toward the inclusion of Korean in Altaic, but regarded the evidence for the inclusion of Korean as weaker than that for the inclusion of Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic. Poppe was a leading specialist in the Mongolic languages and the hypothetical (and controversial) Altaic language family to which the Mongolic, Turkic, and Tungusic languages belong. He is also known as Nikolaus Poppe, with his first name in its German form. University of Washington Institute of Oriental Studies, USSR Academy of Sciences Honorary doctorate from University of BonnĪltaic languages, languages of Central and East Asia
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