Isaak Revzin

Isaak Iosifovic Revzin (Исаак Иосифович Ревзин; 1923–1974) was a Russian linguist and semiotician associated with the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School.

Life
Isaac Revzin was born in Istanbul. He worked at the Institute of Foreign Languages. A structural linguist, he proposed that linguistics be developed as a formal axiomatic theory. Despite the fact that he was a specialist in machine translation, he only saw a computer (and from a distance) once in his life. He also wrote in collaboration with his wife, Olga Revzina. He died in Moscow.

His son, Grigory Revzin, living in Moscow, is an art critic and a journalist.

Works

 * (with Olga Revzina) 'Expérimentation sémiotique chez Eugene Ionesco', Semiotica 4 (1960), pp. 240–262.
 * 'The relationship between structural and statistical methods in modern linguistics', Foreign developments in machine translation and information processing, 1961, pp. 43–53
 * Models of language, London: Methuen, 1966. Translated by N. F. C. Owen and A. S. C. Ross from the Russian Modeli jazyka (1962).
 * (with others) The fundamentals of human and machine translations, 1966