The history of Russian linguistics in the first half of the XIX century is almost not represented in our books and anthologies, and not everyone knows the names of the pioneers of philology of this time. Meanwhile, it was at that time that science was experiencing a certain upsurge, which caused the appearance of interesting and original works on linguistics, philosophy and history, which at that time were not considered different sciences, but acted in harmony. And the very education of the humanities was so synthetic that many specialties got along peacefully in it. That is probably why the philologist of the late XVIII-early XIX centuries was literally an amateur and connoisseur of the word and almost never, if we talk about big names, did not focus only on this area.
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Such was in many ways Ilya Fyodorovich Timkovsky - an original thinker, linguist, jurist, teacher, figure of the Russian and Ukrainian enlightenment of the first half of the XIX century.
The ancestor of the Timkovsky family was the Cossack Timko (Timofey Antonovich). One of his grandsons, I. F. Timkovsky's father, Fyodor, received the nobility and rose to the rank of collegiate assessor. In the Chernihiv region, he acquired a farm, which from that time on was popularly called Timkovschina. My grandfather had an ordinary family in Little Russia: 6 sons and 3 daughters. Many of them later became famous and revered people.
Ilya Fyodorovich Timkovsky was born on July 15 (old style), 1772 (according to other sources, 1773) in Pereyaslavl (in some works it is called in the old way - Pereyaslav). He received his initial education in the family: "My home education was so diverse that it would seem strange if it were not in the properties of that time. Its four years constitute a special century.
The first reading of Church Slavonic literacy was taught to me in Money) (locality. - O. N.) my mother and, like my uncle, who served on errands, from my grandfather's people, Andrey Kulid. His father was a ...
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