Background
Filip was born on 14 January in 1848 in Vologda, Russia.
Filip was born on 14 January in 1848 in Vologda, Russia.
Fortunatov studied in Moscow.
At the age of twenty Fortunatov started his scientific career by gathering important dialectal material in Lithuania. His long and brilliant teaching career at the University of Moscow (1875 - 1902) inspired and educated a host of linguists, among them Shakhmatov, Porzhezinsky (who in 1910 published an Introduction to Linguistics, inspired by Fortunatov), Lyapunov, Ulyanov, Shchepkin, and Pokrovsky.
Fortunatov thus founded a flourishing Russian school of Indo-European linguistics, which endured until it was destroyed by the Bolshevik regime.
After his retirement from the chair in Moscow, he became a member of the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg, and under its patronage, he published Monuments of the Old Slavonic Language and a Lithuanian dictionary by A. Juszkiewicz.
Fortunato's name has become attached to the so-called "Fortunatov's law, " which he presented in 1861 in Beiträge zur Kunde der indogermanischen Sprachen. According to this formulation, Indo-European l plus a dental becomes a simple cacuminal sound in Indo-Aryan and the l disappears, whereas Indo-European r remains unaffected. Fortunatov's law has been much discussed, some scholars attributing the cacuminal sound in these cases to a late Middle Indian influence.