Vladislav Illich-Svitych

Vladislav Markovich Illich-Svitych (Russian: Владисла́в Ма́ркович И́ллич-Сви́тыч, also transliterated as Illič-Svityč; 12 September 1934 – 22 August 1966) was a Soviet linguist and accentologist.

His mother, Klara Moiseevna Desner (1901–1955), was chief director of puppet theater in Orenburg.

[3] He resuscitated the long-forgotten Nostratic hypothesis, originally proposed by Holger Pedersen in 1903.

While embarking on a field trip to collect data on the Hungarian dialects of the Carpathians, he died in an automobile accident on August 22, 1966, near Moscow.

His death prevented him from completing the Comparative Dictionary of Nostratic Languages, but the ambitious work was continued by his colleagues, including Sergei Starostin and Vladimir Dybo.