JONAS KLIMAVIČIUS
Institute of the Lithuanian Language
ALBERTAS ROSINAS
(1938 02 07–2010 07 23)
At the stifling midday of midsummer, on a high hill in Antakalnis, we stood sadly, distraught, beside the grave of our dear colleague, a leading fellow scholar, Albertas Rosinas.
His life and scholarly path were as changeable as that summer—with sunshine and rain, heat and storms—yet he kept going! Perhaps not entirely scholarly, but the first words that come to mind are those of Prince Hamlet, describing his father, so vilely murdered: He was a man, take him for all in all! With these words Hamlet corrected his friend Horatio’s assessment: A most excellent king!
A pupil who shielded his young teacher from blows, beaten by teenage hooligans. Spiritually murdered by party apparatchiks, those vile nonhumans. For half his scholarly life kept apart from humanities students, pushed out of academia, this tenacious Lithuanian from Žemaitija clung firmly to it through his most serious work. The shadow of honor alone lagged behind his merits. But it caught up. Among the otherwise not entirely meager studies by linguists of pronouns, Albertas Rosinas’s six books stand out monumentally: the structure of pronouns in Lithuanian and all the Baltic languages—their semantics, formation, morphology, synchrony and diachrony—with a special focus on Mikalojaus
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