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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Abraham Solomonick | 1/2 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Solomonick | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T17:52:13.288480+00:00 | kb-cron |
Abraham Solomonick, also Avraham Solomonick, Abraham Salomonick (Hebrew: אברהם סולומוניק; born December 10, 1927, in Haradok, Byelorussian SSR) is an Israeli scientist, philologist, semiotician, and philosopher, and is the author of several Hebrew-English and English-Hebrew dictionaries.
== Biography == Abraham Solomonick was born on December 10, 1927, in Haradok, a Belarusian town near Vitebsk. His father, Ben Zion, was a pharmacist, and his mother, Fruma, was a pediatrician. In 1933, the family moved to Leningrad, where Solomonick graduated from secondary school and, in 1949, from the Law Institute, named after Mikhail Kalinin. He was sent to work as a barrister in the Vologda district, and worked there until 1953. During this time, he also studied the teaching of English at the local Pedagogical Institute, receiving a master's degree in the field at the beginning of 1954. After completing his master's degree, Solomonick moved back to Leningrad to be with his family. In Leningrad, he taught English at secondary schools and at the university, and also continued his graduate studies. In 1966, he successfully defended his Doctoral thesis and received a Doctoral degree in applied linguistics (the teaching of foreign languages to adults). He then joined the Research Institute of Adult Education, a branch of the Russian Pedagogical Academy of Sciences, where he became a senior research fellow in the field of teaching foreign languages (mainly, English) to adults. In April 1974, Solomonick immigrated to Israel with his wife and two children, taking up residence in Jerusalem. In November of the same year, he began working at the Israeli Ministry of Education as a supervisor of Ulpans (centers for teaching Hebrew to adults from a wide range of countries). In this capacity, he was responsible for formulating the teaching methods and developing the study materials that were used in the Ulpans. Among his most important accomplishments were the composition of new teaching manuals and the setting up of language laboratories with visual and audio devices to help adults learn Hebrew. In 1993, Solomonick retired, but he continued writing grammars and dictionaries for various categories of learners (see below). During the 1990s, he developed a fascination for semiotics − the science of signs and sign-systems − and wrote ten monographs on the subject (eight in Russian and two in English). His semiotic studies led him to new philosophical generalizations, and he formulated his own theory of cognition, different from the existing views on this problem.
== Works == While working at the Ministry of Education, Solomonick created a broad selection of teaching aids geared to different types of learning communities. Among his works were grammars for Russian and English speakers, phonetic exercises for them and for Ethiopian Jews, and lessons for presentation in radio broadcasts to the former Soviet Union. The pinnacle of his activities during this period was his creation of a manual for Ulpan teachers, "The Principal Concepts in Teaching Additional Languages to Adults", and his compilation of "Comparative Grammars" between Hebrew, on the one hand, and grammatical phenomena in English, French, Spanish, Russian, Georgian, Amharic, and Persian, on the other hand. In his final years at the Ministry of Education, Solomonick began to familiarize the Ulpan teachers with computers, laying the groundwork for the introduction of computer-aided learning as one of the mainstays of the Ulpans' activities. After his retirement, Solomonick began writing grammars and dictionaries for English and Russian speakers at the Mila Publication Co. Between 1995 and 2003, he wrote, edited, or initiated a score of different dictionaries and grammars. These works were collected into two teaching kits: one for English speakers and the other for Russian speakers. In addition to his linguistic activities, Solomonick is deeply involved in the field of semiotics. He has written a number of books and articles on the topic and spoken at international conferences. He is currently recognized as an expert in the field. Not only has he developed his own concept of general semiotics, but he has also tried to apply it to various branches of semiotics, including linguistics, pedagogy, advertising, and cartography. Solomonick views general semiotics as the "trunk" of the “tree” of semiotics; every semiotic branch sprouts from this trunk, and all are united by the common laws and principles represented by the trunk. His fascination with the philosophy of cognition resulted in some books on the topic published in Petersburg (in Russian) and also at Cambridge University (in English). Meanwhile, one of his books – ″Essay on General Semiotics″ – was translated and published in China. Two other books were translated into Welsh and Japanese.
== Semiotic theory == Solomonick's theory of general semiotics is founded on the classification of sign-systems by their basic signs (taxons). The theory identifies five types of sign-systems: natural, iconic, linguistic, notational, and mathematical; each type includes systems with the same types of basic signs (see illustration).