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Đorđe Kostić (1909-1995)
was a linguist with broad interests that encompassed different areas of
linguistics – from experimental phonetics to speech pathology, from methodology
of learning foreign languages to methodology of rehabilitation of hearing
impaired, from automatic speech recognition to machine translation. He
is the author of more than 30 books and more than 150 papers published
in domestic and foreign journals.
Kostić started his research in experimental phonetics in the mid thirties at London University as a student of Daniel Jones, from whom he learned basics of research and methodology in experimental phonetics. As a student he published two books: one with Denis Fry (Serbo-Croat Phonetic Reader, London University Press, 1936) and the other with Isabel Garido (English |
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Students, Cambridge, 1938). Also, at that time Kostić published number
of papers on experimental phonetics. In the late thirties he started with
compiling frequency dictionary of Marko Miljanov. This work he finished
in the mid fifties.
* In 1949 Kostić founded the Institute for Experimental Phonetics and Speech Pathology which was at that time part of the Serbian Academy of Science. He was the director of the Insitute till his retirement in 1979. From the very start the Institute was oriented not only towards research in experimental phonetics, but also towards speech pathology and methodology of learning foreign languages. In 1953. Kostić established the first laboratory for learning foreign languages in former Yugolslavia. In the course of few years the Insitute had more than 60 laboratories for learning foreign languages and some 40 centers for rehabilitation of hearing impared in almost all parts of former Yugoslavia. Both in learning foreign languages and rehabilitation of heairing impaired Kostić developed his own methodology and introduced new techological solutions (KSAFA - Kostić Selective Auditory Filter Amplification).. * In the mid fifties Kostić formed a group of scientits of different profiles and startted with a project of automatic speech recognitiona and machine translation. This project engaged more than 500 collaborators (most of which were technical staff working on the Corpus of Serbian Language). The project included machine for automatic speech recognition, transfer of a recognized speech into a textual format and speech synthesis. The main part of the project was grammatically tagged Corpus of Serbian language that consisted of 11 000 000 words. For the reasons not fully unveiled yet, the project had to be suspended in 1962. Some results of this research Kostić had published in several books (Probability of gramatical forms in Serbocroatian 1965, Probability of phomenic co-occurences of Serbocroatian phonemes, 1965; Functions and Meanings of cases in Serbocroatian, 1965). * Alongside with this project Kostić started a project aimed at exhaustive description of how languge was treated in the history of philosophy. With a group of most prominent philosophers in Belgrade he specified methodology for this project. The result of this project is some fourty volumes of philosophical texts dealing with language that span from Greek philosophy to the contemporary philosophy. * In the late sixties Kostić started collaboration with world's leading statistitians (Mahalanobis and Rhao) at the Indian Statistical Insitute in Calcutta. This collaboration, which lasted for almost twenty years, included statistical research related to problems of morphology, phonology and phonetics. As a result of this collaboration Kostić published number of books that cover problems of phonetics of Indian languages primarely. At the same time he had close collaboration with University of Wisconsin where he was a visiting professor and had collaboration with American scientits on developing aids for hearing impaired. In addition to his scientific work, Đorđe Kostić
was also a poet and a painter. Being one of the founders of the Belgrade
surrealist group he had published number of texts and drawings in Belgrade
surrealist publications in the late tweties and early thirties.
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