Anatoly Liberman (; born 10 March 1937) is a linguist, medievalist, etymologist, poet, translator of poetry (mainly from and into Russian), and literary critic. Liberman is a professor in the Department of German, Nordic, Slavic and Dutch at the University of Minnesota, where since 1975 he has taught courses on the history of all the Germanic languages and literatures, folklore, mythology, lexicography, European structuralism and Russian formalism. He has published works on Germanic historical phonetics, English etymology, mythology/folklore, the history of philology, and poetic translation. He publishes a blog, "The Oxford Etymologist". He is an advocate of spelling reform. Early life Liberman was born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) on 10 March 1937. His father was killed in action in 1941. He graduated from Leningrad State Herzen Pedagogical Institute (now the Herzen State Pedagogical University) in 1959, and then taught English for three years at a boarding school for underprivileged children in the Leningrad region. During that time he studied on his own and passed what is known in Russia as the candidate minimum (Germanic philology, the history of English, German and philosophy, that is, Marxism and the history of the Communist Party of the USSR). After returning to Leningrad in 1962, Liberman taught English at the Leningrad Polytechnic Institute (now Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University) and became an extramural graduate student at Leningrad University. Liberman's academic adviser was Professor M. I. Steblin-Kamenskij, at that time a Soviet scholar in Old Icelandic literature and Germanic historical phonology. In 1965 he defended his Candidate of Philological Sciences (= PhD) dissertation on a topic of Middle English historical phonology, and in the same year Nikita Khrushchev ordered all the institutes of the Academy of Sciences to open groups for the study of what he called "the Scandinavian experience." Steblin-Kamenskij was invited to head such a group at the Institute of Linguistics and invited Liberman to be his full-time junior assistant. There he stayed until his emigration in 1975. In 1972 he defended his Doctor of Philological Sciences dissertation (= West European habilitation) titled "Icelandic Prosody." At the University of Minnesota since 1975, he spent one year as a Hill Visiting Professor and two years as an associate professor; after that he was promoted to full professorship. Phonological theories Liberman's main ideas in phonology are as follows: 1) A non-contradictory theory of phonology is probably unattainable, because we lack the means