On August 8, 2011, Abdurakhman Jamalovich Kalimov, who worked at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences for more than thirty years, passed away. He has written numerous works on his native Dungan language, which is spoken by descendants of Chinese-speaking Huizu Muslims who migrated to the Russian Empire in the 19th century and in 1924 received the status of one of the national minorities of the Soviet Union. Abdurakhman Kalimov was born on May 5, 1923 in the Dungan village of Irdyk (Mariinskoe, Erdoğu, Yrdık) Jety-Oguz district of the Issyk-Kul region of the Kyrgyz SSR in the family of a well-to-do peasant merchant. The future linguist began his long and glorious career in 1937 at the Dungan branch of the Central Kyrgyz Pedagogical Technical School named after M. N. Pokrovsky in Frunze. In 1938, the Dungan branch was liquidated, and in 1939 Kalimov became a student, and in 1942 a post-graduate student of the Kyrgyz Pedagogical Institute, majoring in Kyrgyz language and literature, and thereby acquired a deep knowledge of the Kyrgyz language. This knowledge was useful to him later in his studies of the changes, including grammatical ones, that occurred in the Dongtang-Huizu language as a result of their contacts with the Turkic peoples, first after moving to Xinjiang from the interior of China and then to the Russian Empire. In 1943, Kalimov was drafted into the army and sent to the Frunze Military Infantry School, in 1944 he entered the Central Committee of the Communist Party(b) of Kyrgyzstan and was sent to Xinjiang as chief of staff of the 10th Special Dungan Cavalry Regiment operating in the so-called East Turkestan Republic. Kalimov's main awards are the Order of Independence of the East Turkestan Republic, the Order of the Patriotic War of the 2nd degree and the medal "For Valiant Labor during the Great Patriotic War of 1941-1945". page 216 In 1946, the twenty-three-year-old Captain Kalimov was discharged and again entered the grad ... Читать далее