Description
In Pažiegė, a homestead founded in the mid-19th century has survived. It was home to Kazimieras Būga (1879–1924), the first Lithuanian professional in historical comparative linguistics and the initiator of the Dictionary of the Lithuanian Language – a romantic of linguistics who set out to record every word of the Lithuanian language and even reveal its etymology. He restored Lithuanian names recorded in historical sources in other languages, discovered the ancestral homeland of the Aesti (Balts) and the territories of their tribes, admonished the “spoilers of the language” and saved many Lithuanian words that had been declared foreign borrowings. “Having sacrificed himself to the Dictionary and to science”, he made a great contribution to Baltic studies, ethnonymics, onomastics, historical phonetics and morphology, Baltic dialectology and mythology, Lithuanian accentology and the standardisation of the Lithuanian language – and, of course, his greatest contribution was to Lithuanian lexicology and lexicography. In 1973, the K. Būga Memorial Museum was established at the western end of the building. Using authentic furniture and objects, the interior of Būga's time has been recreated. On display are books prepared by the professor, family photographs and relics. The exhibition tells about the linguist's life and his scholarly and public activities.
