Jan Ignacy Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jan Ignacy Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay (around 1900)
Jan Ignacy Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay (year of recording unknown)

Jan Ignacy Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay (born March 13, 1845 in Radzymin near Warsaw, † November 3, 1929 in Warsaw ) was a Polish linguist and Slavist of French origin. Most of his life he worked at the universities of Kazan (1874-1883), Tartu (1883-1893), Krakow (1893-1899) and St. Petersburg (1900-1918). From 1919 to 1929 he was a professor at the Warsaw University, which was re-established in Poland .

His name in the Russian transcription is Ива́н Алекса́ндрович Бодуэ́н де Куртенэ́н (transcribed Iwan Alexandrowitsch Boduen de Kurtene , scientific transliteration Ivan Aleksandrovič Boduėn de Kurtenė ).

Life

Baudouin de Courtenay came from a French noble family . One of his ancestors immigrated to Poland under Augustus the Strong . In 1862 he became a student at the Warsaw University ( Szkoła Główna ), where he obtained his master's degree from the Faculty of History and Philology in 1866. He left Poland with a grant from the Russian Ministry of Education and continued his studies at the universities of Prague , Jena and Berlin . He attended lectures there with August Schleicher and Ernst Haeckel, among others . In 1870 he acquired his doctorate at the University of Leipzig under August Leskien . There he also had his master's thesis, written in Russian , On the Old Polish Language up to the 14th Century ( О древне-польском языкѣ до ХIVго столѣтия ) printed, which he defended shortly afterwards in Saint Petersburg . At the university there, he taught "comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages" as a private lecturer.

In 1873 he traveled to the Résia Valley in northern Italy to conduct field research among the Resian- speaking minority living there. In 1874 he got a job in Kazan as a lecturer at the chair for comparative grammar and Sanskrit. In 1875 he defended his doctoral thesis attempt at a phonetics of the Resian dialects (Russian Опыт фонетики резьянских говоров ) and in the same year received the call of extraordinary (from 1876 full) professor at the University of Kazan .

From 1883 to 1893 de Courtenay taught at the University of Dorpat , then from 1894 to 1900 at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow . In 1900 he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he received a professorship. Lev Shcherba and Max Vasmer were among his students at the time .

De Courtenay's grave in Warsaw

De Courtenay, who considered himself a Pole throughout his life, was an advocate for the rights of ethnic minorities. In 1913 he was sentenced to two years in prison for a leaflet demanding the recognition of minority rights. After three months he was dismissed, but lost his professorship. Not until 1917 was he allowed to work again as a professor in Petersburg.

After Poland gained independence in 1918, he returned to Warsaw . There he held the professorship for Indo-European linguistics at the linguistic faculty of the University of Warsaw. In 1922 he was proposed as a presidential candidate by the national minorities without his knowledge . About a fifth of the MPs and senators supported him, in the third ballot he was eliminated and Gabriel Narutowicz was elected president.

From 1897 he was also the Petersburg Academy. In 1925 he co-founded the Polish Linguistic Society.

De Courtenay was married twice. His first wife Cezaria died in 1878. His second wife Romualda (1857–1935) was a doctor. He had five children with her, including the ethnologist Cezaria Anna . He died in 1929 and was buried in the Evangelical Reformed Cemetery in Warsaw.

Academic work

Baudouin de Courtenay is the founder of the Kazan linguistic school . His work pioneered structuralist linguistics . Important structuralist concepts and terms can already be found in Baudouin: the distinction between synchrony and diachrony , between langue and parole , and the morpheme . Together with Mikołaj Kruszewski, he formed the concept of the phoneme .

Works

literature

  • Frank Häusler: The problem of phonetics and phonology in Baudouin de Courtenay and his successors . Max Niemeyer, Leipzig 1968; 2nd edition, Halle / Saale 1976.
  • Joachim Mugdan: Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929): Life and work. Wilhelm Fink, Munich 1984.

Web links

Commons : Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay  - collection of images, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan Ignacy Niecisław
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Бодуэн де Куртенэ, Иван Александрович (Russian); Boduen de Kurtene, Iwan Alexandrowitsch (transcription); Boduėn de Kurtenė, Ivan Aleksandrovič (scientific transliteration)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Polish linguist and Slavist
DATE OF BIRTH March 13, 1845
PLACE OF BIRTH Radzymin , Poland
DATE OF DEATH November 3, 1929
Place of death Warsaw , Poland