Alexander Potebnja
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Alexander (Oleksandr) Potebnja (russian: Алекса́ндр Афана́сьевич Потебня́; uk, Олекса́ндр Опана́сович Потебня́) was a Ukrainian
linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Linguis ...
,
philosopher A philosopher is a person who practices or investigates philosophy. The term ''philosopher'' comes from the grc, φιλόσοφος, , translit=philosophos, meaning 'lover of wisdom'. The coining of the term has been attributed to the Greek th ...
and panslavist of Ukrainian Cossack descent, who was a professor of linguistics at the Imperial University of Kharkiv. He is well known as a specialist in the evolution of Russian phonetics. He constructed a
theory of language Theory of language is a topic from Philosophy of language#Nature of language, philosophy of language and theoretical linguistics. It has the goal of answering the questions "What is language?"; "Why do languages have the properties they have?"; or ...
and consciousness that later influenced the thinking of his countryman the Psychologist
Lev Vygotsky Lev Semyonovich Vygotsky (russian: Лев Семёнович Выго́тский, p=vɨˈɡotskʲɪj; be, Леў Сямёнавіч Выго́цкі, p=vɨˈɡotskʲɪj; – June 11, 1934) was a Soviet psychologist, known for his work on ps ...
. His main work was ''Language and Thought'' (russian: Мысль и язык) (1862). He also published a number of works on Russian Grammar, on the History of the Sounds in the Russian Language and on Slavic folk poetry, furthermore he translated a short fragment of
Homer Homer (; grc, Ὅμηρος , ''Hómēros'') (born ) was a Greek poet who is credited as the author of the ''Iliad'' and the ''Odyssey'', two epic poems that are foundational works of ancient Greek literature. Homer is considered one of the ...
's
Odyssey The ''Odyssey'' (; grc, Ὀδύσσεια, Odýsseia, ) is one of two major Ancient Greek literature, ancient Greek Epic poetry, epic poems attributed to Homer. It is one of the oldest extant works of literature still widely read by moder ...
into
Ukrainian Ukrainian may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Ukraine * Something relating to Ukrainians, an East Slavic people from Eastern Europe * Something relating to demographics of Ukraine in terms of demography and population of Ukraine * So ...
.GEORGE Y. SHEVELOV. 1994. Homer's Arbitration in a Ukrainian Linguistic Controversy: Alexander Potebnja and Peter Niščyns´kyj. Harvard Ukrainian Studies Vol. 18, No. 1/2, UKRAINIAN PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS (June 1994), pp. 104-11

/ref> Potebnja was a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the foremost academic institution in the
Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...
.


Life and career

Alexander Potebnja was born into a noble family in 1835 on his family's estate in Maniv, near the village of Havrylivka near
Romny Romny ( uk, Ромни́, ) is a city in northern Ukraine, Ukrainian Sumy Oblast. It is located on the Romen (river), Romen River. Romny serves as the administrative centre of Romny Raion. It is administratively incorporated as a City of region ...
, Government of Poltava, then part of the
Russian Empire The Russian Empire was an empire and the final period of the Russian monarchy from 1721 to 1917, ruling across large parts of Eurasia. It succeeded the Tsardom of Russia following the Treaty of Nystad, which ended the Great Northern War. ...
, now
Ukraine Ukraine ( uk, Україна, Ukraïna, ) is a country in Eastern Europe. It is the second-largest European country after Russia, which it borders to the east and northeast. Ukraine covers approximately . Prior to the ongoing Russian inv ...
. He received his primary education in the Polish school of the city of
Radom Radom is a city in east-central Poland, located approximately south of the capital, Warsaw. It is situated on the Mleczna River in the Masovian Voivodeship (since 1999), having previously been the seat of a separate Radom Voivodeship (1975–1 ...
. He studied law, history, and philology at the Imperial University of Kharkiv (PhD in Philology, 1874). In the early 1860s he was known as an active ethnographer, he took part in folklore expeditions in
Poltava Poltava (, ; uk, Полтава ) is a city located on the Vorskla River in central Ukraine. It is the capital city of the Poltava Oblast (province) and of the surrounding Poltava Raion (district) of the oblast. Poltava is administratively ...
and
Okhtyrka Okhtyrka ( uk, Охти́рка, ) is a city located in the Sumy Oblast (province) of Ukraine. It is administratively incorporated as a city of oblast significance. The city has also served as the administrative center of the smaller Okhtyrka Ra ...
counties. His teachers were the brothers
Pyotr Lavrov Pyotr Lavrovich Lavrov (russian: Пётр Ла́врович Лавро́в; alias Mirtov (); (June 14 O.S.">Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates.html" ;"title="une 2 Old Style and New Style dates">O.S. 1823 – February 6 anuary 6 O.S. 1900) was a ...
and
Nikolai Lavrov Lavrov, Nikolai Vladimirovich (russian: Лавро́в, Никола́й Влади́мирович) (1802–1840) was a well-known Russian baritone opera singer. He sang in Moscow at the Bolshoi Theatre. He possessed a voice of beautiful timbr ...
and Professor
Amvrosy Metlinsky Amvrosy Metlinsky (russian: Амвросий Метлинский, uk, Амвросій Метлинський, romanized: ''Amvrosii Metlynskyi''; 1814 in Sary, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire – 29 July 1870 in Yalta, Taurida Governorate ...
. He graduated from the university in 1856, served briefly a teacher of literature at a school in Kharkiv, and then in 1861 he defended his master thesis ''Certain characters in the Slavic folk poetry'' (russian: О некоторых символах в славянской народной поэзии), before beginning to lecture at the Imperial University of Kharkiv. In 1862 he published his most important work ''Thought and Language'', and in the same year he went on a trip abroad. He attended lectures at the
University of Berlin Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (german: Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a German public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin. It was established by Frederick William III on the initiative o ...
, he studied
Sanskrit Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
and visited several Slavic countries. In 1874 he defended his doctoral dissertation entitled ''Notes on Russian Grammar'' (russian: Заметки о русской грамматике). In 1875, he became a professor at the Imperial University of Kharkiv. He also presided over the Kharkiv Historical-Philological Society (1877–90) and was a member of the
Bohemian Society of Sciences Bohemian Society of Sciences is the first official scientific organization within Bohemia. History The Bohemian Society of Sciences was created from the Private Society for Mathematics, Patriotic History and Natural History, the first scientific s ...
(from 1887).


Work

As a linguist, Potebnja specialized in four areas: the
philosophy of language In analytic philosophy, philosophy of language investigates the nature of language and the relations between language, language users, and the world. Investigations may include inquiry into the nature of meaning, intentionality, reference, ...
, the historical phonetics of the
East Slavic languages The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of the Slavic languages, distinct from the West and South Slavic languages. East Slavic languages are currently spoken natively throughout Eastern Europe, and eastwards to Sibe ...
, etymology, and Slavic historical syntax. His major works on the philosophy of language are ''Thought and Language'' (russian: Мысль и язык, 5 edns, 1862, 1892, 1913, 1922, 1926); ''On the Relation among Some Representations in Language'' ((russian: О связи некоторых представлений в языке, 1864); his doctoral dissertation, ''From Notes on Russian Grammar'' (russian: Из записок по русской грамматике, vol 1, 1874; repr 1958); and the posthumously published ''Language and Nationality'' (russian: Язык и народность, in ''Vestnik Evropy'', 1895). He was particularly interested in the relations among language, thought, and reality. Language for him was primarily the means by which the mind ordered the influx of impressions and stimuli. Words carry not only a meaning, but also the past experience of the individual and the nation, through which all new experience is filtered. Thus a word usually has three aspects: an external form, a meaning, and an internal form. It is through the internal form that the objective world is subjectivized. In many cases the internal form is rooted in myth and, hence, acts as a bridge between language and folklore (with its symbols). These ideas constitute the framework of Potebnja's master's thesis, ''On Some Symbols in Slavic Folk Poetry'' (russian: О некоторых символах в славянской народной поэзии, 1860; expanded edn 1914), and his monumental work ''Obiasneniia malorusskikh i srodnykh narodnykh pesen'' (Explanations of Little Russian and Related Folk Songs, 2 vols, 1883, 1887). With time the consciousness of a word's internal form fades, and one of the tasks of literature is to restore this consciousness. According to this theory, literature is a hierarchy of genres; the simplest ones (the proverb, riddle, and fable) directly recall or renew the word's internal form, and the other genres do so in a more complicated, sometimes hardly detectable, way through a complex system of subjective (in poetry) or seemingly objective (in the novel) images. Potebnia's principal works on this subject were published posthumously: ''From Lectures on the Theory of Literature: The Fable, the Adage, the Proverb'' (russian: Из лекции по теории словесности. Басня, пословица, поговорка, 1894; repr 1970; Transl. into Ukrainian in 1930), ''From Notes on the Theory of Literature: Poetry and Prose, Tropes and Figures, Poetic and Mythical Thought'' (russian: Из записок по теории словесности: Поэзия и проза, тропы и фигуры, мышление поэтическое и мифическое, приложения, Addenda, 1905; repr 1970), and ''Preliminary Remarks ... on L. Tolstoy and F. Dostoevsky'' (russian: Черновые записки о Л. H. Толстом и Ф. М. Достоевском, in Voprosy teorii i psikhologii tvorchestva, vol 5, 1914). Regarding language as an individual's or a nation's only possible means of perceiving the world and of thinking, Potebnja protested vehemently against denationalization in general and the Russification of Ukrainians in particular, and equated this process with spiritual and intellectual disintegration. Potebnja's philosophy of language is rooted in
Wilhelm von Humboldt Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt (, also , ; ; 22 June 1767 – 8 April 1835) was a Prussian philosopher, linguist, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin, which was named after ...
's romantic idealism, but he was also influenced by J. Herbart's and
Hermann Lotze Rudolf Hermann Lotze (; ; 21 May 1817 – 1 July 1881) was a German philosopher and logician. He also had a medical degree and was well versed in biology. He argued that if the physical world is governed by mechanical laws and relations, then dev ...
's associative psychology, and particularly by
Heymann Steinthal Heymann or Hermann Steinthal (16 May 1823 – 14 March 1899) was a German philologist and philosopher. He studied philology and philosophy at the Humboldt University of Berlin, University of Berlin, and was in 1850 appointed ''Privatdozent'' of ...
's psycholinguistic writings. Potebnja viewed the history of a language as the history of its dialects and used the concept of phonetic law, although he often tried to find a psychological basis for the concept. He recognized the existence of a proto-Rus’ language, but located the beginning of its disintegration into dialects back in prehistoric times. He made many discoveries in Ukrainian historical phonetics, such as the primordial dž < dj alteration, the so-called second
pleophony The Slavic liquid metathesis refers to the phenomenon of metathesis of liquid consonants in the Common Slavic period in the South Slavic and West Slavic area. The closely related corresponding phenomenon of pleophony (also known as polnoglasie o ...
, and the conditions for the alternation e:o. He was the first to propose the theory that diphthongs were a transitional stage between Old Ruthenian o, e, and Little Russian (i.e. Modern Ukrainian) language. As an etymologist, Potebnja paid much attention to semantic development and the history of words against an expansive historical, folkloric, and psychological background. His major etymological writings were collected in ''K istorii zvukov russkago iazyka'' (Toward a History of the Sounds in the Russian Language, vols 2–4, 1880–1, 1883). His annotations to Slovo o polku Ihorevi (1878; repr 1914) are a brilliant synthesis of the etymological, folkloristic, and historical approaches. From the 1870s Potebnja concentrated on the study of the historical syntax of the Slavic languages against a comparative Indo-European background. His ''Iz zapisok po russkoi grammatike'' contains his writings on predicate forms and the participle (vol 2, 1874; rev edn 1888; repr 1958), the noun and the adjective (vol 3, 1899; repr 1968), and the verb and indeclinable words (vol 4, 1941; rev edn 1978). Before his work the field of Slavic historical syntax consisted mostly of inventories of constructions collected from literary monuments of various periods. He revised it to create a broadly drawn picture of category and construction changes tied to changes in ways of thinking, by integrating historical, dialectal, and folkloric materials. His comparative analysis uncovered remnants of prehistoric syntax in later constructions and reinterpretations of archaic constructions in later syntactic systems; that is, it demonstrated the historical character of syntactic categories and parts of speech. Anton Budilovich equated Potebnia's contribution to the field of historical syntax with C. Darwin's contribution to the study of the origin of species. Potebnja was far ahead of his contemporaries and not very popular during his lifetime. In the field of historical syntax his only immediate followers were A. Popov and, to a certain extent, Dmitrii Ovsianiko-Kulikovsky (in his outline of Russian syntax). His ideas on literature were adopted as a theoretical framework by the ‘Kharkiv school’ (B. Lezin, Vasyl Khartsiiev, A. Gornfeld, T. Rainov, Oleksa Vetukhiv, and others) grouped around the serial Voprosy teorii i psikhologii tvorchestva (8 vols, 1907–23). They also had a significant impact on the aesthetics of the Russian Symbolists (particularly A. Bely) and an indirect influence on the Ukrainian Symbolists. In 1945 the Institute of Linguistics of the Academy of Sciences of the
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic The Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic ( uk, Украї́нська Радя́нська Соціалісти́чна Респу́бліка, ; russian: Украи́нская Сове́тская Социалисти́ческая Респ ...
(now NANU) was named after Potebnia. Collections of his works on accentology (1973) and esthetics and poetics (1976, 1985) have been published.


See also

* Internal history


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Potebnja, Alexander 1835 births 1891 deaths People from Poltava Governorate People from Sumy Oblast Ukrainian writers Linguists from Ukraine Ukrainian philosophers National University of Kharkiv alumni Researchers of Slavic religion Ukrainian male writers Ukrainianists Translators of Homer