Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy ( ; 16 April 1890 – 25 June 1938) was a Russian
linguist
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...
and
historian
A historian is a person who studies and writes about the past and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, methodical narrative and research of past events as relating to the human species; as well as the ...
whose teachings formed a nucleus of the
Prague School
The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and ...
of
structural linguistics. He is widely considered to be the founder of
morphophonology. He was also associated with the Russian
Eurasianists.
Life and career
Trubetzkoy was born into privilege. His father,
Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy, came from the Lithuanian
Gediminid princely family of
Trubetskoy. In 1908, he enrolled at the
Moscow University. While spending some time at the
University of Leipzig
Leipzig University (), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 December 1409 by Frederick I, Electo ...
, Trubetzkoy was taught by
August Leskien, a pioneer of research into
sound laws
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a language change, change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one distinctive feature, phonetic feature value) by a ...
.
After he graduated from the Moscow University (1913), Trubetzkoy delivered lectures there until the
Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution was a period of Political revolution (Trotskyism), political and social revolution, social change in Russian Empire, Russia, starting in 1917. This period saw Russia Dissolution of the Russian Empire, abolish its mona ...
, when he moved first to the
University of Rostov-on-Don, then to the
University of Sofia (1920–1922) and finally took the chair of Professor of Slavic Philology at the
University of Vienna
The University of Vienna (, ) is a public university, public research university in Vienna, Austria. Founded by Rudolf IV, Duke of Austria, Duke Rudolph IV in 1365, it is the oldest university in the German-speaking world and among the largest ...
(1922–1938). Trubetzkoy was involved with the
Eurasianist movement and became one of their leading theorists and political leaders. After the emergence of "left Eurasianism" in Paris, where some of the movement's leaders became pro-Soviet, Trubetzkoy, who was a staunch
anti-communist
Anti-communism is political and ideological opposition to communist beliefs, groups, and individuals. Organized anti-communism developed after the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and it reached global dimensions during the Cold War, when th ...
, heavily criticised them and eventually broke with the Eurasianist movement.
Trubetzkoy died from a heart attack attributed to
Nazi
Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right politics, far-right Totalitarianism, totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During H ...
persecution after he had published an article that was highly critical of
Hitler's theories.
Legacy
Trubetzkoy's chief contributions to linguistics lie in the domain of
phonology
Phonology (formerly also phonemics or phonematics: "phonemics ''n.'' 'obsolescent''1. Any procedure for identifying the phonemes of a language from a corpus of data. 2. (formerly also phonematics) A former synonym for phonology, often pre ...
, particularly in the analyses of the phonological systems of individual languages and in the search for general and universal phonological laws. His magnum opus, ''Grundzüge der Phonologie'' (''Principles of Phonology'')
was issued posthumously in which he defined the
phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. It was crucial in establishing phonology as a discipline separate from
phonetics
Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that studies how humans produce and perceive sounds or, in the case of sign languages, the equivalent aspects of sign. Linguists who specialize in studying the physical properties of speech are phoneticians ...
.
Trubetzkoy also wrote as a
literary critic
A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature' ...
. In ''Writings on Literature'', a brief collection of translated articles, he analyzed
Russian literature beginning with the
Old Russian epic ''
The Tale of Igor's Campaign'' and proceeding to
19th-century Russian poetry and
Dostoevsky.
It is sometimes hard to distinguish Trubetzkoy's views from those of his friend
Roman Jakobson
Roman Osipovich Jakobson (, ; 18 July 1982) was a Russian linguist and literary theorist. A pioneer of structural linguistics, Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century. With Nikolai Trubetzk ...
, who should be credited with spreading the Prague School views on phonology after Trubetzkoy's death.
As structuralist
In his biography of the mathematical collective
Nicolas Bourbaki
Nicolas Bourbaki () is the collective pseudonym of a group of mathematicians, predominantly French alumni of the École normale supérieure (Paris), École normale supérieure (ENS). Founded in 1934–1935, the Bourbaki group originally intende ...
,
Amir Aczel
Amir Dan Aczel (; ; November 6, 1950 – November 26, 2015) was an Israeli-born American lecturer in mathematics and the history of mathematics and history of science , science, and an author of popular science .
Biography
Amir D. Aczel was ...
described Trubetzkoy as a pioneer in
structuralism
Structuralism is an intellectual current and methodological approach, primarily in the social sciences, that interprets elements of human culture by way of their relationship to a broader system. It works to uncover the structural patterns t ...
, an interdisciplinary outgrowth of structural linguistics that would be applied in mathematics by the Bourbaki group, as in the notion of a
mathematical structure
In mathematics, a structure on a set (or on some sets) refers to providing or endowing it (or them) with certain additional features (e.g. an operation, relation, metric, or topology). Τhe additional features are attached or related to the ...
, and in anthropology by
Claude Lévi-Strauss
Claude Lévi-Strauss ( ; ; 28 November 1908 – 30 October 2009) was a Belgian-born French anthropologist and ethnologist whose work was key in the development of the theories of structuralism and structural anthropology. He held the chair o ...
, who sought to describe rules governing human behavior. According to Aczel, Trubetzkoy's focus in ''Principles of Phonology'' was the study of
phoneme
A phoneme () is any set of similar Phone (phonetics), speech sounds that are perceptually regarded by the speakers of a language as a single basic sound—a smallest possible Phonetics, phonetic unit—that helps distinguish one word fr ...
s and their opposing aspects to describe rules of language, the goal of describing general underlying rules being the common goal of structuralism.
See also
*
Sprachbund
A sprachbund (, from , 'language federation'), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. Th ...
, a linguistic term coined by Trubetzkoy
Notes
References
Sources
*
Anderson, Stephen R. (1985). ''Phonology in the Twentieth Century. Theories of Rules and Theories of Representations''. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. pp. 83–116.
Intellectual Biography of Nikolai Trubetzkoyat the Gallery of Russian Thinkers (International Society for Philosophers)
External links
{{DEFAULTSORT:Trubetzkoy, Nikolai Sergeyevich
1890 births
1938 deaths
Writers from Moscow
People from Moskovsky Uyezd
Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Nobility from the Russian Empire
Expatriates from the Russian Empire in Germany
Linguists from the Russian Empire
Phonologists from Russia
Eurasianists
Soviet emigrants to Bulgaria
Bulgarian emigrants to Austria
Moscow State University alumni
Imperial Moscow University alumni
Academic staff of Moscow State University
Academic staff of Sofia University
Academic staff of Southern Federal University Academic staff of the University of Vienna
People of the Prague linguistic circle
20th-century Russian linguists
Literary critics from the Russian Empire
20th-century Russian historians
Linguists of Slavic languages
Graduates of the 5th Moscow Gymnasium