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

s and their opposing aspects to describe rules of language, the goal of describing general underlying rules being the common goal of structuralism.

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 Trubetzkoy
at 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