Jan Baudouin de Courtenay facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay
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| Born | 13 March 1845 Radzymin, Congress Poland
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| Died | 3 November 1929 (aged 84) |
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Main interests
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Phonology |
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Notable ideas
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Theory of the phoneme and phonetic alternations |
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Influences
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Influenced
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Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (born March 13, 1845 – died November 3, 1929) was a famous Polish linguist. A linguist is a scientist who studies language. He was also a Slavist, meaning he studied Slavic languages like Polish and Russian.
He is most famous for his ideas about the phoneme and how sounds change in words. A phoneme is the smallest sound unit in a language that can change the meaning of a word.
For most of his life, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay worked at universities in Imperial Russia. These included Kazan (1874–1883), Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia) (1883–1893), and St. Petersburg (1900–1918). He also taught at Kraków (1893–1899) in Austria-Hungary. After Poland became independent again in 1918, he became a professor at the University of Warsaw from 1919 to 1929.
Contents
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay's Early Life and Education
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay was born in Radzymin, a town in what was then called Congress Poland. This area was connected to the Russian Empire. His family had French roots, meaning some of his ancestors came from France. One of them was a French noble who moved to Poland a long time ago.
In 1862, Jan started studying at the "Main School" in Warsaw. This school later became the University of Warsaw. He finished his studies in history and languages in 1866. He then received a scholarship from the Russian government to continue his education.
After leaving Poland, he studied at different universities in Europe. These included universities in Prague, Jena, and Berlin. In 1870, he earned his doctorate degree from the University of Leipzig. His work was about how words change over time. He also earned a master's degree from St. Petersburg for his paper on the Old Polish language.
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay's Career and Achievements
In the mid-1870s, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay started the Kazan School of linguistics. He worked as a professor at the university there starting in 1875. Later, he became the head of the linguistics department at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia) from 1883 to 1893.
From 1894 to 1898, he held the same position at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków. After that, he moved to St. Petersburg, where he continued to improve his ideas about how sounds in language change. When Poland became independent in 1918, he went back to Warsaw. There, he helped build the linguistics department at the University of Warsaw.
He was a permanent member of the Polish Academy of Skills from 1887. In 1897, he also became a member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay also helped edit a very important dictionary. This was the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language. It was put together by the Russian dictionary maker Vladimir Dahl. Baudouin de Courtenay worked on the 3rd (1903–1909) and 4th (1912–1914) versions of this dictionary.
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay's Social and Political Views
Besides his scientific work, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay also cared a lot about people's rights. He strongly supported different national and ethnic groups. He believed they should have more freedom and their own cultures.
In 1915, he was arrested by the Russian secret police. This happened because he wrote a paper about how people under Russian rule should have more independence. He spent three months in prison but was later set free.
In 1922, some national minority groups in Poland suggested him as a candidate for president. He didn't know about this beforehand. He lost in the third round of voting, and Gabriel Narutowicz became president.
He was also very active in the Esperanto movement. Esperanto is an artificial language created to help people from different countries communicate easily. He was the president of the Polish Esperanto Association. In 1925, he helped start the Polish Linguistic Society.
In 1927, he officially left the Roman Catholic Church. He did not join any other religion. He died in Warsaw and is buried in the Protestant Reformed Cemetery in Warsaw. His tombstone says: "He sought truth and justice."
According to historian Norman Davies, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay was a very special Polish thinker. He lived around the late 1800s and early 1900s. Davies said that Baudouin de Courtenay was a pacifist, meaning he believed in peace and was against war. He also supported protecting the environment and fighting for better education. He was a "free thinker" and often disagreed with common social ideas of his time.
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay was an atheist. This means he did not believe in God. He was also the Chairman of the Polish Association of Freethinkers.
He believed that Polish science should be taught in all Jewish schools in Poland. He also thought that Yiddish, a language spoken by many Jewish people, should be taught in all Polish schools. He often spoke out against anti-semitism (hatred towards Jewish people) and other forms of xenophobia (fear or dislike of foreigners). Because of this, he was often criticized.
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay's Impact on Linguistics
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay's work had a huge impact on how people studied language in the 20th century. His ideas helped create several important ways of studying sounds in language, called phonology.
He was one of the first to support synchronic linguistics. This is the study of how languages are spoken right now, at a specific point in time. He developed these ideas around the same time as Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist.
One of his most important ideas was the difference between how languages work (their "statics") and how they change over time (their "dynamics"). He also showed the difference between a language (the rules and system) and speech (how people actually use the language). These ideas are similar to Saussure's concepts of langue (language system) and parole (individual speech).
With his students, Mikołaj Kruszewski and Lev Shcherba, Baudouin de Courtenay helped define the modern meaning of the word "phoneme." This word was first used in 1873 by a French linguist named A. Dufriche-Desgenettes. He wanted a single word for "speech sound."
Baudouin de Courtenay's work on how sounds change in words might have influenced Ferdinand de Saussure's ideas too.
Three major schools of phonology in the 20th century came directly from his ideas. These were the Leningrad school, the Moscow school, and the Prague school. Each of these schools developed different ways of understanding his ideas about sound changes. The Prague School became very well known outside of the study of Slavic languages.
Throughout his life, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay published hundreds of scientific papers. He wrote them in many languages, including Polish, Russian, Czech, Slovenian, Italian, French, and German.
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay's Legacy
His daughter, Cezaria Baudouin de Courtenay Ehrenkreutz Jędrzejewiczowa, also became a famous scholar. She helped start the Polish way of studying ethnology (the study of cultures) and anthropology (the study of human societies). She was a professor at the universities of Vilnius and Warsaw.
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay also appears as a character in a book. He is in the 2010 novel A Curable Romantic by Joseph Skibell.
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Jan Baudouin de Courtenay
See also
In Spanish: Jan Baudouin de Courtenay para niños
