Nikolai Trubetzkoy facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Prince
Nikolai Trubetzkoy
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| Никола́й Трубецко́й | |
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| Born | 16 April 1890 |
| Died | 25 June 1938 (aged 48) |
Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (born April 16, 1890 – died June 25, 1938) was an important Russian linguist and historian. A linguist is someone who studies language. He helped create the ideas of the Prague School, a group of thinkers who studied how languages are built.
Many people consider him the founder of morphophonology. This is a field that looks at how sounds and word parts work together in a language. He was also connected to a group called the Eurasianists.
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The Life of Nikolai Trubetzkoy
Nikolai Trubetzkoy was born into a wealthy family. His father, Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy, came from a princely family in Lithuania. In 1908, Nikolai began studying at Moscow State University.
He also spent time at the University of Leipzig in Germany. There, he learned from August Leskien, who was a pioneer in studying how language sounds change over time.
From Moscow to Vienna
After finishing his studies at Moscow University in 1913, Trubetzkoy taught there. This was until the Russian Revolution happened. He then moved to the University of Rostov-on-Don.
Later, he taught at the Sofia University in Bulgaria from 1920 to 1922. Finally, he became a professor at the University of Vienna in Austria. He taught about Slavic languages there from 1922 until 1938.
Trubetzkoy passed away from a heart attack in 1938. This was after he wrote an article that was very critical of Adolf Hitler's ideas. He faced difficulties because of this.
Trubetzkoy's Work in Linguistics
Trubetzkoy's main contributions to language study were in phonology. Phonology is the study of how sounds are organized and used in a language. He analyzed the sound systems of many different languages. He also looked for general rules about how sounds work in all languages.
Principles of Phonology
His most famous book, Grundzüge der Phonologie (which means Principles of Phonology), was published after he died. In this book, he explained what a phoneme is. A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can change the meaning of a word in a language.
For example, the 'p' sound in "pat" and the 'b' sound in "bat" are different phonemes. This book was very important. It helped make phonology a separate field of study from phonetics, which is just about how sounds are made.
Literary Critic and Collaborator
Trubetzkoy also wrote about literature. In a collection of his translated articles called Writings on Literature, he looked at Russian literature. He wrote about old Russian stories like The Tale of Igor's Campaign. He also wrote about 19th-century Russian poetry and the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.
It can sometimes be hard to tell Trubetzkoy's ideas apart from those of his friend Roman Jakobson. Jakobson helped spread the ideas of the Prague School about phonology after Trubetzkoy's death.
Trubetzkoy as a Structuralist
Nikolai Trubetzkoy was a pioneer in something called structuralism. Structuralism is a way of thinking that looks at how things are organized into systems. It started with the study of language.
Amir Aczel, who wrote about a group of mathematicians called Nicolas Bourbaki, described Trubetzkoy as a key figure in this field. Structuralism was later used in mathematics and in anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss. Lévi-Strauss used it to describe rules that govern human behavior.
According to Aczel, Trubetzkoy's book Principles of Phonology focused on studying phonemes. He looked at how opposing sounds help describe the rules of a language. The main goal of structuralism is to describe these general underlying rules in different areas.
See also
In Spanish: Nikolái Trubetskói para niños
