Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay (13 March 1845 – 3 November 1929) was a Polish linguist and Slavist, best known for his theory of the phoneme and phonetic alternations.
For most of his life Baudouin de Courtenay worked at Imperial Russian universities: Kazan (1874–1883), Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia) (1883–1893), Kraków (1893–1899) in Austria-Hungary, and St. Petersburg (1900–1918). In 1919–1929 he was a professor at the re-established University of Warsaw in a once again independent Poland.
Biography
He was born in Radzymin, in the Warsaw Governorate of Congress Poland (a state in personal union with the Russian Empire), to a family of distant French extraction. One of his ancestors had been a French aristocrat who immigrated to Poland during the reign of Polish King Augustus II the Strong. In 1862 Baudouin de Courtenay entered the "Main School," a predecessor of the University of Warsaw. In 1866 he graduated from its historical and philological faculty and won a scholarship of the Russian Imperial Ministry of Education. After leaving Poland, he studied at various foreign universities, including those of Prague, Jena and Berlin. In 1870 he received a doctorate from the University of Leipzig for his work on analogy and a master's degree from St. Petersburg for his Polish-language dissertation On the Old Polish Language Prior to the 14th Century.
Baudouin de Courtenay established the Kazan School of linguistics in the mid-1870s and served as professor at the local university from 1875. Later he was chosen as the head of linguistics faculty at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia) (1883–1893). In 1882 he married historian and journalist Romualda Bagnicka. Between 1894 and 1898 he occupied the same post at the Jagiellonian University in Kraków only to be appointed to St. Petersburg, where he continued to refine his theory of phonetic alternations. After Poland regained independence in 1918, he returned to Warsaw, where he formed the core of the linguistics faculty of the University of Warsaw. From 1887 he held a permanent seat in the Polish Academy of Skills and from 1897 he was a member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences.
Baudouin de Courtenay was the editor of the 3rd (1903–1909) and 4th (1912–1914) editions of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language compiled by Russian lexicographer Vladimir Dahl (1801–1872).
Apart from his scientific work, Baudouin de Courtenay was also a strong supporter of the national revival of various national minority and ethnic groups. In 1915 he was arrested by the Okhrana, the Russian secret service, for publishing a brochure on the autonomy of peoples under Russian rule. He spent three months in prison, but was released. In 1922, without his knowledge, he was proposed by the national minorities of Poland as a presidential candidate, but was defeated in the third round of voting in the Polish parliament and eventually Gabriel Narutowicz was chosen. He was also an active Esperantist and president of the Polish Esperanto Association. In 1925, he was one of the co-founders of the Polish Linguistic Society.
In 1927 he formally withdrew from the Roman Catholic Church without joining any other religious denomination. He died in Warsaw. He is buried at the Protestant Reformed Cemetery in Warsaw with the epitaph "He sought truth and justice".
Contribution to linguistics
His work had a major influence on 20th-century linguistic theory, and it served as a foundation for several schools of phonology. He was an early champion of synchronic linguistics, the study of contemporary spoken languages, which he developed contemporaneously with the structuralist linguistic theory of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Among the most notable of his achievements is the distinction between statics and dynamics of languages and between a language (an abstract group of elements) and speech (its implementation by individuals) – compare Saussure's concepts of langue and parole.
Together with his students, Mikołaj Kruszewski and Lev Shcherba, Baudouin de Courtenay also shaped the modern usage of the term "phoneme" (Baudouin de Courtenay 1876–77 and Baudouin de Courtenay 1894), which had been coined in 1873 by the French linguist A. Dufriche-Desgenettes who proposed it as a one-word equivalent for the German Sprachlaut. His work on the theory of phonetic alternations may have had an influence on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure according to E. F. K. Koerner.