Jan Baudouin de Courtenay

Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay, also known as Ivan Alexandrovich Baudouin de Courtenay (13 March 1845 – 3 November 1929), was a prominent Polish and Russian 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 Estonia) (1883–1893), Kraków (1893–1899) in Austria-Hungary, and St. Petersburg (1900–1918). which had been coined in 1873 by the French linguist Antoni 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 Ernst F. K. Koerner.

Three major schools of 20th-century phonology arose directly from his distinction between physiophonetic (phonological) and psychophonetic (morphophonological) alternations: the Leningrad school of phonology, the Moscow school of phonology, and the Prague school of phonology. All three schools developed different positions on the nature of Baudouin's alternational dichotomy. The Prague School was best known outside the field of Slavic linguistics. Throughout his life he published hundreds of scientific works in Polish, Russian, Czech, Slovenian, Italian, French and German.

Views According to historian Norman Davies, Baudouin de Courtenay was one of the most extraordinary Polish thinkers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Davies writes: "He was a pacifist, an advocate of the fight for environmental protection, a feminist, a fighter for progress in the field of education, and a free thinker, and he was against most of the social and intellectual conventions of his day." Baudouin de Courtenay was an atheist and did not consider himself a member of the Catholic Church for most of his life. He was Chairman of the Polish Association of Freethinkers.

Baudouin de Courtenay was in favor of introducing Polish science to all Jewish schools in the Second Polish Republic, and Yiddish to all Polish schools. In his public appearances, he openly criticized anti-semitism and manifestations of organized xenophobia, for which he was repeatedly attacked.

Legacy His daughter, Cezaria Jędrzejewiczowa was one of the founders of the Polish school of ethnology and anthropology as well as a professor at the universities of Vilnius and Warsaw. He had four other children: Zofia, a painter and sculptor; Świętosław, a lawyer and diplomat; Ewelina, a historian; and Maria, a lawyer.

He appears as a character in Joseph Skibell's 2010 novel, A Curable Romantic.