Baudouin De Courtenay, Jan Niecisław

Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay, (born March 13, 1845, Radzymin, Pol., Russian Empire [now in Poland]—died Nov. 3, 1929, Warsaw, Pol.), linguist who regarded language sounds as structural entities, rather than mere physical phenomena, and thus anticipated the modern linguistic concern with language structure. His long teaching career in eastern European universities began in 1871 and included professorships at the universities of St. Petersburg (1900–14) and Warsaw.

Although he was a specialist in comparative linguistics, Baudouin de Courtenay turned to general problems, including questions of language mixture, children’s speech, and the effect of linguistic structure on world outlook. He used the linguistic term phoneme to denote a speech sound that distinguishes meaning; e.g., the b in “bit” that distinguishes it from “pit,” “fit,” and “sit.” Views expressed in his major work, Versuch einer Theorie phonetischer Alternationen (1895; “Essay on a Theory of Phonetic Alternation”), have become a part of modern linguistic science. A Baudouin de Courtenay Anthology: The Beginnings of Structural Linguistics (1972) was edited and translated by Edward Stankiewicz.