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Baudouin de Courtenay

Jan Niecislaw Baudouin de Courtenay was a Polish linguist and Slavist, best known for his theory of the phoneme and phonetic alternations. For most of his life he worked at Imperial Russian universities: Kazan (1874-1883), Yuryev (as Tartu, Estonia was then known) (1883-1893), Kraków (1893-1899) and St. Petersburg (1900-1918). In 1919-1929, he was a professor at the re-established Warsaw University in a once again independent Poland. Baudouin de Courtenay's view of language as structural entities anticipated later interest in the connection between structure and meaning, as well as directly influencing the structuralist theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. He was also fascinated by the relationship between language and nationality, advocating the peaceful co-existence and cooperation of all ethnic groups and nationalities, without the dominance or cultural assimilation of any group by another.

Biography.

Jan Niecislaw Baudouin de Courtenay was born March 13 1845, in Radzymin, near Warsaw, Poland 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 August II the Strong.

In 1862, Baudouin entered the "Main School," a predecessor of Warsaw University. In 1866, he graduated in history and philology and won a scholarship from the Russian Imperial Ministry of Education. 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 Russian language dissertation On the Old Polish Language Prior to the 14th Century.

Baudouin established the Kazan School of Linguistics in the mid-1870s and served as the professor at the Kazan university from 1875. He was the head of linguistics faculty at the University of Yuryev (now Tartu, Estonia) (1883-1893). Between 1894 and 1898, he served in the same post at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow only to be appointed to St. Petersburg, where he continued to refine his theory of phonetic alternations.

After Poland regained her independence in 1918, he returned to Warsaw, where he formed the core of the linguistics faculty of the Warsaw University. Since 1887, he had a permanent seat in the Polish Academy of Skills and since 1897 he was a member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In 1925 he was one of the co-founders of the Polish Linguistic Society.

His daughter, Cezaria Baudouin de Courtenay Ehrenkreutz Jędrzejewiczowa was one of the founders of the Polish school of ethnology and anthropology as well as a professor at the universities of Wilno and Warsaw.

Outside of his scientific work, Baudouin de Courtenay was also a strong supporter of revival of various national minorities and ethnic groups. In 1915, he was arrested by the Okhranka, Russian secret service, for publishing a brochure on 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.

Baudouin de Courtenay died in Warsaw on November 3, 1929, and was buried at the Reformed Evangelical cemetery.

Work

Throughout his life, Baudouin de Courtenay published hundreds of scientific works in Polish, Russian, Czech, Slovenian, Italian, French, and German.

His work had a major impact on twentieth century linguistic theory, and it served as a foundation for several schools of phonology. Together with his student, Mikolaj Kruszewski, de Courtenay coined the term phoneme.

He was an early champion of synchronic linguistics, the study of contemporary spoken languages, and he had a strong impact on the structuralist linguistic theory of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, among whose notable achievements is the distinction between statics and dynamics of languages and between a language, that is an abstract group of elements) and speech (its implementation by individuals).

Contribution to phonology

Of all the topics connected with Baudouin this is the one most thoroughly dealt with in the existing literature, both in historiographically oriented studies and in strictly phonological ones. While there may be differences of opinion regarding the extent of Baudouin’s importance for any other area of linguistics, his contribution to the development of phonology appears undisputed.

Already in the Kazan period Baudouin distinguished between what he called ‘anthropophonics’ (roughly, today’s phonetics) and ‘phonetics’ (corresponding to later (morpho)phonology). Subsequently, he tried to disambiguate the latter term by talking of ‘psychophonetics’. Anthropophonics dealt with sounds and psychophonetics with phonemes. Alongside the distinction between these two aspects of the study of speech sounds, Baudouin insisted on the yet more basic separation of the study of sounds/phonemes from the study of graphemes (a term he himself coined). The issues are discussed, for instance, in his early lecture programmes and in his mature work on sound laws.

Like most pioneers, Baudouin did not always use his own distinctions consistently. Thus, one occasionally finds him using the terms ‘sound’ and ‘phoneme’ interchangeably, which has not escaped the attention of later phonologists.

The elaboration of the phoneme concept dates back to the time when Baudouin and Kruszewski worked in tandem, which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to assess their respective contributions to this fundamental development in structuralist phonology. The relevant publications appeared in the same year, and both scholars readily acknowledged their debt to each other. Despite his subsequent disappointment with Kruszewski’s major work, Očerk nauki o jazyke, and long after he had become disenchanted with the whole Kazan era, Baudouin continued to pay tribute to his late student, especially as regards the logical organisation and orderly presentation of their common findings. It is not unlikely that, had he acted differently, the part played by Kruszewski would have fallen into oblivion.

Pursuing the age-old question of the relation between sound and meaning, Baudouin and Kruszewski arrived at the concept of the phoneme as a meaning-differentiating unit through the study of phonetic alternations. Their notion of alternation is therefore sketched briefly in the following section.

Alternations

The topic occupied Baudouin for half a century: since his article on the s ~ ch alternation in Polish until, at least, his introduction to linguistics; the monograph contains the fullest exposition of his views on the subject.

In that work an alternation is defined as the coexistence of phonetically different but etymologically related sounds. Three basic classes of alternations are distinguished: 1)neophonetic alternations (divergences), 2)paleophonetic or traditional alternations, and 3)psychophonetic alternations (correlations). Divergences result from the influence upon a sound of its phonetic context; their members, divergents, are combinatory variants of the same sound. Traditional alternations are residues of divergences. Finally, in correlations phonetic differences perpetuated by tradition come to be utilised "for psychical purposes", i.e. as signals of morphological or semasiological distinctions. Another property exclusive to alternations of the third type is their ‘vitality', manifested in the analogical extension of their members (correlatives) to new words.

The boundaries between the three classes are not sharp, since alternations of one type gradually evolve into those of another. The usual scenario is as follows: with the obliteration of the phonetic context (caused, among others, by the gradual transformation of a formerly combinatory phonetic process into a spontaneous one), a divergence is transformed into a traditional alternation, which eventually acquires a morphological/semasiological function, thus turning into a correlation. With the passage of time, the resulting correlation tends to lose its psychological motivation, changing back into a traditional alternation. What at a given time still constitutes a psychophonetic alternation for one individual may already be a traditional alternation for another.

The study of alternations was one of the manifestations of Baudouin’s conviction that linguists should work with living languages prior to investigating dead ones. Unlike with the Neogrammarians, this was not simply a theoretical postulate devoid of practical consequences, but a principle Baudouin adhered to consistently.

At the same time, the theory of alternations had important consequences for Baudouin’s conceptualisation of language change. He tried to introduce some order into the current treatments of the subject, arguing that one should not mistake synchronic processes for historical changes, or, in general, invoke the terminology of historical linguistics without making sure that what one was dealing with really was the result of a historical process. In his view, the only type of phonetic change occurring in the linguistic present resulted from the discrepancy between the speaker's phonetic intention and its realization.

Unlike substitutions, alternations are results of historical changes. This is not to say that the whole issue boils down to an either - or choice between synchronic vs. historical processes. The occurrence of different sounds in related morphemes may be an instance of a simple substitution or a reflex of a historical change, but it may also be due to both factors, i.e. to a process which started in the past, but is still operative in the present.

The immediate response to these proposals was lukewarm at best. Baudouin and Kruszewski failed to convince their contemporaries that the distinction between sound alternation and sound change was worth maintaining, as is evident from the reviews of Baudouin by Lloyd, Meringer and Wagner, or from the review of Kruszewski by Brückner and of Kruszewski by no lesser a scholar than Brugmann. Many years had to pass before the value of the concept of alternation came to be appreciated.

The phoneme

As indicated above, the idea of sound alternations served Baudouin and Kruszewski as a point of departure for distinguishing between sounds and phonemes. The phoneme was, for both of them, a phonetic unit (as opposed to the sound, an anthropophonic unit) which constituted the invariant part of the word. At first, they viewed phonemes as prototypes of sound correspondences in related languages, as well as prototypes underlying sound alternations in a given language. Most of the time, however, their attention was focused on the synchronic plane, the phoneme being defined as:

the sum of generalised anthropophonic properties of a given phonetic part of the word, indivisible in the process of establishing the links of correlation within one language and the links of correspondence within several languages. In other words: the phoneme is what is phonetically indivisible from the point of view of the comparability of phonetic parts of the word.

There is a much commented upon difference between this definition and a later one, which reads:

The phoneme = a uniform representation from the phonetic world, which comes into existence in the mind through the psychical fusion of impressions obtained by pronouncing one and the same sound = the psychical equivalent of a sound.

The shift from defining the phoneme in functional terms to conceiving it as a psychological unit has generally been treated as a sign of regression on Baudouin’s part, especially by representatives of the Prague School. This assessment, entirely typical of early structuralism, is also evident, e.g., in the relative indifference to Sapir’s psychological definition of the phoneme three decades later, or in Trubetzkoy's abandonment of his earlier mentalist approach in favour of a functionalist one. Although the advent of generative phonology to some extent legitimised the mentalist treatment, it is probably fair to say that in the end the functional approach proved more fruitful. Still, one ought to be aware that the definitions of the phoneme Baudouin proposed at different points in his career differ more in theory than in practice: no matter which definition is adopted, the units identified as phonemes will turn out largely to be the same, and, more often than not, identical to the units arrived at through later phonemic analysis.

A detailed examination of the reasons which led Baudouin to concentrating on the psychological aspects of the phoneme falls outside the scope of the present article. Suffice it to say that there is little evidence to support Jakobson’s claim that the move was "fundamentally just camouflage to justify his discoveries in the eyes of his contemporaries", who, for the most part, stressed the dependence of linguistics on psychology and favoured the genetic approach. Contrary to Jakobson, there is also no indication that towards the end of his life Baudouin reverted to the functional understanding of the phoneme championed in the Kazan period. Such claims run deeply against what we know about Baudouin’s lifelong allegiance to the psychological interpretation of the facts of language and about his scholarly and personal integrity. In my view, there is no reason to disbelieve what he himself said on the topic, and that hardly leaves any doubts as to his genuine conviction - mistaken as it may have been - that the psychological approach to the phoneme was an improvement upon his own earlier treatments of the subject.

Quantitative linguistics

The origin and development of modern quantitative linguistics is associated with the structuralist revolution of the first decades of the twentieth century, and particularly with the work of Baudouin de Courtenay. While he did not apply mathematical methods himself, he did, while conducting field studies, realize the virtues of a quantitative description of language. He foresaw the advent of rigorous investigations into the laws of language, and articulated them in his 1927 Quantity as a Dimension of Thought about Language.

Baudouin de Courtenay's concept principally involved the semantic, syntactic, and morphologic representations of the number, dimensions, and intensities of the attributes. Thus he did not touch upon the concept of statistical linguistics operating with frequencies or other expressly numerical features of the language elements. Nonetheless, he perceived analogies between the physical domain, defined by precise and formalized laws, and language. He realized that the contemporary level of linguistic and mathematical knowledge was inadequate for the formulation of exact linguistic laws:

I, personally, having considered the rigor and functional dependency of the laws of the world of physics and chemistry, would hesitate to call that a ‘law’ which I consider merely an exceptionally skillful generalization applied to phenomena at large.

However, he anticipated such laws also being formulated for linguistic relationships in the future:

the time for genuine laws in the psycho-social realm in general, and first and foremost in the linguistic realm, is approaching: laws which can stand proudly beside those of the exact sciences, laws expressed in formulae of the absolute dependency of one quantity on another.

Relationship between language and nationality.

Jan Baudouin de Courtenay devoted much of his attention to the mutual relationships and affinities between East Slavonic languages and the specific characteristic features of each of them (Great Russian, Belarusian, and Little Russian or Ukrainian).

He observed that in small villages along the Polish-Belarusian border areas, people were using both languages. Polish more often in some, while in others Belarusian dominated. In any case, Belarusian seemed to prevail in these regions. In spite of this, the gentry tended to consider itself Polish, and not only on account of religion, for they were almost all Catholic, but also because of the traditions of Polish gentry. The Polish language used there was quite standard, though the local population were also speaking quite good "peasant" language, namely Belarusian.

Baudouin de Courtenay, who strongly condemned the official imperial Russian policy of Russification of Poles, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Lithuanians, could also not accept attempts to Polonize Belarus, Ukraine, and Lithuania.

He saw that view as treating Lithuanians and others are merely "ethnographic material" who may be granted the privilege of cultural assimilation into "Polishness."

In consequence, Baudouin distinguished two types of patriotism:

"The patriotism of hoodlums and international expropriators, that is nationalistic patriotism, with its slogan of ‘national egoism’, slogan of mutual extermination of bipeds differing in creed, language, traditions, convictions, a patriotism which transforms ‘fatherland’ into a prison for convicts, a cage for different species of wild beasts, into hell populated by madmen obsessed with nationalism."

"Territorial patriotism, under the banner of equal rights for all citizens, a common fatherland for all people of different creeds, different languages, different convictions, under the slogan of solidarity in the name of common work for the benefit of common fatherland, work in the sphere of material possessions and all the things which could be attained here on earth."

Legacy.

Jan Baudouin de Courtenay made a lasting contribution to phonology and foreshadowed the development of mathematical linguistics. He pioneered the scientific approach to contrastive and applied linguistics, inspired new theoretical and cognitive trends in lexicology, semantics, onomastics and anthroponymy, as well as in dialectology, sociolinguistics, and logopedics.

Baudouin de Courtenay’s role in the struggle for a civic and open society, both in imperial Russia and later in the Republic of Poland, which had regained its independence, could be hardly overdramatized. Jan Baudouin de Courtenay as a thinker, social activist, and journalist was engaged both in the central dilemmas of his time and in the mundane problems of everyday life. He strongly objected to any form of national exclusiveness and earned himself the reputation of a staunch spokesman for peaceful and brotherly coexistence, cooperation and development of all ethnic groups, nations and nationalities, and in particular Poles, Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, Germans, and Jews. Recognition of this role was evidenced in 1922, when representatives of national minorities in the Polish parliament, after consultation each other, proposed him as their candidate for President of Poland.

Summary

Baudouin de Courtenay is probably one of the most interesting and complex figures of the linguistics of his time. He was one of the chief precursors of structuralist linguistics, father of several linguistic schools, and a role model for generations of Polish scholars.

Among the areas of linguistics to which Baudouin made important contributions one finds, among others: phonetics and phonology, historical linguistics, psycho- and sociolinguistics, contrastive linguistics, dialectology, language typology, lexicology and lexicography. He was also a distinguished Slavist and Indo-Europeanist.

If one disregards the list of 22 principles of linguistics formulated in his autobiographical note, Baudouin never produced anything approaching a synthesis of his views. We are told by his contemporaries that, looking back at his long career, he reprimanded himself for having frittered away his energies on too many diverse topics.

An author dealing with Baudouin is thus confronted with the sheer bulk of his output (over 400 publications, mostly scattered in obscure periodicals) and hampered by the lack of a major synthetic oeuvre. Additionally, there is the awareness that, since only a tiny fraction of Baudouin’s work has been translated into English, the burden of responsibility to one’s readers is perhaps greater than usual.

The extent of Baudouin de Courtenay's contribution to general linguistic theory is still hard to assess. He never wrote a major synthetic work, nor has the bulk of his production been translated into English. Thanks primarily to Jakobson, his formative influence on modern phonology is nevertheless generally acknowledged. Fewer linguists are aware of the relevance of Baudouin's teaching for the study of language change. His conceptualisation of the nature of change, its causes and goals, and the role played in it by the language system all seem of more than merely historical interest to the theoretically-minded diachronic linguist.

Literature

Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan. 1972. An attempt at a theory of phonetic alternations. In Edward Stankiewicz (ed. and trans.) A Baudouin de Courtenay anthology: The beginnings of structural linguistics, 144–212. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. First published 1895.

Jakobson, R., and M. Halle. 1956. "Phonology and phonetics," in Fundamentals of Language.

Joachim Mugdan, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929). Leben und Werk, Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1984

Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1973. Ferdinand de Saussure: Origin and development of his linguistic thought in Western studies on language.

Roman Jakobson, "Jan Baudouin de Courtenay", Slavischen Rundschau 1 (1929); repr. in Jakobson, Selected Writings, II: Word and Language, The Hague: Mouton, 1972

Stankiewicz, Edward. 1976. Baudouin de Courtenay and the Foundation of Structural Linguistics. Lisse: de Ridder.

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