Trubetskoi, Nikolai

Trubetskoi, Nikolai Sergeevich 

Born Apr. 16, 1890, in Moscow; died June 25,1938, in Vienna. Russian linguist.

Trubetskoi was the son of the philosopher S. N. Trubetskoi. He graduated from Moscow University in 1913. In 1913 and 1914 he attended lectures at the University of Leipzig. Trubetskoi was a privatdocent at Moscow University in 1915 and 1916 and a professor at Don University in Rostov in 1918. He became a member of the Vienna Academy of Sciences in 1930.

Trubetskoi was one of the theorists of the Linguistic Circle of Prague. He conducted research on the history of Slavic languages and worked on the comparative and historical study of the Nakho-Dagestanian and Abkhazo-Adyg languages. He developed the principles of phonology as a separate linguistic discipline in Foundations of Phonology (1939; Russian translation, 1960). Trubetskoi developed his theories under the influence of I. A. Baudouin de Courtenay and F. de Saussure. He formulated the principles and tasks of morphophonemics.

WORKS

“Nekotorye soobrazheniia otnositel’no morfonologii.” In the collection Prazhskii lingvisticheskii kruzhok. Moscow, 1967.
“Studien auf dem Gebiete der vergleichenden Lautlehre der nord-kaukasischen Sprachen.” Caucasica, 1926, fase. 3.
Polabische Studien. Warsaw, 1929.

REFERENCES

Reformatskii, A. A. “N. S. Trubetskoi i ego ‘Osnovy fonologii’.” In N. S. Trubetskoi, Osnovy fonologii. Moscow, 1960.
Jakobson, R. “Nikolaj Sergejevič Trubetzkoy.” Acta lingüistica, 1939, vol. 1, no. 1.

V. A. VINOGRADOV