Baudouin de Courtenay – The Anatomy of Language
An outstanding scholar who forever changed the approach to language, both written and spoken; a forefather of many modern ideas in the field of linguistics; creator of the theory of phonemes; dialectologist; breaker of linguistic taboos; an independent columnist and thinker.
Lines of destiny
The name Baudouin de Courtenay, entirely uncharacteristic for a Pole, immediately gives away the French ancestry of the future scholar. Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay, born into the world in 1845 in Radzymin near Warsaw, is a member of the Polish branch of an old French family: his great-great-grandfather was a Frenchman in the military service of the Polish King August II, came to Poland at the beginning of the 17th century and married a Polish woman.
After finishing the Main School in Warsaw and a fellowship in Prague, Jena, Berlin and Leipzig, Baudouin de Courtenay receives the position of privatdozent in the department of comparative linguistics at Saint Petersburg Imperial University. Five years later, he enters the ‘Kazan period’ of his life: as a professor of comparative linguistics at Kazan University, Baudouin de Courtenay establishes there a new linguistic school of thought. From 1883 to 1893, he is a professor at the University of Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia), after which the scholar leaves to teach for a few years in Kraków, which was then under control of the Austrian crown. In 1901, he returns to the Russian capital as a professor at Saint Petersburg University.
A revolution in linguistics
Baudouin de Courtenay works every day from four o’clock in the morning to ten o’clock at night. He manages to educate a whole galaxy of students. And though he has no particularly brilliant oratorical skills, his students very much enjoy his manner of teaching: it is as if Baudouin de Courtenay is thinking out loud in front of his listeners. This, combined with his phenomenal ability to generalise facts, allows him to easily teach young people how to be active thinkers.
Many of Baudouin de Courtenay’s ideas have an innovative character and are utterly ahead of their time. The scholar’s chief achievement is his complete revolution of the field of linguistics: before Baudouin de Courtenay, linguists only studied written language. He is the first linguistics scholar to pay attention to how people actually speak. The scholar proves that writing and language are two different groups of phenomena, and the connection between them is of a purely psychological nature. Therefore, Baudouin de Courtenay distinguishes between ‘letters’ and ‘sounds’, that is, graphemes and phonemes: concepts which he introduces into scientific use. He is also a forerunner of modern speech therapy, studying the ‘embryology of language’: for years Baudouin de Courtenay conducts detailed and in-depth observations of the speech development of his own five children, summarising his findings in the work Observations of Child Speech. The scholar figures that the most important impulses for change in human language are hidden in child speech.
In defence of criminal slang
Yet another radical shift initiated by Baudouin de Courtenay in language studies is the notion that language is not a self-contained organism but is instead constantly evolving, and the concept of a single national language is a fiction. The scholar is keenly interested in the problems of interlinguistics, which refer to mixed (creole, pidgin) and invented (Esperanto, Volapük, Interlingua) languages. He studies Esperanto and writes critical papers about it. With his interest in studying dialects, he sincerely does not understand the contempt of linguists for professional jargons.
In 1908, Vasyli Trakhtenberg’s book Criminal Music, which is edited and prefaced by Baudouin de Courtenay, débuts in St. Petersburg. It is the first-ever dictionary of thieves’ slang and will become a model and basis for all subsequent dictionaries of this type. In his preface, Baudouin de Courtenay formulates a truly revolutionary thesis: ‘Criminal jargon is one of the variations of the Russian language’. Thus, the scholar becomes the first linguist to acknowledge that slang has the right to be called language.
The extravagant scholar’s next radical step turns into a scandal. While preparing the third edition of Vladimir Dahl’s Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian Language, Courtenay includes a number of vulgarisms and swear words in the dictionary. He argues: if a word is in the language, then it should be in the dictionary, and let the reader determine the extent and forms of its use in accordance with his level of culture. This innovation incited violent attacks from the Russian nationalist press. The scholar concisely retorted:
How is it that an ass exists but the word ‘ass’ doesn’t?
An independent thinker
Despite the breadth of his scientific interests (or thanks to them) Baudouin de Courtenay is by no means a scientist confined to his office, far from the problems of modern times. He does not shy away from social and political issues: he publicly speaks out against war, violence, xenophobia and discrimination, writes articles (he wrote around 200 editorial columns) and signs petitions. He considers maintaining an active social position as a sacred duty of scholars and the intelligentsia.
As a professor at Saint Petersburg University, he repeatedly publicly opposes the persecution of ethnic minorities in Tsarist Russia and advocates for the rights (language rights among others) of national minorities such as Poles and Jews. He argues that in Congress Poland (the central part of modern Poland which was a part of the Russian Empire until 1918) the Polish language should have equal status with Russian, and he repeatedly speaks and writes about the necessity of Poland’s cultural independence. In 1913, the scholar spends a few months in prison for fierce criticism of Great-Russian chauvinism.
After Poland regains its independence in 1918, Baudouin de Courtenay returns to Warsaw. Here he receives the title of honorary professor at Warsaw University, where he teaches right up until his death in 1929. In independent Poland, Baudouin de Courtenay’s active social position and his opposition to xenophobia gains the sympathy of the intelligentsia and national minorities, while at the same time angering nationalist circles.
The Church also does not tolerate the scientist because Baudouin de Courtenay is an atheist and speaks openly about it. In 1922 in Kraków, a group of Polish ‘jingoists’ tries to disrupt a public lecture by Baudouin de Courtenay in a crowded Słowacki Theatre and throws rotten eggs at him – and all because the scholar dared to say that it’s possible to be both Polish and German at the same time.
That same year, the national minorities of Poland, unbeknownst to Baudouin de Courtenay, nominate him for the post of president of the country. The chances of winning are small, so it is more of a demonstrative gesture and tribute to the great scholar. In the Sejm, Baudouin de Courtenay loses to Gabriel Narutowicz, who would be assassinated a few days later by an ultra-right-wing nationalist.
As a classic liberal-internationalist, Baudouin de Courtenay is not afraid to be responsible for his views. He is a Polish patriot without the shadows of xenophobia or megalomania, and he always thinks independently, remaining true to himself both in Russia and Poland. He is also remembered as altruistic and unmercenary, an exceptionally humble person who thought more about others than himself.
Not long before his death, Baudouin de Courtenay tells Józef Czapski, who is visiting the scientist in his poor and cramped apartment in the Warsaw’s Praga district:
Sometimes, honestly, I want to shoot myself, but I never have because every time, I think: what if I can still somehow help this unfortunate humanity.
Jan Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay
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