Nikolai Trubetskoy

Prince Nikolai Sergeevich Trubetskoy (Russian: Николай Сергеевич Трубецкой Moscow, April 15, 1890 – Vienna, June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist and the founder of structural phonology or linguistic morphology.

Biography

Of noble origin, he was the son of the philosopher Sergei Trubetskoi. He was a child prodigy, who very early opted for the study of ethnology and the languages of Siberia, the Urals and the Caucasus. He ended up specializing in comparative grammar and phonology. In Moscow he argued against the conceptual atomism of the neogrammarians and critically assimilated the ideas of Saussure, to which he imprinted a teleological conception of Hegelian roots.

Between 1920 and 1922 he taught in the chair of Indo-European linguistics at the University of Sofia and began his correspondence with his friend and fellow linguist Roman Jakobson. In 1922 he is called to the chair of Slavic philology in Vienna, where he teaches until the end of his days. In 1928 Jakobson and Trubetskoi entered the Linguistic Circle of Prague, created in 1926. In 1938 he was expelled from his chair in Vienna by the Nazis, just a few months before his death from angina.

The publication, in Sofia in 1920, of his work Europe and Humanity, in which he criticizes Eurocentrism, gave rise to the doctrine of Eurasianism, the ideological basis of the projects of the Eurasian Union and Eurasian Economic Union currently promoted by Russia.

Works

His main, incomplete, work is Principles of Phonology, published posthumously in 1939 by the Prague Circle, a key book for modern phonology. Current Phonology (1933), Introduction to Phonological Descriptions (1935) and The Neutralization of Phonological Oppositions (1936) are others of the works of him