Jan Baudouin de Courtenay(Jan Ignacy Niecislaw) dedicated all of his long and active life to the study and understanding of language. He embraced the nineteenth century belief in generalizations and laws. though he conceived them in a quite different ...
Jan Baudouin de Courtenay(Jan Ignacy Niecislaw) dedicated all of his long and active life to the study and understanding of language. He embraced the nineteenth century belief in generalizations and laws. though he conceived them in a quite different from that of Western "Junggrammatiker(Neogrammarians)" It is generally agreed that the rise of modern linguistics is associated with the names of two of its most outstanding practitioners: Ferdinand de Saussure and Baudouin de Courtenay. The present paper deals with Baudouin de Courtenay's contribution to the modern study of slavic philology and dialectology. As is apparent from other
researchers. it is almost impossible to separate Baudouin' s contributions to Slavic Philology from his work in general linguistics. for the study of empirical facts was for him always a springboard for broad theoretical generalizations. Unfortunately it is not possible in this brief paper to elaborate upon all of Baudouin's views and studies concerning slavic philology and. to some extent. general linguistic theory. This paper indicated here only the main areas of his interest and his major achievments in Slavics. His main fields of interest. besides comparative Slavic. are Polish. Sovenian. and Russian. In each of these areas he left a large body of work dealing with the history. structure. and dialectology of thease languages. In Slavic his name is associated with the socalled "Baudouin's palatalization"(the third palatalization of velars). "Baudouin's law" in Slavic morphology and claasification of slavic languages. He offered the first phonological typology of the slavic languages which is based on two features. stress and quantity. The presence of one or both of
these features enables Baudouin to single out five different slavic areas