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Nikolai Trubetzkoy
 
 
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Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (also: Trubetskoy
Trubetskoy

Trubetskoy , ????????? , Trubiacki , Trubecki , Trubetsky , ?????????? , Troubetzkoy , Trubezkoi or Trubetzkoy , is a Ruthenian Gediminid gentry family of Black Ruthenian stock, like many other princely houses of Grand Duchy of Lithuania, later prominent in Russian history, science, and arts....
) (Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
: (Moscow
Moscow

Moscow is the capital and the largest types of inhabited localities in Russia of the Russian Federation. It is also the largest European cities and metropolitan areas, with the Moscow metropolitan area ranking among the largest urban areas in the world....
, April 15, 1890 - Vienna
Vienna

Vienna is the Capital of Republic of Austria and also one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.7 million...
, June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
 and historian
Historian

A historian is an individual who studies and writes about history, and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, systematic narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all events in time....
 whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics
Structuralism

Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure....
. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology
Morphophonology

Morphophonology is a branch of linguistics which studies:*The phonology structure of morpheme.*The combinatory phonic modifications of morphemes which happen when they are combined...
. He was also associated with the Russian Eurasianists
Eurasianists

The Eurasianists was a political movement in the White ?migr? community in the 1920s. The movement posited that Russian civilization does not belong in the "European" category , and that the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks was a necessary reaction to the rapid westernization of Russian society....
.

Trubetzkoy was born into an extremely refined environment. His father was a first-rank philosopher whose lineage ascended to the medieval rulers of Lithuania
Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the southernmost of the three Baltic states. Situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, it shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the southeast, Poland, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast to the southwest....
.






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Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (also: Trubetskoy
Trubetskoy

Trubetskoy , ????????? , Trubiacki , Trubecki , Trubetsky , ?????????? , Troubetzkoy , Trubezkoi or Trubetzkoy , is a Ruthenian Gediminid gentry family of Black Ruthenian stock, like many other princely houses of Grand Duchy of Lithuania, later prominent in Russian history, science, and arts....
) (Russian
Russian language

Russian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe....
: (Moscow
Moscow

Moscow is the capital and the largest types of inhabited localities in Russia of the Russian Federation. It is also the largest European cities and metropolitan areas, with the Moscow metropolitan area ranking among the largest urban areas in the world....
, April 15, 1890 - Vienna
Vienna

Vienna is the Capital of Republic of Austria and also one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.7 million...
, June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist
Linguistics

Linguistics is the science study of natural language. Linguistics encompasses a number of sub-fields. An important topical division is between the study of language structure and the study of Meaning ....
 and historian
Historian

A historian is an individual who studies and writes about history, and is regarded as an authority on it. Historians are concerned with the continuous, systematic narrative and research of past events as relating to the human race; as well as the study of all events in time....
 whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics
Structuralism

Structuralism is an approach to the human sciences that attempts to analyze a specific field as a complex system of interrelated parts. It began in linguistics with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure....
. He is widely considered to be the founder of morphophonology
Morphophonology

Morphophonology is a branch of linguistics which studies:*The phonology structure of morpheme.*The combinatory phonic modifications of morphemes which happen when they are combined...
. He was also associated with the Russian Eurasianists
Eurasianists

The Eurasianists was a political movement in the White ?migr? community in the 1920s. The movement posited that Russian civilization does not belong in the "European" category , and that the October Revolution of the Bolsheviks was a necessary reaction to the rapid westernization of Russian society....
.

Trubetzkoy was born into an extremely refined environment. His father was a first-rank philosopher whose lineage ascended to the medieval rulers of Lithuania
Lithuania

Lithuania , officially the Republic of Lithuania is a country in Northern Europe, the southernmost of the three Baltic states. Situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, it shares borders with Latvia to the north, Belarus to the southeast, Poland, and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast to the southwest....
. Having graduated from the Moscow University (1913), Trubetzkoy delivered lectures there until the revolution. Thereafter he moved first to the university of Rostov-na-Donu, then to the University of Sofia
Sofia University

The St. Clement of Ohrid University of Sofia or Sofia University is the oldest higher education institution in Bulgaria, founded on 1 October 1888....
 (1920-22), and finally took the chair of Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna
University of Vienna

The University of Vienna is a public university located in Vienna, Austria. Having opened in 1365, it is one of the oldest universities in Europe....
 (1922-1938). He died from a heart attack attributed to Nazi
Nazism

Nazism, officially National Socialism , refers to the ideology and practices of the National Socialist German Workers? Party under Adolf Hitler, and the policies adopted by the dictatorial government of Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945....
 persecution following his publishing an article highly critical of Hitler's theories.

Trubetzkoy's chief contributions to linguistics lie in the domain of phonology
Phonology

Phonology is the systematic use of sound to encode meaning in any spoken human language, or the field of linguistics studying this use. Just as a language has syntax and vocabulary, it also has a phonology in the sense of a sound system....
, in particular in analyses of the phonological systems of individual languages and in the search for general and universal phonological laws. His magnum opus, Grundzüge der Phonologie (Principles of Phonology), was issued posthumously. In this book he famously defined the phoneme
Phoneme

In human language, a phoneme is the smallest posited linguistically distinctive unit of sound. Phonemes carry no semantic content themselves. In theoretical terms, phonemes are not the physical segment s themselves, but cognitive abstractions or categorizations of them....
 as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology as a discipline separate from phonetics
Phonetics

Phonetics is a branch of linguistics that comprises the study of the sounds of human speech. It is concerned with the physical properties of speech sounds , and the processes of their physiological production, auditory reception, and neurophysiological perception....
.

It is sometimes hard to distinguish Trubetzkoy's views from those of his friend Roman Jakobson
Roman Jakobson

Roman Osipovich Jakobson, , was a Russian linguist and literary critic, associated with the Russian Formalism school. He became one of the most influential linguistics of the 20th century by pioneering the development of structuralism of language, poetry, and art....
, who should be credited with spreading the Prague School views on phonology after Trubetzkoy's premature death.