Born: March 13, 1845, Radzymin, Russian partition of Poland (now Poland)
Died: November 3, 1929, Warsaw, Poland
Opinion. A famous British historian specializing in Polish history- Norman Davies- wrote in his History of Poland, vol.II, p.59:"Some of the most fearless and enlightened figures - was Jan Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay-A pacifist, an environmentalist, a feminist, a progressive educationist, and a freethinker... He was particularly incensed by the current cant of Nationalism of all sorts..."
Early days. He was born to a family of distant French extraction. One of his ancestors had been a French aristocrat who emigrated to Poland during the reign of Polish King August II the Strong. His father, Aleksander, was a surveyor. In 1862 Baudouin de Courtenay entered the "Main School," a predecessor of the University of Warsaw. In 1866 he graduated from its historical and philological faculty and won a scholarship of the Russian Imperial Ministry of Education. Leaving Poland, he studied at various foreign universities, including those of Prague, Jena and Berlin. In 1870 he received a doctorate from the University of Leipzig for his Polish-language dissertation On the Old Polish Language Prior to the 14th Century.
Career. Baudouin de Courtenay established the Kazan School of Linguistics (in Kazan, Russia) in the mid-1870s and served as professor at the local university from 1875. In 1883 he was chosen as the head of linguistics faculty at the University of Yuryev (now Tartu, Estonia) where he served till 1893. Between 1894 and 1898 he occupied the same post at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow only to be appointed to St. Petersburg, where he continued to refine his theory of phonetic alternations. After Poland regained her independence in 1918 he returned to Warsaw, where he formed the core of the linguistics faculty of the University of Warsaw. His work had a major impact on 20th century linguistic theory, and it served as a foundation for several schools of phonology. He was an early champion of synchronic linguistics, the study of contemporary spoken languages, which he developed contemporaneously with the structuralist linguistic theory of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Together with his students he shaped the modern usage of the term phoneme, which had been coined in 1873 by the French linguist A. Dufriche-Desgenettes. Three major schools of 20th century phonology arose directly from his distinction between physiophonetic (phonological) and psychophonetic (morphophonological) alternations: the Leningrad School of Phonology, the Moscow School of Phonology, and the Prague School of Phonology. All three schools developed different positions on the nature of Baudouin's alternational dichotomy. Throughout his life he published hundreds of scientific works in Polish, Russian, Czech, Slovenian, Italian, French and German. Outside of his scientific work, Baudouin de Courtenay was also a strong supporter of national revival of various national minority and ethnic groups. In 1915 he was arrested by the Okhrana, Russian secret service, for publishing a brochure on autonomy of peoples under Russian rule. He spent 3 months in prison, but was released. He believed that nationalism is a threat to cultural identity as much as the imperial powers. That's why Polish nationalists criticized him. In 1922, without his knowledge, he was proposed by the national minorities of Poland as a presidential candidate, but was defeated in the third round of voting in the Polish parliament and eventually Gabriel Narutowicz was elected.
Achievements, recognition. Among the most notable of his achievements is the distinction between statics and dynamics of languages and between a language, that is, an abstract group of elements, and speech (its implementation by individuals). From 1887 he held a permanent seat in the Polish Academy of Science and Letters and from 1897 he was a member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. In 1925 he was one of the co-founders of the Polish Linguistic Society. He was the president of the Polish Esperanto Association. He appears as a character in Joseph Skibell's 2010 novel, A Curable Romantic. Editor of the 3rd (1903-1909) and 4th (1912-1914) editions of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Live Great Russian language complied by Russian lexicographer Dahl.
Personal. His first wife was Cezaria Pryfek. After her death he married Romualda Bagnicka. They had five children and among them Cezaria Baudouin de Courtenay Ehrenkreutz Jedrzejewiczowa, professor of ethnography at the Warsaw University and after WWII the President of Polish University in London. In 1927 he formally withdrew from the Roman Catholic Church without joining any other religious denomination.
Based mostly on an article in Wikipedia:
Wikipedia
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This was supplemented by the information from additional sources:
Prof.Schmalstieg in Lituanus
Encyclopedia Brittanica
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