Lev Shcherba | |
---|---|
Лев Влади́мирович Ще́рба | |
Born | March 3 [ O.S. February 20] 1880 |
Died | December 26, 1944 64) | (aged
Alma mater | Saint Petersburg Imperial University |
Awards | Order of the Red Banner of Labour |
Scientific career | |
Institutions | Leningrad State University |
Doctoral advisor | Jan Baudouin de Courtenay |
Doctoral students | Sergey Ozhegov Lev Zinder Viktor Vinogradov |
Lev Vladimirovich Shcherba (commonly Scherba) (Russian: Лев Влади́мирович Ще́рба, Belarusian: Леў Уладзіміравіч Шчэрба; March 3 [ O.S. February 20] 1880 – December 26, 1944) was a Russian Empire and Soviet linguist and lexicographer specializing in phonetics and phonology.
Born in Igumen (Minsk Governorate, Russian Empire, [Note 1] now Chervyen, Belarus) to the family of an engineer. [1] Shcherba went to secondary school in Kiev, where he graduated in 1898, and briefly attended Kiev University before he moved to the capital and entered St. Petersburg University. [1] There, he studied under Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and graduated in 1903. In 1906 he traveled abroad, first to Leipzig and then to northern Italy, where he studied Tuscan dialects.
During the autumn holidays of 1907 and 1908, on the advice of Baudouin de Courtenay, he studied the Sorbian languages and wrote a description of the Mužakow dialect (spoken in the east, near Muskau). In late 1907 he went to Paris, where he worked in the experimental phonetics laboratory of Jean-Pierre Rousselot studying the phonetics of a series of languages using experimental methods; [2] on his return to Russia he began setting up an experimental phonetics laboratory, paying for equipment from his own stipend, and this became the institution that now bears his name. [3]
As early as 1912, basing himself on the ideas of Baudouin de Courtenay, he elaborated the concept of the phoneme, defined by him as the grouping of sounds into "sound types". In 1912 he defended his master's thesis and in 1915 received his doctorate from St. Petersburg University, where he was a professor from 1916 to 1941. He became the founder of the so-called "Leningrad school" of phonology, which included M. I. Matusevich and L. R. Zinder among others and carried on a polemic with the "Moscow school." [4] However, he spent the last few years of his life in Moscow, where he died. He became an academician of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 1943.
Beyond phonology, Shcherba made significant contributions to the wider fields of linguistics and lexicography. In contrast to Ferdinand de Saussure, he recognized three rather than two objects of study: speech activity, language systems, and language material. He placed emphasis on the question of the capacity of the speaker to produce sentences never previously heard, a question which would become important to the linguistics of the later twentieth century. He also emphasized the importance of experiments in linguistics, particularly that of negative results, developing methods which became important for field study. [4] He was the teacher of the lexicographer Sergei Ozhegov, author of the most widely used Russian dictionary.
Shcherba is the author of the glokaya kuzdra sentence, which consists of words whose roots do not exist in Russian, but has correct construction in terms of Russian morphology and syntax — similar to Chomsky's Colorless green ideas sleep furiously . He invented this sentence to illustrate the distinction between grammar and vocabulary.
In phonology, minimal pairs are pairs of words or phrases in a particular language, spoken or signed, that differ in only one phonological element, such as a phoneme, toneme or chroneme, and have distinct meanings. They are used to demonstrate that two phones represent two separate phonemes in the language.
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Someone who engages in this study is called a linguist. See also the Outline of linguistics, the List of phonetics topics, the List of linguists, and the List of cognitive science topics. Articles related to linguistics include:
Klas Bernhard Johannes Karlgren was a Swedish sinologist and linguist who pioneered the study of Chinese historical phonology using modern comparative methods. In the early 20th century, Karlgren conducted large surveys of the varieties of Chinese and studied historical information on rhyming in ancient Chinese poetry, then used them to create the first ever complete reconstructions of what are now called Middle Chinese and Old Chinese.
The voiced bilabial fricative is a type of consonantal sound, used in some spoken languages. The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨β⟩, and the equivalent X-SAMPA symbol is B
. The official symbol ⟨β⟩ is the Greek letter beta.
Vladimir Ivanovich Dal was a noted Russian-language lexicographer, polyglot, Turkologist, and founding member of the Russian Geographical Society. During his lifetime he compiled and documented the oral history of the region that was later published in Russian and became part of modern folklore.
In linguistics, a zero or null is a segment which is not pronounced or written. It is a useful concept in analysis, indicating lack of an element where one might be expected. It is usually written with the symbol "∅", in Unicode U+2205∅EMPTY SET. A common ad hoc solution is to use the Scandinavian capital letter Ø instead.
Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay was a Polish linguist and Slavist, best known for his theory of the phoneme and phonetic alternations.
Anatoly Liberman is a linguist, medievalist, etymologist, poet, translator of poetry, and literary critic.
Aleksey Aleksandrovich Shakhmatov was a Russian philologist and historian credited with laying the foundations for the science of textology. Shakhmatov held the title of Doctor of Russian language and philology. He was a full member of the Russian Academy of Sciences since 1899 and a chair of the Department of Russian language and philology of the Academy of Sciences (1908–1920), a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party (1905) and the Russian Empire State Council (1906–1911).
Stoyko Ivanov Stoykov was a Bulgarian linguist, Slavist.
Kazimieras Būga was a Lithuanian linguist and philologist. He was a professor of linguistics, who mainly worked on the Lithuanian language.
Jørgen Rischel was a Danish linguist who worked extensively with different subjects in linguistics, especially phonetics, phonology, lexicography and documentation of endangered languages.
Mikołaj Habdank Kruszewski, was a linguist from the Russian Empire, most significant as the co-inventor of the concept of phonemes, and relative of Anya Lucia Kruszewski. From 1883, he was a professor at Kazan University. His notable works include On Sound Alternation (1881) and Outline of Linguistic Science (1883). The former is the introduction to his master's thesis on morphophonemic alternation in Old Slavic and the latter is his doctoral thesis.
Lev Rafailovich Zinder was a Russian linguist in German philology.
The Kazan School of phonology was an influential group of linguists in Kazan. The linguistic circle included the Polish linguist Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and his student Nikolai Trubetzkoy. Mikołaj Kruszewski, Vasilii Alekseevich Bogoroditskii, Sergeĭ Konstantinovich Bulich, and Aleksandr Ivanovic Aleksandrov are usually considered members. Baudouin de Courtenay was the most prominent figure, but Kruszewski was also a significant factor in the movement, but died early, and was then frequently denigrated by Baudouin de Courtenay. The Kazan school influenced the Prague school.
Simon Charles Boyanus was a Russian phonetician who worked in England.
Vladimir Viktorovich Kolesov was a Soviet and Russian linguist. He was a specialist in phonology, accentology, historical grammar and lexicography, philosophy of language and history of linguistics. Doctor of Philological Sciences (1969), full professor (1973), Honorary Professor of St. Petersburg State University (2018). Professor and Head of the Department of the Russian Language of the Faculty of Philology of St. Petersburg State University (1979‒2006).