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46-398: A grouping of languages that share features can only be defined as a sprachbund if the features are shared for some reason other than the genetic history of the languages. Without knowledge of the history of a regional group of similar languages, it may be difficult to determine whether sharing indicates a language family or a sprachbund. In a 1904 paper, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay emphasised

92-512: A language (an abstract group of elements) and speech (its implementation by individuals) – compare Saussure's concepts of langue and parole . Together with his students, Mikołaj Kruszewski and Lev Shcherba , Baudouin de Courtenay also shaped the modern usage of the term " phoneme " (Baudouin de Courtenay 1876–77 and Baudouin de Courtenay 1894), which had been coined in 1873 by the French linguist A. Dufriche-Desgenettes who proposed it as

138-448: A stop consonant ), which was followed by a tone split where the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants disappeared but in compensation the number of tones doubled. These parallels led to confusion over the classification of these languages, until André-Georges Haudricourt showed in 1954 that tone was not an invariant feature, by demonstrating that Vietnamese tones corresponded to certain final consonants in other languages of

184-466: A PhD dissertation (supervised by André Martinet ) about Romance languages . The nonconformist thesis was not accepted by the two reviewers ( Albert Dauzat and Mario Roques ) and so Haudricourt was not allowed to teach at the École pratique des hautes études . Instead, Haudricourt volunteered to work at the École française d'Extrême-Orient in Hanoi from 1948 to 1949. There, he was able to clarify issues in

230-509: A classic 1956 paper titled "India as a Linguistic Area", Murray Emeneau laid the groundwork for the general acceptance of the concept of a sprachbund. In the paper, Emeneau observed that the subcontinent's Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages shared a number of features that were not inherited from a common source, but were areal features , the result of diffusion during sustained contact. These include retroflex consonants , echo words , subject–object–verb word order, discourse markers , and

276-430: A group of languages with similarities in syntax , morphological structure, cultural vocabulary and sound systems, but without systematic sound correspondences, shared basic morphology or shared basic vocabulary. Later workers, starting with Trubetzkoy's colleague Roman Jakobson , have relaxed the requirement of similarities in all four of the areas stipulated by Trubetzkoy. A rigorous set of principles for what evidence

322-621: A major field of research in language contact and convergence. Some linguists, such as Matthias Castrén , G. J. Ramstedt , Nicholas Poppe and Pentti Aalto , supported the idea that the Mongolic , Turkic , and Tungusic families of Asia (and some small parts of Europe) have a common ancestry, in a controversial group they call Altaic . Koreanic and Japonic languages, which are also hypothetically related according to some scholars like William George Aston , Shōsaburō Kanazawa, Samuel Martin and Sergei Starostin , are sometimes included as part of

368-457: A major influence 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 . Among the most notable of his achievements is the distinction between statics and dynamics of languages and between

414-678: A member of the Catholic Church for most of his life. He was Chairman of the Polish Association of Freethinkers . Baudouin de Courtenay was in favor of introducing Polish science to all Jewish schools in the Second Polish Republic, and Yiddish to all Polish schools. In his public appearances, he openly criticized anti-semitism and manifestations of organized xenophobia , for which he was repeatedly attacked. His daughter, Cezaria Baudouin de Courtenay Ehrenkreutz Jędrzejewiczowa

460-565: A number of similarities including syntax and grammar , vocabulary and its use as well as the relationship between contrasting words and their origins, idioms and word order which all made them stand out from many other language groups around the world which do not share these similarities; in essence creating a continental sprachbund. His point was to argue that the disproportionate degree of knowledge of SAE languages biased linguists towards considering grammatical forms to be highly natural or even universal, when in fact they were only peculiar to

506-679: A once again independent Poland . He was born in Radzymin, in the Warsaw Governorate of Congress Poland (a state in personal union with the Russian Empire), to a family of distant French extraction. One of his ancestors had been a French aristocrat who immigrated to Poland during the reign of Polish King Augustus II the Strong . In 1862 Baudouin de Courtenay entered the " Main School ," a predecessor of

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552-532: A one-word equivalent for the German Sprachlaut . His work on the theory of phonetic alternations may have had an influence on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure according to E. F. K. Koerner . Three major schools of 20th-century phonology arose directly from his distinction between physiophonetic ( phonological ) and psychophonetic ( morphophonological ) alternations: the Leningrad school of phonology ,

598-538: Is his hypothesis that labiovelars existed in Old Chinese: "...it seems that scholars have overlooked the fact that some rhymes in the Analytic Dictionary only appear with velar initials (/k/, /kʰ/, /g/, /x/, and /ŋ/), for instance -iʷei [MC *-wej] 齊, -ʷâng [*-wang] 唐, -iʷäng [*-jweng] 清, -ʷâk [*-wak] 鐸, -iʷet [*-wet] 屑etc." (Middle Chinese reconstructions added in square brackets are from Baxter 1992. ). The idea

644-730: Is home to speakers of languages of the Sino-Tibetan , Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Tai–Kadai , Austronesian (represented by Chamic ) and Mon–Khmer families. Neighbouring languages across these families, though presumed unrelated, often have similar features, which are believed to have spread by diffusion. A well-known example is the similar tone systems in Sinitic languages (Sino-Tibetan), Hmong–Mien, Tai languages (Kadai) and Vietnamese (Austroasiatic). Most of these languages passed through an earlier stage with three tones on most syllables (but no tonal distinctions on checked syllables ending in

690-490: Is valid for establishing a linguistic area has been presented by Campbell, Kaufman, and Smith-Stark. The idea of areal convergence is commonly attributed to Jernej Kopitar 's description in 1830 of Albanian , Bulgarian and Romanian as giving the impression of " nur eine Sprachform ... mit dreierlei Sprachmaterie ", which has been rendered by Victor Friedman as "one grammar with the [ sic ] three lexicons". The Balkan Sprachbund comprises Albanian, Romanian,

736-525: The Book of Odes . Words with final stops /-p -t -k/ rhyme with words in departing tone (去聲 qùshēng) according to their Middle Chinese pronunciation. For instance, words in the zhà 乍 and zuó 昨 series (Middle Chinese: *dzraeH and *dzak, respectively) rhyme, as do words in the bì 敝 and piē 瞥 series (Middle Chinese: *bjiejH and *phiet). That led Karlgren to reconstruct a voiced series of finals: /*-d/, /*-g/ and (in some cases) /*-b/. Haudricourt's theory, which states that

782-523: The Centre des recherches comparées sur les sociétés anciennes , which later became the Centre Louis Gernet , focusing more on the study of ancient Greece . Within the Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Haudricourt cofounded in 1976 a research centre whose goal is to investigate little-documented languages within their cultural environment, combining ethnological and linguistic work:

828-625: The Jagiellonian University in Kraków only to be appointed to St. Petersburg , where he continued to refine his theory of phonetic alternations. After Poland regained independence in 1918, he returned to Warsaw , where he formed the core of the linguistics faculty of the University of Warsaw. From 1887 he held a permanent seat in the Polish Academy of Skills and from 1897 he was a member of

874-585: The LACITO research centre ( Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale ). Haudricourt is considered to be the founder of the panchronic program in historical phonology. His study of the history of Chinese , Vietnamese and other East Asian languages draws on seminal insights. He clarified how a toneless language can become tonal. De l'origine des tons en vietnamien explains tonogenesis in Vietnamese and numerous other East and Southeast Asian languages and paved

920-593: 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. The Prague School was best known outside the field of Slavic linguistics. Throughout his life he published hundreds of scientific works in Polish, Russian, Czech , Slovenian, Italian , French and German . According to historian Norman Davies , Baudouin de Courtenay

966-626: The Petersburg Academy of Sciences . Baudouin de Courtenay was the editor of the 3rd (1903–1909) and 4th (1912–1914) editions of the Explanatory Dictionary of the Living Great Russian Language compiled by Russian lexicographer Vladimir Dahl (1801–1872). Apart from his scientific work, Baudouin de Courtenay was also a strong supporter of the national revival of various national minority and ethnic groups. In 1915 he

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1012-584: The Résistance , as he was afraid that the German occupation army would confiscate his library. That allowed Haudricourt to make extensive readings in linguistics during the Second World War. Meanwhile, he also studied Asian languages at the École nationale des langues orientales vivantes . Haudricourt decided to switch from the botany department of CNRS to its linguistics department in 1945. In 1947, he presented

1058-579: The South Slavic languages of the southern Balkans (Bulgarian, Macedonian and to a lesser degree Serbo-Croatian ), Greek , Balkan Turkish , and Romani . All but one of these are Indo-European languages but from very divergent branches, and Turkish is a Turkic language . Yet they have exhibited several signs of grammatical convergence, such as avoidance of the infinitive , future tense formation, and others. The same features are not found in other languages that are otherwise closely related, such as

1104-574: 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. After 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 work on analogy and a master's degree from St. Petersburg for his Polish-language dissertation On

1150-526: The quotative . Emeneau specified the tools to establish that language and culture had fused for centuries on the Indian soil to produce an integrated mosaic of structural convergence of four distinct language families: Indo-Aryan , Dravidian , Munda and Tibeto-Burman . This concept provided scholarly substance for explaining the underlying Indian-ness of apparently divergent cultural and linguistic patterns. With his further contributions, this area has now become

1196-682: The Mon–Khmer family, and proposed that tone in the other languages had a similar origin. Similarly, the unrelated Khmer (Mon–Khmer), Cham (Austronesian) and Lao (Kadai) languages have almost identical vowel systems. Many languages in the region are of the isolating (or analytic) type, with mostly monosyllabic morphemes and little use of inflection or affixes , though a number of Mon–Khmer languages have derivational morphology . Shared syntactic features include classifiers , object–verb order and topic–comment structure, though in each case there are exceptions in branches of one or more families. In

1242-535: The National Institute of Agriculture. In 1940, Haudricourt was awarded a position in the new Centre national de la recherche scientifique , in its botany department, but he was disappointed by the research being done there, which relied on static classifications instead of an evolutionary approach espousing the new developments of genetics . In August 1940, the linguist Marcel Cohen entrusted to Haudricourt his library of books about linguistics before he joined

1288-533: The Old Polish Language Prior to the 14th Century . Baudouin de Courtenay established the Kazan School of linguistics in the mid-1870s and served as professor at the local university from 1875. Later he was chosen as the head of linguistics faculty at the University of Dorpat (1883–1893). In 1882 he married historian and journalist Romualda Bagnicka . Between 1894 and 1898 he occupied the same post at

1334-590: The SAE language group . Whorf likely considered Romance and West Germanic to form the core of the SAE, i.e. the literary languages of Europe which have seen substantial cultural influence from Latin during the medieval period . The North Germanic and Balto-Slavic languages tend to be more peripheral members. Alexander Gode , who was instrumental in the development of Interlingua , characterized it as "Standard Average European". The Romance, Germanic , and Slavic control languages of Interlingua are reflective of

1380-550: The SAE features. Language families that have been proposed to actually be sprachbunds The work began to assume the character of a comparison between Hopi and western European languages. It also became evident that even the grammar of Hopi bore a relation to Hopi culture, and the grammar of European tongues to our own "Western" or "European" culture. And it appeared that the interrelation brought in those large subsummations of experience by language, such as our own terms "time," "space," "substance," and "matter." Since, with respect to

1426-576: The administration. However, at graduation (1931), Haudricourt got the worst mark of the entire year group. Unlike his peers, he was interested not in promoting modern tools and technology but in understanding traditional technology, societies and languages. He attended lectures in geography , phonetics , ethnology and genetics in Paris. Marcel Mauss obtained funding for him to go to Leningrad for one year to pursue studies in genetics with Nikolai Vavilov , whose lectures he had attended with great interest at

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1472-509: The departing tone comes from *-s, explains that phenomenon. The words with departing tone rhyming with words in final stop should be reconstructed with final clusters *-ks, *-ts or *-ps. Moreover, from the point of view of historical morphology , Haudricourt's theory of tonogenesis leads to the reconstruction of several *-s suffixes (in particular a nominalizing suffix) which can be shown to be cognate with those found in conservative Sino-Tibetan languages such as Tibetan . A second major finding

1518-418: The historical phonology of Asian languages and to develop general models of language change . He participated with other colleagues committed to the left ( Elena Cassin , Maxime Rodinson , Maurice Godelier , Charles Malamoud, Jean-Paul Brisson , Jean Yoyotte , Jean Bottero) in a Marxist think tank organised by Jean-Pierre Vernant . This group took on an institutional form with the creation, in 1964, of

1564-642: The language groups most often included in the SAE Sprachbund . The Standard Average European Sprachbund is most likely the result of ongoing language contact in the time of the Migration Period and later, continuing during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance . Inheritance of the SAE features from Proto-Indo-European can be ruled out because Proto-Indo-European, as currently reconstructed, lacked most of

1610-503: The need to distinguish between language similarities arising from a genetic relationship ( rodstvo ) and those arising from convergence due to language contact ( srodstvo ). Nikolai Trubetzkoy introduced the Russian term языковой союз ( yazykovoy soyuz 'language union') in a 1923 article. In a paper presented to the first International Congress of Linguists in 1928, he used a German calque of this term, Sprachbund , defining it as

1656-617: The northeastern part of the Tibetan plateau spanning the Chinese provinces of Qinghai and Gansu , is an area of interaction between varieties of northwest Mandarin Chinese , Amdo Tibetan and Mongolic and Turkic languages . Standard Average European ( SAE ) is a concept introduced in 1939 by Benjamin Whorf to group the modern Indo-European languages of Europe which shared common features. Whorf argued that these languages were characterized by

1702-485: The other Romance languages in relation to Romanian, and the other Slavic languages such as Polish in relation to Bulgaro-Macedonian. Languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area have such great surface similarity that early linguists tended to group them all into a single family, although the modern consensus places them into numerous unrelated families. The area stretches from Thailand to China and

1748-456: The purported Altaic family. This latter hypothesis was supported by people including Roy Andrew Miller , John C. Street and Karl Heinrich Menges . Gerard Clauson , Gerhard Doerfer , Juha Janhunen , Stefan Georg and others dispute or reject this. A common alternative explanation for similarities among the "Altaic" languages, such as vowel harmony and agglutination , is that they are due to areal diffusion. The Qinghai–Gansu sprachbund , in

1794-513: The traits compared, there is little difference between English , French , German , or other European languages with the 'possible' (but doubtful) exception of Balto-Slavic and non-Indo-European , I have lumped these languages into one group called SAE, or "Standard Average European." Jan Baudouin de Courtenay Jan Niecisław Ignacy Baudouin de Courtenay , also Ivan Alexandrovich Baudouin de Courtenay ( Russian : Иван Александрович Бодуэн де Куртенэ ; 13 March 1845 – 3 November 1929),

1840-531: The way for the reconstruction of nontonal ancestors for the languages of Mainland Southeast Asia, such as Proto-Sino-Tibetan and Proto-Tai . A more comprehensive account of the development and evolution of tonal systems was published by Haudricourt in 1961. Haudricourt's main legacies to the field of reconstruction of Old Chinese historical phonology , apart from his systematic account of tonogenesis, are his reconstruction of final *-' as well as labiovelars. Haudricourt clarified several rhyming patterns found in

1886-414: Was a French botanist , anthropologist and linguist . He grew up on his parents' farm, in a remote area of Picardy . From his early childhood, he was curious about technology, plants and languages. After he obtained his baccalauréat in 1928, his father advised him to enter the National Institute of Agriculture (Institut national agronomique) , in the hope that he would obtain a prestigious position in

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1932-472: Was a Polish linguist and Slavist , best known for his theory of the phoneme and phonetic alternations . For most of his life Baudouin de Courtenay worked at Imperial Russian universities: Kazan (1874–1883), Dorpat (now Estonia ) (1883–1893), Kraków (1893–1899) in Austria-Hungary , and St. Petersburg (1900–1918). In 1919–1929 he was a professor at the re-established University of Warsaw in

1978-453: Was arrested by the Okhrana , the Russian secret service , for publishing a brochure on the autonomy of peoples under Russian rule. He spent three months in prison, but was released. 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

2024-801: Was chosen. He was also an active Esperantist and president of the Polish Esperanto Association . In 1925, he was one of the co-founders of the Polish Linguistic Society . In 1927 he formally withdrew from the Roman Catholic Church without joining any other religious denomination. He died in Warsaw . He is buried at the Protestant Reformed Cemetery in Warsaw with the epitaph "He sought truth and justice". His work had

2070-558: Was one of the founders of the Polish school of ethnology and anthropology as well as a professor at the universities of Vilnius and Warsaw. He had four other children: Zofia, a painter and sculptor; Świętosław, a lawyer and diplomat; Ewelina, a historian; and Maria, a lawyer. He appears as a character in Joseph Skibell 's 2010 novel, A Curable Romantic . Andr%C3%A9-Georges Haudricourt André-Georges Haudricourt ( French: [odʁikuʁ] ; 17 January 1911 – 20 August 1996)

2116-419: Was one of the most extraordinary Polish thinkers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Davies writes: "He was a pacifist, an advocate of the fight for environmental protection, a feminist, a fighter for progress in the field of education, and a free thinker, and he was against most of the social and intellectual conventions of his day." Baudouin de Courtenay was an atheist and did not consider himself

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