The Kazan school, or the Kazan Linguistic Circle, was a late-19th-century school of linguistics in Kazan, Russia, founded by the Polish linguists Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikołaj Kruszewski. The Kazan school began when Kruszewski arrived at Kazan Imperial University to study as a graduate student under Baoudoin de Courtenay in 1878, and lasted until Baoudouin de Courtenay's departure for Tartu in 1883 and the death of Kruszewski in 1887. As part of the Kazan school, Kruszewski is held to have been the first to formulate the concept of the phoneme in a synchronic context, which was part of a broader theory of alternations. In phonology, the Kazan school distinguished between the concepts of anthropophonics (relating to the physical aspects of speech) and psychophonetics (relating the psychological aspects of speech), which has been considered to prefigure aspects of generative phonology, which became dominant during the mid-20th century.
Other notable linguists of the Kazan Linguistic Circle included the linguist and the Turkologist Wilhelm Radloff, who remained in Kazan after the departure of Baudouin and the death of Kruszewski. The Kazan school also influenced the Russian linguists Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy, who eventually formed the Prague linguistic circle, and the Polish Indo-Europeanist Jerzy Kuryłowicz. The views of the Kazan school have been frequently compared with those of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, who corresponded with the Kazan school and was significantly better known than the Kazan school in the development of linguistics in Western Europe and the United States.
Background Jan Baudouin de Courtenay
Although Baudouin's family descended from the French aristocracy, they had lived in Poland for several generations when Baudouin was born in 1845 (in Radzymin, near Warsaw). Baudouin felt a great loyalty to Polish cultural and political ideals throughout his career, even though much of his life was spent outside Poland. After finishing the gymnasium, he began university studies in Warsaw, where he received a master of arts degree from the historical-philological faculty in 1866. Like Ferdinand de Saussure, he spent a number of years studying under various prominent Indo-Europeanists of the day, including August Schleicher, August Leskien, Karl Brugmann, and Berthold Delbrück. In 1870, he received a doctorate from Leipzig for work on the nature of analogy, as well as a second master's degree from Saint Petersburg for a study of fourteenth-century Old Polish.
His supervisor in Saint Petersburg, Izmail Sreznevsky, arranged a position for him there as docent (assistant professor) of comparative grammar beginning in 1870. In 1872, he did field work on Slovenian dialects in Austria and northern Italy. When it was published in 1875, his study of the phonetic systems of some of these dialects earned him a Russian doctorate. However, his political views and contemptuous attitude toward Srzenevsky prevented him from staying in Saint Petersburg after his initial appointment. In 1875, he went to Kazan as an assistant professor, obtaining full professorship after a year.
As a provincial city in central Russia, Kazan was isolated from the rest of the academic world. Baudouin did not enjoy the working conditions of Kazan. Nonetheless, it has sometimes been suggested that this isolation had a liberating and ultimately beneficial effect on his scholarship: if work appearing in Kazan was unlikely to be heard of in the intellectual circles of western Europe, it was correspondingly free of the pressures exerted by the dominant influences in those circles.
It was during his years in Kazan that Baudouin was most productive in general linguistics. The arrival of Mikolaj Kruszewski resulted in the formation of the Kazan Linguistic Circle as a forum for the discussion of current linguistic work, and Baudouin quickly developed a very close working relationship with him.
Mikołaj Kruszewski
Kruszewski was born in Poland in 1851. Like Baudouin, he studied in the historical-philological faculty in Warsaw, but spent most of his time there reading philosophy and psychology. He was particularly well trained in English philosophical logic, which is reflected by the later development of his thought on linguistic matters. After submitting an MA thesis in 1875 on a folkloristic topic, he wanted to continue his studies in linguistics, but was financially unable to do so. He had to spend several years teaching Russian language and literature to the daughters of the provincial nobility before he could take the suggestion of one of his advisers to go to Kazan in order to study with Baudouin.
After corresponding with Baudouin for some time and announcing his interest in developing a genuinely scientific foundation for linguistics, he arrived in Kazan in 1878 and immediately became an active participant in Baudouin's program of research and teaching. He was awarded a master's degree in 1881 for his thesis on Old Church Slavonic, a work which contained a substantial systematic chapter on the theory of alternations and which Baudouin praised extravagantly in a published review. His 1883 Outline of Linguistic Science earned him a doctorate.
Contributions to linguistics From his inaugural lecture at Saint Petersburg, Baudouin establishes major differences of emphasis between his approach to the study of language and that of others. Baudouin suggests that the science of language must seek to understand the laws and forces that govern the nature and development of its object. For Baudouin, if the study of linguistic history—the major preoccupation of his contemporaries—is to go beyond the mere establishment and recording of historical facts and become genuinely explanatory, it must be based on an understanding of the synchronic nature of linguistic systems. Baudoin gives two major reasons for this necessity, one practical and the other a matter of basic principle.
On the one hand, it is living languages that are directly available for study: prior stages of linguistic history can be known only inferentially or, at best, through written records, which constitute only an indirect representation of a language, and not an actual language itself. Living languages must thus have basic priority as evidence for "the forces operating in language, and for the laws that govern its development, its life". While Baudouin criticizes the descriptive, empirical study of languages for its own sake, he also stresses that a thorough knowledge of living languages is an essential preliminary to any attempt at theorizing and explanation.
On the other hand, it is in the forces that govern synchronic systems that the underlying principles leading to historical change are found. Therefore, Baudouin advocates giving priority to the search for the general laws that govern the systems of living languages. This emphasis was particularly appealing to Kruszewski, whose arrival in Kazan contributed greatly to the stress put on such matters in Baudouin's work from that point on. Kruszewski hoped to be able to formulate a small number of fundamental laws of the nature of language, which would have a deductive, explanatory scope similar to that attributed to the "principle of association" in psychology.
Kruszewski's approach to the synchronic structure of language was based on his earlier readings in philosophy, and particularly on his acquaintance with the English tradition of philosophical logic and psychology of scholars such as Francis Bacon, David Hume, John Locke, and John Stuart Mill. On the basis of such typical positions as the attempt to reduce causality to "constant conjunction", these writers held out the hope that many philosophically important problems could ultimately be analyzed in terms of psychological notions, particularly the sorts of associations important to contemporary conceptions of the structure of the mind.
In his theoretical work, Kruszewski presents the nature of language as ultimately a network of two sorts of associations between linguistic forms: associations based on simultaneity, or parallelism of structure, and associations based on sequence, or frequent juxtaposition in larger structures. On the basis of such relations of simultaneity or sequence, words form families; these are also called nests, since the relation of one word to another results in further layers of relationship between the first word and others to which the second is, in its turn, related. In Kruszewski's theory, such a system of relational networks among forms is the structural basis of a language, and knowledge of such a system of similarities of morphological structure and contiguous combinability constitutes "knowledge of the language".
The nature of phonological structure Baudouin distinguishes two aspects of the study of synchronic language systems: the physical and the psychological. In the particular domain of sound structure, the study of "the purely physical aspect of language" (now known as phonetics) is called anthropophonics. This is the analysis of sounds from the physiological or acoustic point of view. Anthropophonics involves questions which could, in principle, be posed directly by physiologists or physicists, who have no particular interest in language and speech, though these disciplines generally do not investigate the specific questions of interest to linguists. The other, nonphysical side of the sound system of language is dealt with by psychophonetics. This has as its object "the feeling for the language of a given speech community", and treats a language as a particular system of sound/meaning associations that are related to one another in particular ways. In principle, psychophonetics is related to general psychology in much the same way anthropophonics is related to physics and physiology, but again the specific questions that are of interest to the linguist are to be studied in detail by psychologists.
The main attention in their studies of 'psychophonetics' during this period was given to a phenomenon rooted in historical considerations. They observed that through the operation of phonetic changes in various forms, what was etymologically a single sound type might (in later historical stages of the language) come to be represented differently in different environments. When these different environments occur in related words, or in related forms of the same word, the result may be that the sound differences in question can come to serve as one of the factors—or even the sole factor—separating morphologically distinct yet related forms from one another.
For example, in the history of English, the (originally purely mechanical) factors leading to the voicing of fricatives obtained in some denominal verbs but not in the corresponding nouns from which they were derived. Although subsequent changes eliminated other differences between the nouns and the verbs, the voicing distinction in final fricative consonants remained to differentiate such pairs as cloth/clothe, house()/house(), calf/calve, and others. In this way, an original purely anthropophonic difference has taken on psychophonetic value.
The phoneme