Alexander Potebnja

Alexander Potebnja
Олександр Потебня
Born(1835-09-22)22 September 1835
Maniv, Romensky Uyezd, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire (now Ukraine)
Died11 December 1891(1891-12-11) (aged 56)
Kharkiv
SpouseMaria Potebnja

Alexander Afanasyevich Potebnja (Russian: Алекса́ндр Афана́сьевич Потебня́; Ukrainian: Олекса́ндр Опана́сович Потебня́, romanized: Oleksandr Opanasovych Potebnia; September 22, 1835 – December 11, 1891) was a linguist, philosopher and pan-Slavist of Ukrainian Cossack descent, who was a professor of linguistics at the Imperial Kharkov University.[1][2][3] He is well known as a specialist in the evolution of Russian phonetics.

He constructed a theory of language and consciousness that later influenced the thinking of his countryman the Psychologist Lev Vygotsky.[4][5] His main work was Language and Thought (Russian: Мысль и язык) (1862).[6] He also published a number of works on Russian Grammar, on the History of the Sounds in the Russian Language and on Slavic folk poetry, furthermore he translated a short fragment of Homer's Odyssey into Ukrainian.[7] Potebnja was a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the foremost academic institution in the Russian Empire.

  1. ^ "N Kerecuk. 2006. "Potebnja, Alexander (1835–1891)"" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2014-03-20. Retrieved 2012-08-03.
  2. ^ Kerecuk N (2000). ‘Consciousness in Potebnja’s theory of language.’ In Histoire E´ piste´mologie. Language, vol. XII, fascicule 2. 81–95.
  3. ^ Kess J F (1988). ‘Review of ‘‘John Fizer: Alexander A. Potebnja’s psycholinguistic theory of literature; a metacritical inquiry’’.’ In Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. XXX. No. 3. 408–409
  4. ^ JOHN FIZER. 1982. Potebnja's Views of the Structure of the Work of Poetic Art: A Critical Retrospection. Harvard Ukrainian Studies. Vol. 6, No. 1 (March 1982), pp. 5-24 [1]
  5. ^ Lev Vygotsky, Mind in society, Harvard University Press, 1979 (1978), p. 33
  6. ^ Potebnia A. A. (1862/2007). Thought and language. Kerecuk N (trans.). [Annotated translation (English and Portuguese), including full bibliography.]
  7. ^ GEORGE Y. SHEVELOV. 1994. Homer's Arbitration in a Ukrainian Linguistic Controversy: Alexander Potebnja and Peter Niščyns´kyj. Harvard Ukrainian Studies Vol. 18, No. 1/2, UKRAINIAN PHILOLOGY AND LINGUISTICS (June 1994), pp. 104-116 [2]