Le mélange des langues selon Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929)

Abstract

This paper examines the emergence of Baudouin de Courtenay’s ideas about the mixture of languages as a reaction against the theories of Neogrammairians at the end of the 19th century. Born in Poland, which was then under Russian administration, he worked mostly at imperial Russian universities. He founded the so called Kazan Circle (1875-1883) where he elaborated the theory of phoneme. Anyway he was interested in a lot of other subjects. At the beginning of his career, he followed the neogrammarians theories, till he went to investigate the Slavonic islet of Resia in the Italian Frioul which gave him the materials of his monumental thesis Essay of Phonetics of the Dialects of Resia (1875) which he wrote under the influence of Graziado Ascoli. Baudouin thought there was a Turanian (Finno-Ugric and Turkic) substratum in theses dialects which so appeared to be a mixture of languages. He further shared the ideas of Hugo Schuchardt who affirmed that any language results to be a mixture and Nikolaj Marr about the hybridization of all languages in the world. So, could Baudouin give rise to a lot of studies dedicated to linguistic contacts, exchanges and mixtures of languages.

Keywords

• Baudouin de Courtenay (Jan)
• Schuchardt (Hugo)
• mixture of languages
• Slovenian dialects of Resia and the hypothesis of a Turanian substratum
• dispute about Neogrammarians