16 Facts About Alexander Potebnja

Alexander Afanasyevich Potebnja was a Russian Imperial linguist, philosopher and pan-Slavist of Ukrainian Cossack descent, who was a professor of linguistics at the Imperial Kharkov University.

Alexander Potebnja is well known as a specialist in the evolution of Russian phonetics.

Alexander Potebnja constructed a theory of language and consciousness that later influenced the thinking of his countryman the Psychologist Lev Vygotsky.

Alexander Potebnja 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.

Alexander Potebnja was born into a noble family in 1835 on his family's estate in Maniv, near the village of Gavrilovka near Romny, Government of Poltava, then part of the Russian Empire, now Ukraine.

Alexander Potebnja received his primary education in the Polish school of the city of Radom.

Alexander Potebnja studied law, history, and philology at the Imperial University of Kharkov.

Alexander Potebnja's teachers were the brothers Pyotr Lavrov and Nikolai Lavrov and Professor Amvrosy Metlinsky.

Alexander Potebnja graduated from the university in 1856, served briefly a teacher of literature at a school in Kharkiv, and then in 1861 he defended his master thesis Certain characters in the Slavic folk poetry, before beginning to lecture at the Imperial University of Kharkiv.

Alexander Potebnja attended lectures at the University of Berlin, he studied Sanskrit and visited several Slavic countries.

Alexander Potebnja presided over the Kharkiv Historical-Philological Society and was a member of the Bohemian Society of Sciences.

Alexander Potebnja was particularly interested in the relations among language, thought, and reality.

Alexander Potebnja viewed the history of a language as the history of its dialects and used the concept of phonetic law, although he often tried to find a psychological basis for the concept.

Alexander Potebnja recognized the existence of a proto-Rus' language, but located the beginning of its disintegration into dialects back in prehistoric times.

Alexander Potebnja revised it to create a broadly drawn picture of category and construction changes tied to changes in ways of thinking, by integrating historical, dialectal, and folkloric materials.

Alexander Potebnja was far ahead of his contemporaries and not very popular during his lifetime.