birth_date: 1835-09-22 00:00:00
avg_rating: 3.41
name: Oleksander Potebnja
about: Olexander Potebnja or Oleksander Opanasovich Potebnia (Russian: Александр Афанасьевич Потебня; Ukrainian: Олександер Опанасович Потебня) was a Ukrainian philosopher and linguist active in the Russian Empire, who was a professor of linguistics at the University of Kharkiv. He translated part of Homer's Odyssey into Ukrainian, even though translating into that language was prohibited in the Russian Empire. He constructed a theory of language and consciousness that later influenced the thinking of his countryman the Psychologist Lev Vygotsky. His main work was "Language and Thought" (mysl' i jazyk) (1862). He was a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the foremost academic institution in the Russian Empire.As a lingu Olexander Potebnja or Oleksander Opanasovich Potebnia (Russian: Александр Афанасьевич Потебня; Ukrainian: Олександер Опанасович Потебня) was a Ukrainian philosopher and linguist active in the Russian Empire, who was a professor of linguistics at the University of Kharkiv. He translated part of Homer's Odyssey into Ukrainian, even though translating into that language was prohibited in the Russian Empire. He constructed a theory of language and consciousness that later influenced the thinking of his countryman the Psychologist Lev Vygotsky. His main work was "Language and Thought" (mysl' i jazyk) (1862). He was a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the foremost academic institution in the Russian Empire.As a linguist Potebnja specialized in four areas: the philosophy of language, the historical phonetics of the East Slavic languages, etymology, and Slavic historical syntax. His major works on the philosophy of language are Mysl’ i iazyk (Thought and Language, 5 edns, 1862, 1892, 1913, 1922, 1926); O sviazi nekotorykh predstavlenii v iazyke (On the Relation among Some Representations in Language, 1864); his doctoral dissertation, Iz zapisok po russkoi grammatike (From Notes on Russian Grammar, vol 1, 1874; repr 1958); and the posthumously published ‘Iazyk i narodnost’ (Language and Nationality, in Vestnik Evropy, 1895). He was particularly interested in the relations among language, thought, and reality. Language for him was primarily the means by which the mind ordered the influx of impressions and stimuli. Words carry not only a meaning, but also the past experience of the individual and the nation, through which all new experience is filtered. Thus a word usually has three aspects: an external form, a meaning, and an internal form. It is through the internal form that the objective world is subjectivized. In many cases the internal form is rooted in myth and, hence, acts as a bridge between language and folklore (with its symbols). These ideas constitute the framework of Potebnja's master's thesis, O nekotorykh simvolakh v slavianskoi narodnoi poezii (On Some Symbols in Slavic Folk Poetry, 1860; expanded edn 1914), and his monumental work Obiasneniia malorusskikh i srodnykh narodnykh pesen (Explanations of Little Russian and Related Folk Songs, 2 vols, 1883, 1887). With time the consciousness of a word's internal form fades, and one of the tasks of literature is to restore this consciousness. According to this theory, literature is a hierarchy of genres; the simplest ones (the proverb, riddle, and fable) directly recall or renew the word's internal form, and the other genres do so in a more complicated, sometimes hardly detectable, way through a complex system of subjective (in poetry) or seemingly objective (in the novel) images. Potebnia's principal works on this subject were published posthumously: Iz lektsii po teorii slovesnosti: Basnia, poslovitsa, pogovorka (From Lectures on the Theory of Literature: The Fable, the Adage, the Proverb, 1894; repr 1970; Ukrainian trans 1930), Iz zapisok po teorii slovesnosti: Poeziia i proza, tropy i figury, myshlenie poeticheskoe i mificheskoe, prilozheniia (From Notes on the Theory of Literature: Poetry and Prose, Tropes and Figures, Poetic and Mythical Thought, Addenda, 1905; repr 1970), and ‘Chernovyia zametki ... o L.N. Tolstom i F.M. Dostoevskom’ (Preliminary Remarks ... on L. Tolstoy and F. Dostoevsky) in Voprosy teorii i psikhologii tvorchestva (vol 5 [1914]). ...more
death_date: 1891-12-11 00:00:00