Kazan school

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 Vasily Bogoroditsky 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.