Nikolai Trubetzkoy

• Honorific Prefix — Prince • Name — Nikolai Trubetzkoy • Native Name — Николай Трубецкой • Born — 16 April 1890 • Birthplace — Moscow, Russian Empire (present-day Russia) • Died — 25 June 1938 • Place of death — Vienna, State of Austria, Nazi Germany (present-day Austria) • Occupation — * Linguist • historian • Alma Mater — Imperial Moscow University (1913) • Workplaces — * Imperial Moscow University • University of Rostov-on-Don • University of Sofia • University of Vienna • Movement — Eurasianism • Discipline — Linguistics • Sub Discipline — * Phonology • Slavic philology • Main Interests — * Structural linguistics • morphophonology • School Tradition — Prague School • Notable Works — Principles of Phonology • Notable Ideas — * Phoneme • sprachbund • Father — Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy • Relatives — * Nikolai Petrovitch Troubetzkoy (grandfather) • Evgenii Nikolaevitch Troubetzkoy (uncle) • Family — Trubetskoy

Trubetzkoy was born into privilege. His father, Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy, came from the Lithuanian Gediminid princely family of Trubetskoy. In 1908, he enrolled at the Imperial Moscow University. While spending some time at the University of Leipzig, Trubetzkoy was taught by August Leskien, a pioneer of research into sound laws. After he graduated from the Moscow University (1913), Trubetzkoy delivered lectures there until the Russian Revolution, when he moved first to the University of Rostov-on-Don, then to the University of Sofia (1920–1922) and finally took the chair of Professor of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna (1922–1938). Trubetzkoy was involved with the Eurasianist movement and became one of their leading theorists and political leaders. After the emergence of "left Eurasianism" in Paris, where some of the movement's leaders became pro-Soviet, Trubetzkoy, who was a staunch anti-communist, heavily criticised them and eventually broke with the Eurasianist movement. Trubetzkoy died from a heart attack attributed to Nazi persecution after he had published an article that was highly critical of Hitler's theories.

In his biography of the mathematical collective Nicolas Bourbaki, Amir Aczel described Trubetzkoy as a pioneer in structuralism, an interdisciplinary outgrowth of structural linguistics that would be applied in mathematics by the Bourbaki group, as in the notion of a mathematical structure, and in anthropology by Claude Lévi-Strauss, who sought to describe rules governing human behavior. According to Aczel, Trubetzkoy's focus in Principles of Phonology was the study of phonemes and their opposing aspects to describe rules of language, the goal of describing general underlying rules being the common goal of structuralism.

The authorities additionally record the headings Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy and Trubet Łskoi, Nikolai Sergeevich kni Łaz £. His recorded languages were Russian, German and Czech. He was the child of Sergei Nikolaevich Trubetskoy and Praskovya Obolenskaya.

Nikolai Trubetzkoy is recorded as linguist, historian, university teacher, phonologist and philosopher.