Alexander Potebnja
(1835-1891)

Died aged 56

Alexander (Oleksandr) Potebnja (Russian: Алекса́ндр Афана́сьевич Потебня́; Ukrainian: Олекса́ндр Опана́сович Потебня́) was a Ukrainian linguist, philosopher and panslavist of Ukrainian Cossack descent, who was a professor of linguistics at the Imperial University of Kharkiv. He is well known as a specialist in the evolution of Russian phonetics. 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 (Russian: Мысль и язык) (1862). He also 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. Potebnja was a corresponding member of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, the foremost academic institution in the Russian Empire.

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