Jan Baudouin de Courtenay - Ekaterina Velmezova

Where does animal cry become human word? Long before "biosemiotics" had a name, thinkers were already circling its deepest questions. Ekaterina Velmezova revisits Jan Baudouin de Courtenay—a restless, brilliant linguist who crossed paths with Ferdinand de Saussure and shared Tartu's intellectual air with Jakob von Uexküll himself. A pioneer who scattered his genius across articles rather than books, Baudouin de Courtenay sensed something profound: that the boundary between physics and meaning might be where language truly begins. Join Velmezova as she traces these "presemiotic" roots and asks what an overlooked forerunner can still teach us about signs, thresholds, and the living roots of communication. 0:00 Introduction 0:39 Ekaterina Velmezova 23:18 Discussion - Abstract: On the "Humanisation" of Language in the Categories of Biosemiotics: Jan Niecislaw Baudouin de Courtenay Ekaterina Velmezova University of Lausanne (Switzerland) - University of Tartu (Estonia) [email protected] Jan Niecislaw Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929) was one of the most famous and versatile linguists in Central and Eastern Europe in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His scientific heritage is so diverse that it contains, at least in germ, almost all of the central topics dealt with by linguistics over the course of the last century and that they still often deal with today. One of these was the theme of the "humanisation" of the human language (in the sense of its origin and derivation from the "primitive" and "animal" state) — that is, the question of its "development" and "evolution" including attempts to predict its future state. Reasonings of this kind were no exception in the era of Baudouin de Courtenay. They were also present in the works of linguists working in various countries at the time: Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), Nikolai Marr (1864-1934), Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927), Dmitry Ovsyaniko-Kulikovsky (1853-1920) and others. Analyzing the works of Baudouin de Courtenay devoted to the question of the "humanisation" and the future evolution of human language, in our paper we will try to answer the question of how much the topic of "humanisation" of language, which involves the question of boundaries between animal language-langage and human language-langue and which is of interest to modern biosemiotics (see the problematisation around the "linguistic threshold"), was developed by Baudouin de Courtenay in categories which today can be considered to be (bio)semiotic (sign, iconicity, arbitrariness, structure/system, intentionality, etc.). These topics seem interesting not only because one of the historical roots for biosemiotics comes from (general) linguistics, but also because, for several years (1883-1893), Baudouin de Courtenay worked in Tartu (which at that time was called Dorpat). Both during this period (when, in particular, Jakob von Uexküll studied at the university there) and later, Baudouin de Courtenay could therefore be familiar with the reflections of the "holistic orientation", which gave rise to one of the trends in (bio)semiotics in the 20th century. References Boduen de Kurtenè I.A. Izbrannye trudy po obshchemu jazykoznaniju. T. 1-2. Moskva: Izdatel 'stvo Akademii nauk, 1963. Stankiewicz E. (ed.). A Baudouin de Courtenay Anthology. The Beginnings of Structural Linguistics. Bloomington - London: Indiana University Press, 1972. Velmezova E., Kull K., Cowley S.J. (eds.). Biosemiotic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics. Springer, 2015. - Original video footage from: https://www.ufs.ac.za/conferences/con...