Roman Jakobson’s Forgotten Czech Articles on Phonology: a Case of Avoiding Anachronism in Linguistic Historiography

Abstract

Although Roman Jakobson’s theory of distinctive features is best depicted in his English works after his immigration to the United States, a full picture of the development of this theory remains blurred unless all his early works on this topic, written in Czech, Russian, French and German, are well examined. Even though some of these works have been translated into English, there may exist misleading differences between the original non-English texts and the translated English texts. Based on a comparison between Jakobson’s phonological works published in Czech in the early 1930s (“Z fonologie spisovné slovenštiny” and the Ottův entries) and their English versions in his Selected Writings, the present article attempts to clarify a few details on the divisibility of phoneme, the paradigmatic nature of distinctive feature, and the nomenclature and classification of the distinctive features. It also aims to provide a specific example on how to avoid anachronism in the research on history of linguistics.