Lev Shcherba

Who was Lev Shcherba?

Lev Shcherba was a Russian linguist and lexicographer specializing in phonetics and phonology.

Born in Igumen, Shcherba went to high school in Kiev, graduating in 1898, and briefly attended Kiev University before moving to the capital and entering St. Petersburg University. There he studied under Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, graduating in 1903. In 1906 he traveled abroad, first to Leipzig and then to northern Italy, where he studied Tuscan dialects. During the autumn holidays of 1907 and 1908, on the advice of Baudouin de Courtenay, he studied the Sorbian languages, writing a description of the Mužakow dialect. At the end of 1907 he went to Paris, where he worked in the experimental phonetics laboratory of Jean-Pierre Rousselot studying the phonetics of a series of languages using experimental methods; on his return to Russia he began setting up an experimental phonetics laboratory, paying for equipment from his own stipend, and this became the institution that now bears his name.

As early as 1912, basing himself on the ideas of Baudouin de Courtenay, he elaborated the concept of the phoneme, defined by him as the grouping of sounds into "sound types".