The Prague school important personalities

Vilém Mathesius (1882-1945)	Roman Jakobson (1896-1982)	André Martinet (1908-1999)	Nicolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy (1890-1938)
V.M. was one of the most remarkable and most influential personalities of the Prague school. Mathesius was one of the pioneers of the synchronic approach to facts of language, and this can be already found in his 1911 treatise,, On the   potentiality of the phenomena of Language“. The first important aspect of his work was that concerning the synchronic, non-historical approach. Secondly , ever more important about his work was the term potentiality, which was conceiverd by Mathesius as synchronous oscillation of speech in the particular language community. The oscillation is a precondition for the development of the language itself. In his view there are some tendecies in the language itself, which, though not being so constant as physical laws, are obvious and can be statistically represented.The emphasis on statistical evaluation was another contribution of Mathesius at the outset of the century. Another important point in his work was that he was convinced about the procedure from statics to dynamics to be to most reliable in linguistics.	Roman Jakobson   (1896-1982) was one of the greatest linguists of the 20th century. He was born in Russia and was a member of the Russian Formalist school as early as 1915. In 1943 he became one of the founding members of the Linguistic Circle of New York and acted as its vice president until 1949. He taught at numerous institutions from 1943 on, including Harvard University and MIT. Through his   teaching in the United States, Jakobson helped to bridge the gap between European and American linguistics. He had a profound influence on general linguistics (especially on Noam Chomsky's and Morris Halle's work) and on Slavic studies, but also on semiotics, anthropology, psychoanalysis, ethnology, mythology, communication theory and literary studies. His famous model of the functions of language is part of the intellectual heritage of semiotics.	André Martinet was born in 1908. He had occupations including author and academic. He died in Châtenay-Malabry in July 1999 aged 91 years and 3 months old. French linguist and author who was noted for his pioneering work on diachronic phonology, or sound change. His work was expounded in his 1955 book. In 1964 he was the author of "Elements of General Linguistics." From 1947, he served as the head of the linguistics department of Columbia University, but returned to the University of Paris in 1955 Following World War II he moved to New York, where he was to remain until 1955. During his time in New York Martinet directed the International Auxiliary Language Association and taught at Columbia University, where he served as chair of the department   from 1947 to 1955. Also, during this time, he became editor of Word, a linguistics journal. In 1955 he returned to his position at École Pratique des Hautes Études.	Prince Nikolay Sergeyevich Trubetskoy(April 15, 1890 – June 25, 1938) was a Russian linguist whose teachings formed a nucleus of the Prague School of structural linguistics. Having graduated from Moscow University (1913), Trubetskoy delivered lectures there until the revolution in 1917. He left Moscow, moving several times before finally taking the chair of Slavic Philology at the University of Vienna (1922–1938). On settling in Vienna, he became a geographically distant yet significant member of the Prague Linguistic School. Trubetzkoy's chief contributions to linguistics lie in the domain of phonology, particularly in analyses of the phonological systems of individual languages and in search for general and universal phonological laws. His magnum opus, Grundzüge der Phonologie(Principles of Phonology), issued posthumously, was translated into virtually all main European and Asian languages. In this book   he famously defined the phoneme as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of a given language. This work was crucial in establishing phonology as a discipline separate from phonetics.