Vladimír Skalička (19 August 1909 – 17 January 1991) was a Czech

professor Professor (commonly abbreviated as Prof.) is an Academy, academic rank at university, universities and other tertiary education, post-secondary education and research institutions in most countries. Literally, ''professor'' derives from Latin ...

linguist Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

translator Translation is the communication of the meaning of a source-language text by means of an equivalent target-language text. The English language draws a terminological distinction (which does not exist in every language) between ''trans ...

, and

polyglot Multilingualism is the use of more than one language, either by an individual speaker or by a group of speakers. When the languages are just two, it is usually called bilingualism. It is believed that multilingual speakers outnumber monolin ...

. A member of the influential

Prague School The Prague school or Prague linguistic circle is a language and literature society. It started in 1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed methods of structuralist literary analysis and ...

of linguists and literary critics and a corresponding member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, he is credited with further developing

morphological typology Morphological typology is a linguistic typology, way of classifying the languages of the world that groups languages according to their common Morphology (linguistics), morphological structures. The field organizes languages on the basis of how ...

Life and work

Skalička was born on 19 August 1909 in

Prague Prague ( ; ) is the capital and List of cities and towns in the Czech Republic, largest city of the Czech Republic and the historical capital of Bohemia. Prague, located on the Vltava River, has a population of about 1.4 million, while its P ...

, then part of

Austria-Hungary Austria-Hungary, also referred to as the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Dual Monarchy or the Habsburg Monarchy, was a multi-national constitutional monarchy in Central Europe#Before World War I, Central Europe between 1867 and 1918. A military ...

. His grandfather was Czech painter Josef Mánes. He became associated with the

while studying at

Charles University in Prague Charles University (CUNI; , UK; ; ), or historically as the University of Prague (), is the largest university in the Czech Republic. It is one of the oldest universities in the world in continuous operation, the oldest university north of the ...

, at which he habilitated in 1935, writing on

Finno-Ugric Finno-Ugric () is a traditional linguistic grouping of all languages in the Uralic languages, Uralic language family except for the Samoyedic languages. Its once commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in ...

linguistics. He remained at the university, and in 1946 was appointed

there, founding the department of linguistics and phonetics. He continued to write until late into his life in a number of languages, collaborating with a number of other linguists including his wife, Alena Skaličková. Skalička was an active communist and influenced some of his students in politics. In 1951–1952 he was the dean of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University. In 1960 he was awarded the degree of Doctor of Sciences. Two years later he became a correspondent member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. After 1968 during the so called era of "

normalization Normalization or normalisation refers to a process that makes something more normal or regular. Science * Normalization process theory, a sociological theory of the implementation of new technologies or innovations * Normalization model, used in ...

" he was expelled from the Communist Party and sidelined within academia, however he continued to publish his works. His work included translation and comparative studies of languages, and was reported to have a basic understanding of approximately 1200 languages and dialects. He developed

into five categories, classifying languages into ''isolating'', ''

agglutinating An agglutinative language is a type of language that primarily forms words by stringing together morphemes (word parts)—each typically representing a single grammatical meaning—without significant modification to their forms ( agglutinations) ...

'', ''inflectional'', ''introflectional'', and ''

polysynthetic In linguistic typology, polysynthetic languages, formerly holophrastic languages, are highly synthetic languages, i.e., languages in which words are composed of many morphemes (word parts that have independent meaning but may or may not be able t ...

''.

References

External links

Vladimír Skalička: Bibliography
{{DEFAULTSORT:Skalicka, Vladimir 1909 births 1991 deaths People of the Prague linguistic circle Linguists from the Czech Republic Czech Finno-Ugrists Academic staff of Charles University 20th-century Czech translators 20th-century Czech linguists