Roman Jakobson — linguist with roots in the Russian Empire
Roman Jakobson was a Russian-American linguist and literary theorist born in Moscow who became one of the most influential figures in 20th-century linguistics and semiotics. His theory of phonology, his concept of the six functions of language, and his structuralist approach transformed linguistics, literary criticism, anthropology, and communication theory.
Tracing the roots — Moscow
Born in Moscow in 1896 to a Jewish industrialist family, Jakobson was part of the Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Prague School of linguistics before fleeing to the United States. At Harvard and MIT he shaped a generation of American linguists — including Noam Chomsky — and his influence on anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss transformed the social sciences.
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Moscow. At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.