JAKOBSON, Roman, (1896-1982), Russian-American linguist. Jakobson was professor at the Higher Dramatic School, Moscow (1920-33) and Masarykova University, Brno, Czechoslovakia (1933-39) before moving to the US in 1941. There Jakobson was professor at Columbia Universtity (1943-49), Harvard (1950-67) and M.I.T. (1957-67). A leading authority on Slavic languages, he was the principal founder of Prague school of structural linguistics and of phonology. Author of Remarques sur l' évolution phonologique du russe (1929), Kharakteristichke yevrazi-yskogo yazykovogo soyuza (1931), Kinder-sprache (1941), Aphasie und allgemeine Lautgesetze (1941), Preliminaries to Speech Analysis (with G. Fant and M. Halle, 1952), Fundamentals of Language (1956).

'I Think it was in September 1923 that a friend of Mayakovsky arrived in Berlin from Prague. This was red-haired Romka - the linguist Roman Oisipovich Yakobson, who worked at the Soviet Representation. Roman was pink faced and blue-eyed, with a squint in one eye; he drank a great deal but his head remained clear, and only after the tenth glass would he button his coat the wrong way. What struck me was that he knew everything: the structure of Khlebnikov's verse, old Czech literature, Rimbaud, the machinations of Curzon and Ramsay MacDonald. Occasionally he made things up, but when anyone tried to catch him out in an inaccuracy, he replied with a grin: "That was just a working hypothesis of mine".'
(Ilya Ehrenburg, Memoirs, 1921-41, p60)
Functionalists and structuralists