Nikolai Trubetzkoy

Prince Nikolai Sergeyevich Trubetzkoy (Russian: Николай Сергеевич Трубецкой, IPA: [trʊbʲɪtsˈkoj]; 16 April 1890 - 25 June 1938) was a Russian linguist and historian.

Quotes

 * The assumption of an Indo-European protopeople with definite cultural and racial characteristics is untenable. We are chasing a romantic illusion … The idea of an Indo-European protolanguage is not absurd, but it is not necessary, and we can do very well without it … There is … no compelling reason for the assumption of a homogeneous Indo-European protolanguage from which the individual branches of Indo-European des- cended. … [I]t is equally probable that the Indo-European family arose when some originally non-related languages (the ancestors of the later branches) converged and that the Indo-European languages developed from a protolanguage by divergence.
 * Trubetzkoy NS 2001 Studies in general linguistics and language structure (ed) A Liberman (Durham and London: Duke University Press) pp 87–90(Trubetzkoy 2001, pp. 87–90). quoted in Danino, M. (2019). Methodological issues in the Indo-European debate. Journal of Biosciences, 44(3), 68.