Quick Facts
Biography
Vladimír Skalička (19 August 1909 – 17 January 1991) was a Czech professor, linguist, translator, and polyglot. A member of the influential Prague School of linguists and literary critics and a corresponding member of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences, he is credited with further developing morphological typology.
Life and work
Skalička was born on 19 August 1909 in Prague, then part of Austria-Hungary. His grandfather was Czech painter Josef Mánes. He became associated with the Prague School while studying at Charles University in Prague, at which he habilitated in 1935, writing on Finno-Ugric linguistics. He remained at the university, and in 1946 was appointed professor 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.
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 morphological typology into five categories, classifying languages into isolating, agglutinating, inflectional, introflectional, and polysynthetic.