[3] He finished his Doctoraalexamen [nl] in Slavic languages at the University of Amsterdam in 1947.

He then moved to the United States and studied Slavic languages at Harvard University and obtained his PhD there under Roman Jakobson in 1950 with a thesis titled: The parts of the sentence in modern Russian: a structural analysis.

[3][4] Ebeling returned to the Netherlands and from 1955 to 1960 he was professor of Slavic languages.

[4] In the 1960s Ebeling came up with a law-like theory of verbal paradigmic accentuation in Slavic, and possibly Balto-Slavic languages.

[5] Ebeling was elected a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1979.