Jacques François
Université de Caen & CNRS

In his introduction (p.6-18) to the Vorlesungen über lateinische Sprachwissenschaft (Lectures on Latin Linguistics, 1839), Christian Karl Reisig offered a philosophically grounded account of the epistemology of language as a Prinzipienwissenschaft (“Science of Principles”, in Hermann Paul’s wording, 1880). There is a crucial difference however between these two endeavours, namely : Reisig – who gave his lectures in 1817, i.e. twelve years before their publication – was a successor both to Wilhelm von Humboldt (and indirectly to Johann Gottfried Herder) in terms of conflating language, people and nation (in his principles 2 and 5, see below) and to Immanuel Kant in terms of his application to language of the latter’s table of the categories of understanding (see principles 6-7). In constrast to Paul, the impact of comparative grammar is hardly perceptible (see principles 12-13), although Reisig was certainly aware of the works of Friedrich Schlegel (1808) and Franz Bopp (1816).[1]

General principles of Language research

1. (Natural) Language fundamentally exists as grammar rather than through grammar.
2. Languages are products of peoples, not of a single individual or of a small group.
3. Enthusiasm is the primary source of language. Imagination has an earlier effect than understanding, and the impressions of the senses are the first concern of speech. Onomatopoeia is particularly notable.

[“Allgemeine Grundsätze der Sprachforschung – 1. Sprache ist eher als Grammatik und nicht durch die Grammatik. – 2. Sprachen sind Völkererzeugnisse, nicht einzelner Menschen oder eines Einzigen. – 3. Begeisterung ist der Urquell der Sprache; Phantasie wirkt früher als Verstand, und sinnliche Anschauungen sind der erste Gegenstand des Sprechens. Man bemerke besonders die Onomatopöie.” (1839 :6)]

Principle 1 asserts the descriptive purpose of linguistics when compared to the prescriptive grammar of academies: linguists’ grammars describe languages, they are not designed to contextualise them. Principles 2 and 3 deal with the modus operandi of language development resulting from the exchange of designations for concepts and feelings: “What the other likes, he takes and spreads around” [“was dem Andern gefällt, nimmt er auf und breitet es aus” (ibid :7)]. Amongst the enthusiasm factors likely to generate neologisms, Reisig mentions major events, such as “the fight of the forces of the German people in the war of liberation from the French yoke” [“der Kampf der Kräfte des deutschen Volks in dem französischen Freiheitskriege”] in the recent past.

4. Analyzing what mankind has experienced and thought of throughout its development is the task of philology, inasmuch as language is its expression.
5. Every natural language is shaped by the history and the character of the nation speaking it, which is the source of its use.

[“4. Ergründung und Entwickelung dessen, was unter der Menschheit gefühlt und gedacht worden, insofern es in und durch die Sprache dargestellt ist, ist Aufgabe der Philologie. – 5. Jede Sprache wird durch die Geschichte und den Charakter ihrer Nation gestaltet und erhält dadurch ihren Sprachgebrauch.” (ibid:6)]

Principles 4-5 define the task and the foundations of philology as Humboldt conceived of them in his development of Herder’s ideas.

6. Language usage is the motion inherent to every natural language within the framework of the general laws of language.
7. The general laws of human languages are space and time as primary forms of intuition, the categories of understanding and sensory experience.

[“6. Sprachgebrauch ist die freie und eigenthümliche Bewegung der einzelnen Sprache innerhalb der allgemeinen Sprachgesetze. – 7. Allgemeine Gesetze menschlicher Sprachen sind Raum und Zeit als Grundformen der Anschauung, die Verstandeskategorien und die Empfindungen” (ibid.:6)]

The modern reader who looks at principle 6 in isolation may imagine that the “general laws of language” are those of historical comparative grammar, but this is not the case, as principle 7 shows; it is rather a matter of the conditions of intuition (“transcendental aesthetics”) and understanding (“transcendental analytics”) according to the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Here we encounter the most appealing feature of Reisig’s linguistic epistemology: Reisig draws his inspiration not only from Kant’s four categories of understanding (quantity ; quality ; relation ; modality) – as Paul Grice was to later in the 20th century, but also from three selected values of each category. Table 1 summarizes the original organisation of the categories of understanding in Kritik der reinen Vernunft and Reisig’s (indicated by ‘R’) reworking.

Table 1: Kant and Reisig’s categories of understanding

The first category, Quantity, is carried out by the “nomen substantivum”: the “nomen proprium” expresses unity by expelling the determiner, the “nomen appelativum” expresses plurality using grammatical categories (singular, plural and occasionally dual), and the “nomen collectivum” – or the “nomen appellativum” associated with the quantifier omnis – expresses totality.

With regard to the second category, Quality, Reisig replaces the “Reality” value with “Position”, which is designed to “assign a property to an object”, the two other values remaining unchanged. The “adjectivum” expresses the two values of Reality and Negation in a specific way (i.e. applied to an entity, e.g. doctus ~ indoctus), and the “adverbium” fulfils the same function in a generic way (i.e. related to a state-of-affairs, e.g. docte ~ indocte). Finally, the Limitation value is conveyed by the grammatical category of Degree in its two varieties, “comparativus” and “superlativus”[2]. The Pronomina substituted for adjectives fulfil the same functions as these adjectives.

Reisig’s argument with regard to prepositions is rather opaque, but the Negative value of Latin sine is obvious, as well as the Limitative value of prepositions specifying the relation to a place expressed by a substantive in the dative or accusative case. However, one could also argue the opposite regarding prepositions with varying complementation (which govern the dative case with a stative meaning and the accusative with a dynamic meaning, e.g. in horto vs. in hortum): here the accusative vs. dative case is responsible for restricting the locative value of the preposition, either ‘inessive’ or ‘illative’.

Finally, the Position value is conveyed by the cases endowed with an autonomous relational meaning (direction : accusative, membership : genitive, recipient : dative, source : ablative), involving a bijective relationship between case and function, which excessively idealises actual use in classical Latin.

Regarding the Relation category, the three values of Substantiality, Causality and Interaction (“Communio”) are illustrated by the morphological cases labelled as “oblique” (with the exception of the nominative and vocative cases):

Genitive is related to substantiality in so far as it conveys the relationship between essence and property; Dative and Ablative convey causality, and Accusative Communio. Nominative is inopportune, because it does not convey any designation of relationship.
[Der Genitiv entspricht der Substantialität, indem er das Verhältniß von Wesen und Eigenschaft ausdrückt; der Dativ und Ablativ entsprechen der Causalität, und der Accusativ der Communio. Der Nominativ gehört nicht hierher; denn er enthält gar keine Bezeichunung eines Verhältnisses.]

Finally, Reisig draws a parallel between the three values of the Modality category, i.e. Possibility, Reality (Reisig’s equivalent to Kant’s Existence) and Necessity, and three types of grammatical categories. This impressive rhetorical exercise deserves to be detailed. Reisig, in a predictable manner, identifies verb modes as the grammatical counterpart to Modality but, on a more original note, also associates Modality with tenses and persons. Table 2 summarizes the logico-grammatical correlations identified by Reisig.

Table 2: Logico-grammatical correlations in the domain of Modality according to Reisig (1839:11)

The reason why the imperative is used to convey the Necessity value is obviously the underlying speech act: “I declare that you have to carry out action A”. Future conveys the Possibility value because the content of the state-of-affairs predicated is only possible at the time of utterance, and conversely Past conveys the Necessity value because at the same time the content of the state-of-affairs predicated can no longer be called into question. Lastly:

He, she, that is Reality, everything we may observe. I is Necessity, for, when we are to become aware of the objects outside of ourselves, our thinking self has to dissociate itself from them (…) You is obviously only something possible, for it lies only in the will of the speaker or in circumstances enabling me to call out to him.
[er, sie, es ist die Wirklichkeit, Alles, was uns nur zur Betrachtung gegeben ist; ich ist die Nothwendigkeit ; denn wenn wir uns der Objecte, die außer uns sind, sollen bewußt werden, so ist es nothwendig, daß wir unser Ich, unser denkendes Subject, von ihnen absondern (…) Du ist offenbar nur etwas Mögliches; denn es beruht nur in dem Willen des Sprechenden oder in Verhältnissen, daß ich mich mit jemand auf den Fuß setzen will, ihn anzureden (ibid.:11)]

If Reisig is to be viewed as the inventor of a branch of linguistics, then, on the evidence of the views expressed above, it would not be “semasiology”[3] as Brigitte Nerlich (2001) claims, but rather pragmatics. To the best of my knowledge, no other linguist before his time came to the idea of assembling the categories of Person, Verb mode and Tense in the same logical frame. The “reality” of the third person referent prefigures the “non-person” category suggested by E. Benveniste (1966:225-236); the “necessity” of the first person referent, as negation of the third person is most probably a grammatical expansion of Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, but the “possibility” of the second person referent is likely to be the most original idea of Reisig since the speech act of addressing (Bühler’s appeal function in 1934, Jakobson’s conative function in 1960) changes the status of the referent from being a represented object (third person) to being an addressee. All in all, every alter ego is an object of the world that may acquire a new status by simply using one of the two personal pronouns I or you, thus generating a whole pragmatic programme.

8. In its function of thought representation, language is itself only one form of these thoughts.
9. The representation form is either that of objectivity or that of subjectivity, either that of reality or that of ideality.
10. The diversity of the representation form lies in this, either only per se, or related to its content; formal and essential diversity.

[“8. Sprache als Darstellerin der Gedanken ist selbst nur eine Form dieser Gedanken – 9. Die Darstellungsform ist entweder die der Objektivität oder die der Subjektivität; entweder die der Realität oder die der Idealität – 10. Die Verschiedenheit der Darstellungsform beruht entweder nur in dieser als solcher, oder zugleich in ihrem Inhalte; formelle und wesentliche Verschiedenheit.” (ibid : 6-7)]

These three principles are related to the classical distinction made by Latin grammarians between “oratio recta” and “oratio obliqua”. The first relates to direct speech, which Reisig refers to as “objective” and which describes a “reality”, the second (named “allocutio obliqua” by Quintilian) relates to reported speech in Reisig’s view. However he does not confine himself to these two types of speech: his distinction is about the expression of judgements and it encompasses three modes of expression. The first one is objective in the sense that the thinking subject is absent, e.g. It is right. The second is subjective in so far as it is conveyed by an explicit statement (cf. Bally 1965: 38-48), e.g. I suppose it is right (a formulation pertaining to oratio obliqua). The third breaks down into an asserted clause (oratio recta) and an interpolated clause (also pertaining to oratio recta), e.g. That is right, I suppose. Assessing to what extent Reisig prefigures the view of ‘functional equivalences’ amongst the more or less obvious expressions of Modus next to or within the Dictum (according to Charles Bally), is difficult, because no similar formulation is to be found in that excerpt. Admittedly Reisig displays a theory of paraphrase in §14:

Many expressions convey the same content, but in various ways, in various turns of phrase, thus in different logical forms; that is formal variation. But many expressions convey not only a variety of logical forms, but at the same time a difference related to the thing, to the entity itself, and that gives us essential variation.
[Vieles bezeichnet denselben Inhalt, aber auf verschiedenen Wegen, in verschiedenen Wendungen, also in verschiedenen logischen Formen; dies ist der formale Unterschied. Vieles bezeichnet aber bei dem Unterschiede der logischen Form zugleich auch eine Verschiedenheit des Dinges, des Wesens selbst, und dies giebt den wesentlichen Unterschied. (ibid.:14).]

Nevertheless, he does not seem to apply this theory (see §13) to the two expressions I suppose that P and P, I suppose.

Indeed, This is true, because I believe it is a subjective judgement but what designates it as such is not the form of the clauses for every clause exists for itself. [‘Dies ist, wie ich glaube, wahr’ ist zwar ein Subjectsurtheil, aber nicht die Form der Sätze bezeichnet es als solches; denn jeder Satz besteht für sich (ibid:13)].[4]

11. Euphony, firmness and clarity are the major qualities of language and the main reasons for its use among cultured peoples.
12. The grammatical way for discovering language use is analogy.
13. Comparing several languages in their similarities is a useful contribution to studying one of them when their relatedness is historically established.

[“11. Wohllaut, Nachdrücklichkeit und Deutlichkeit sind die größten Vorzüge der Sprache und die hauptsächlichsten Bewegungsgründe des Sprachgebrauchs bei gebildeten Völkern – 12. Der grammatische Weg zur Auffindung des Sprachgebrauchs ist die analogie – 13. Vergleichung mehreren Sprachen in ihren Aehnlichkeiten ist ein brauchbares Hülfsmittel zur Erforschung der einen, wenn die Verwandtschaft derselben historisch nachgewiesen ist.” (ibid : 7).]

Culture prompts speakers to favour an utterance whose musicality resonates with the conceptual form (Begriffsform). Here Humboldt’s ideal shows through, as well as his claim – addressed to François Abel Rémusat (1827) – that the genius of flectional Indo-European languages and specifically of classical Greek prevails over that of Chinese, because building periodic sentences is impossible in Chinese. Reisig’s argument about the ‘firmness’ (Nachdrücklichkeit) of classical Greek, based on its ability to build words which may reach some eight or nine syllables, is rather disturbing. Friedrich Schlegel (1808) argued namely that the perfection of ‘Sanskritic’ and related ancient languages lay, on the contrary, in the prominent place assigned to apophony (Ablaut), the pinnacle of the organic growing of natural languages. By contrast, Reisig’s defence of tropes is fully understandable, see. e.g. “Tropes excite sensitivity; what delights sensitivity makes the language pleasant” [“Tropen reizen die Sinnlichkeit; was die Sinnlichkeit erfreut, macht die Sprache angenehm” (ibid. :15)], prompting him (see principle 12) to assign a core role to analogy, Quintilian’s proportio.

The last point (see principle 13) appears self-evident, but one must keep in mind that Reisig died in 1829, before two of the three definitive books in the establishment of the comparative grammar of the so-called ‘Indo-Germanic’ languages were published; namely Franz Bopp’s Vergleichende Grammatik (from 1833 on) and August Wilhelm Pott’s Etymologische Forschungen (at the same time)[5]. It is therefore quite natural that in his Vorlesungen (Lectures) in 1827 attacked those “who link isolated sounds from one language to another though these languages are historically far from each other” [“Das hier gesagte ist sehr wichtig und gegen diejenigen gerichtet, welche einzelne Klänge in verschiedenen Sprachen, die in der Geschichte einander fern liegen, von einander ableiten” (ibid.:16)] and that the two works of James Harris (1751) and Bernhardi (1801) which he recommends his readers to read are then very much outdated.

Finally, these thirteen principles of linguistics listed by Reisig were original and pioneering for a Latinist who passed away at the age of thirty-seven, before the emergence of comparative grammar. However, in the remaining parts of his introduction to the Vorlesungen, he maintained a conservative attitude: after describing the three stages of “the spirit and history of the Latin language” (§34: 40-41), from the “harshness” of the beginnings to the blooming of the specific qualities of that language due to lawmakers, poets and orators, and lastly to the corrupted medieval Latin, he came to one of the core purposes of his Lectures, namely the seven “general principles and ideas for acquiring a high quality Latin” (§38 : 45 [“allgemeine Grundsätze und Ideen zur Erwerbung einer guten Latinität” (ibid:45)]), where he stated:

3. It [the Latin language] is represented by linguistics as an organic whole. However, the idea that grammar alone can depict may grow into a profound feeling during the studious reading of writers from the most appropriate period, that in which the healthiest taste blooms
[3. Als ein organisches Ganze wird sie zwar durch die Sprachwissenschaft dargestellt, doch wird die Idee, welche die Grammatik nur schildern kann, zum tiefen Gefühl gebracht erst durch fleißige Lectüre der Schriftsteller des besten Zeitalters, worin der gesundeste Geschmack herrscht (ibid.:45)].

Reisig’s students had an obligation that may explain their interest in his Lectures: they had to write up their theses in the most classical and distinguished Latin. The assignment Reisig gave himself as an academic was therefore double: on the one hand to assert the descriptive character of linguistic approach, and on the other hand to pass on the prescriptions of elegant classical style in such a way that classical Latin would remain the favourite mode of academic communication over the following few decades.[6]

Notes

[1] This paper is an adaptation of §2.5.2 of Le siècle d’or de la linguistique en Allemagne : de Humboldt à Meyer-Lübke (The golden century of linguistics in Germany – from Humboldt to Meyer-Lübke), forthcoming [Limoges : Lambert-Lucas].

[2] Reisig specifies (p.10) that the superlative actually fulfils a limitative function. Indeed, the devil, who is unique, is defined as “the evil one” and not “the most evil one” but a centaur, belonging to a class of individuals, may be referred to as “the best one” to indicate its superlative quality.

[3] Its actual founders were two followers of Reisig’s in the second part of the 19th century; see Haase (1874) and Heerdegen (1875-1881).

[4] Here Reisig‘s argument is dubious: he does not explain how we may recognize if it is a subjective judgment in the absence of a subordination relationship between the judgement clause and the content clause. Theoretical grammar was probably still too primitive to recognise the equative conjunction wie as the logical converse of the object conjunction daß and to conclude that the two expressions are functionally equivalent, as Charles Bally and Lucien Tesnière (see 1959) were to a century later, in the 1930s.

[5] Only Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik was already published in the 1820s (1^st ed. 1819, 2^nd ed. with “Grimms’ law” 1822-1826).

[6] As an illustration, in 1864, i.e. 36 years after Reisig’s Lectures, Hugo Schuchardt still wrote his PhD, De sermonis Romani plebei vocalibus, in Latin, before publishing it in German in 1866-1868.

References

Bally, Charles (1965), Linguistique française et linguistique générale, Berne 1965 (4th ed.)
Benveniste Emile (1966), Problèmes de linguistique générale. Paris : Gallimard

Bernhardi, August Ferdinand (1801), Sprachlehre. Berlin.

Bopp, Franz (1816), Über das Conjugations-System der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache. Frankfurt/Main

Bopp, Franz (1833-1849), Vergleichende Grammatik des Sanskrit, Zend, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Lithauischen, Altslawischen, Gotischen und Deutschen, Berlin

Bühler, Karl (1934), Sprachtheorie : Die Darstellungsfunktion der Sprache . 2d ed. 1999, Stuttgart : UTB

Grimm, Jacob (1822-1826), Deutsche Grammatik [2nd ed., 1st. ed. 1819]

Haase, Friedrich (1874), Vorlesungen über lateinische Sprachwissenschaft, gehalten ab 1840, 2 vols., Leipzig : Simmel.

Harris, James (1751), Hermes, a philosophical inquity concerning universal grammar. London. Translated into German in 1788

Heerdegen, Ferdinand (1875-1881), Untersuchungen zur lateinischen Semasiologie, 3 vols. Erlangen : Deichert.

Humboldt, W. von (1827), Lettre à M. Abel-Rémusat sur la nature des formes grammaticales en général et le génie de la langue chinoise en particulier. Paris.

Jakobson, Roman (1960), “Linguistics and Poetics: Closing Statement”, in Th. Sebeok (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge (mass.) : MIT Press.

Kant, Immanuel (1781, ²1787), Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Riga

Nerlich, Brigitte (2001), “The study of meaning change from Reisig to Bréal”, in Auroux Sylvain / Koerner E.F.K. / Niederehe Hans-Joseph / Versteegh Kees (eds.), History Of The Language Sciences / Geschichte der Srachwissenschaften / Histoire des Sciences du Langage: An International Handbook (…). vol.2. Berlin : De Gruyter, 1617-1628.

Paul, Hermann (1880, ²1886), Principien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle

Pott, August Friedrich (1833-1836). Etymologische Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der indogermanischen Sprachen, mit besonderem Bezug auf die Lautumwandlung in Sanskrit, Griechischen, Lateinischen, Litauischen und Gotischen, Lemgo.

Quintilian (ca. 95 CE), Institutio oratoria: http://eserver.org/rhetoric/quintilian/ http://eserver.org/rhetoric/quintilian/

Schlegel, Friedrich [von] (1808), Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier – Ein Beitrag zur Begründung der Althertusmkunde. Heidelberg : Mohr & Zimmer

Schuchardt, Hugo (1866-1868), Der Vokalismus des Vulgärlateins, 3 vol. Leipzig [original dissertation : De sermonis Romani plebei vocalibus (“About the vocals of vulgar Latin discourses”).

Tesnière Lucien (1959), Éléments de syntaxe structurale.Paris : Klincksieck.

How to cite this post

François, Jacques. 2016. Christian Karl Reisig as an upholder of philosophical linguistics in 19th century Germany. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2016/04/13/christian-karl-reisig-as-an-upholder-of-philosophical-linguistics-in-19th-century-germany

James McElvenny
Universität Potsdam

Research into grammaticalization has an established pedigree, first certified by Lehmann (2015[1982]: 1-9) and confirmed, with various additions, by Heine et al (1991: 5-23) and Hopper & Traugott (2003[1993]: 19-38).[1] The standard genealogy records the birth of the term “grammaticalization” in more or less its present-day sense with Antoine Meillet (1866–1936), but recognises an intellectual lineage extending back at least to the Enlightenment. Among the immediate predecessors of Meillet, Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) is accorded a significant place for proposing an account of the emergence of grammatical forms that prefigures Meillet’s in several key respects. The standard narrative is without doubt correct, but at the same time excessively sketchy, omitting important details. The place of Gabelentz, in particular, deserves greater attention.

The locus classicus of grammaticalization is Meillet’s (1921[1912]) paper “L’évolution des formes grammaticales”. There grammaticalisation is described as the “attribution du caractère grammatical à un mot jadis autonome” (“attribution of a grammatical character to a word that was once independent”; Meillet 1921[1912]: 131). In Meillet’s account, which builds on 19^th-century agglutination theory, there is a continuum of forms in every language ranging from fully independent content-bearing words to affixes that have a purely grammatical meaning. Grammaticalization is the ever-acting and inevitable process by which these linguistic elements are “weakened” in their meaning and form, with the result that they move along this continuum from full words to affixes:

L’affaiblissement du sens et l’affaiblissement de la forme des mots accessoires vont de pair; quand l’un et l’autre sont assez avancés, le mot accessoire peut finir par ne plus être qu’un élément privé de sens propre, joint à un mot principal pour en marquer le rôle grammatical. Le changement d’un mot en élément grammatical est accompli.

The weakening of meaning and the weakening of form of accessory words go together; when they are both sufficiently advanced, the accessory word can end up as an element that no longer has its own meaning, but which is joined to a principal word in order to mark its grammatical role. The transition from a word into a grammatical element is accomplished.
(Meillet 1921[1912]: 139)

Additionally, he sees all languages as developing in a “sort of spiral”: “Les langues suivent ainsi une sorte de développement en spirale” (Meillet 1921[1912]: 140). As linguistic elements are weakened and worn away, they are replaced by new ones, which are in turn subject to the same process. This weakening in meaning and form results from simple repetition in normal usage. The introduction of new elements is driven by a desire on the part of speakers to be more “expressive” (Meillet 1921[1912]: 135-136, 146 et passim).

As is highlighted by Lehmann (2015[1982]: 3-4), Hopper & Traugott (2003[1993]: 20-21) and Heine et al (1991: 9), these key elements of Meillet’s account — the “weakening”, the spiral, and the complementary tendencies that lead to the spiral — were already present in much the same configuration in Gabelentz’ own summary of agglutination theory. In the following passage from Gabelentz’ magnum opus, Die Sprachwissenschaft (2016[1891]; quoted by Lehmann op. cit. and in part by Heine et al 1991: 8), a spiral conception of linguistic history is invoked, resulting from the opposing Bequemlichkeitstrieb (“drive to comfort”) and Deutlichkeitstrieb (“drive to distinctness”):

Nun bewegt sich die Geschichte der Sprachen in der Diagonale zweier Kräfte: des Bequemlichkeitstriebes, der zur Abnutzung der Laute führt, und des Deutlichkeitstriebes, der jene Abnutzung nicht zur Zerstörung der Sprache ausarten läßt. Die Affixe verschleifen sich, verschwinden am Ende spurlos; ihre Funktionen aber oder ähnliche drängen wieder nach Ausdruck. Diesen Ausdruck erhalten sie, nach der Methode der isolierenden Sprachen, durch Wortstellung oder verdeutlichende Wörter. Letztere unterliegen wiederum mit der Zeit dem Agglutinationsprozesse, dem Verschliffe und Schwunde, und derweile bereitet sich für das Verderbende neuer Ersatz vor: periphrastische Ausdrücke werden bevorzugt; mögen sie syntaktische Gefüge oder wahre Komposita sein (englisch: I shall see, — lateinisch videbo = vide-fuo); immer gilt das Gleiche: die Entwicklungslinie krümmt sich zurück nach der Seite der Isolation, nicht in die alte Bahn, sondern in eine annähernd parallele. Darum vergleiche ich sie der Spirale.

The history of languages moves across the diagonal of two forces: the drive to comfort, which leads to the wearing down of sounds, and the drive to distinctness, which prevents this wearing down from ending up in the destruction of the language. The affixes are slurred, and in the end disappear without a trace; but their functions or similar functions push again for expression. They receive this expression according to the method of the isolating languages, through word order or clarifying words. These words are in turn subject to the processes of agglutination over time, to slurring and disappearance, and meanwhile new replacements are are prepared for that which is decaying: periphrastic expressions are preferred, whether they are syntactic structures or true compounds (English “I shall see” – Latin videbo = vide-fuo). The same principle is always true: the line of development bends back to the side of isolation, not in the old path, but in a closely parallel one. For this reason I compare it to a spiral.
(Gabelentz 2016[1891]: 269)

Lehmann (2015[1982]: 4) and, presumably following him, Hopper & Traugott (2003[1993]: 21) and Heine et al (1991: 8) seem to credit Gabelentz as the originator of these notions. There are, however, clear antecedents in earlier linguistic scholarship, and indeed Gabelentz himself claims no originality. Of the spiral conception of history, he explicitly says, “Zu dieser Theorie sind gewiss schon viele Andere vor mir gelangt, — ich weiss nicht, wer zuerst” (“Many have definitely come to this theory before me — I do not know who was first”; Gabelentz 2016[1891]: 269; cf. Plank 1992).

The specific opposition that Gabelentz sets up between the drives to Bequemlichkeit and Deutlichkeit may be original, but considerations of this sort were not unknown in previous work. Georg Curtius (1820–1885), for one, had by mid-century already proposed Bequemlichkeit in articulation as the driving force behind sound change. Slowing the progress of the phonetic Verwitterung (“weathering”) brought about by the tendency to greater comfort in articulation was the need to preserve the distinctness of meaning-bearing elements in words. Curtius’ formulation was widely received by his contemporaries and is signposted by Berthold Delbrück (1842–1922; 1919: 172-173) as one of the waypoints in his history of Indo-European linguistics.

Similar notions appear in the work of William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894), with specific reference to the development of new grammatical forms through the process of agglutination. Whitney’s (1875: 49-74) “tendency to ease or economy”, much like Curtius’ Bequemlichkeit, operates on a phonetic level both to shorten individual words and to render the overall phonological system of languages easier to pronounce. But the tendency to economy does not simply wear away at words; it also serves to create new forms by compacting collocations and compounds:

Thus the tendency to economy, in the very midst of its destructive action, is at the same time constructive. It begins with producing those very forms which it is afterward to mutilate and wear out. Without it, compound words and aggregated phrases would remain ever such. Its influence is always cast in favor of subordinating in substance what is subordinate in meaning, of integrating and unifying what would otherwise be of loose structure — in short, of disguising the derivation of linguistic signs, making them signs merely, and signs easy to manage.
(Whitney 1875: 53)

What Whitney had in mind here has as much affinity to modern grammaticalization theory as anything Gabelentz had to say. Whitney’s illustrations of this process include such classic examples of present-day grammaticalization as the English suffix -ly and its Romance counterpart -ment(e), and the Romance future as represented by French donner-ai (Whitney 1875: 122-124).[2]

The historical background to grammaticalization is not only broader than the standard history suggests, but also much richer. Lehmann (2015[1982]: 4), Hopper & Traugott (2003[1993]: 21) and Heine et al (1991: 8) seem to confine Gabelentz’ drives to the phonetic plane. Hopper & Traugott, in particular, describe them as operating to effect only “renewal”; that is, the development of new means to express existing grammatical categories, whose forms have been worn away.

But Gabelentz’ drives went beyond renewal and could be considered to touch on what in present-day grammaticalization theory is referred to as “innovation”, or the creation of wholly new grammatical categories. This is of particular importance, since innovation is frequently cited — e.g. by Meillet (1921[1912]: 133) and Lehmann (2004: 184-186) — as the key property that sets grammaticalization apart as a unique process in human language.[3]

Gabelentz held that all of grammar is merely solidified style (see McElvenny 2016). In language there is a progression along the continuum Möglichkeit — Regel — Gesetz (“possibility — rule — law”; Gabelentz 2016[1891]: 406-408). What begins as just one among many possible means of expression chosen by a speaker becomes, through repeated use, the rule or standard form of expression, and then finally a law stipulating the required and only permissible form. This restriction can then be broken, leading to innovation in the grammar, but at this point the novel expression is no longer a free choice from among numerous possibilities, but rather an act of liberation from the law.

Grammar is a Luxus (“luxury”) that we grant ourselves; it emerges from yet another drive, the Formungstrieb (“drive to formation”). This is the desire to shape our speech as we please, according to our whims and fancies, rather than just providing a flat, objective description of the world. The Formungstrieb, argues Gabelentz, is simply part of the more general Spieltrieb (“play-drive”), using Friedrich Schiller’s (1759–1805; 1960[1795]) term for the general aesthetic drive that motivates all artistic efforts:

Es ist doch nur eine höhere Stufe des Spieltriebes, jenes Gefallen an freier, künstlerischer Formung, das in frischer Laune jeder Schöpfung den Stempel der eigenen Individualität und Stimmung aufdrücken muss. Es sei die künstlerische Leistung noch so gering: schon jener Überschuss von Arbeit, die ich meinem Werke über den blossen Nützlichkeitsbedarf hinaus zugewendet habe, ist ein Stück Liebe gewesen und hat dem todten Stoffe für alle Zeiten einen Hauch des Persönlichen gegeben. Und ebenso geschah es mit der Sprache. Die Seele verlangte ein Mehreres als jenen Geschäftsstil, der in objectiver Klarheit alles Nothwendige sagt und weiter nichts. Sie will in der Sache sich selbst wiederfinden, wie sie sich ihrer Welt gegenüber gemüthvoll, phantastisch, launenhaft verhält, will, – dass ich den Ausdruck wiederhole, – nicht nur etwas, sondern auch sich selbst aussprechen, und wird um so sicherer den Hörer nicht nur zum Mitdenken, sondern auch zum Mitfühlen zwingen. Da wirthschaftet sie aus dem Vollen, – sie ist ja so reich; da wird auch dem Kleinsten etwas von eigener Zuthat angeheftet, erst nach der Eingebung des Augenblickes, scheinbar regellos und doch immer bedeutsam; dann je länger je mehr unter dem Zwange gewohnheitsmässiger Normen.

It is just a higher level of the play-drive, that joy at free, artistic formation, that in fresh fancy puts the stamp of its own individuality and mood on every creation. Even when the artistic achievement was still slight, that little surplus of effort that I made on my work over and above bare utility was already a piece of love, and gave the dead material a breath of the personal for all time. And precisely the same thing happened with language. The soul demands something more than that simple business-like style that says in objective clarity all that is necessary and nothing more. It wants to identify itself with the thing, how it relates to its world, temperamentally, fancifully, moodily. I repeat the expression from earlier: it wants not only to express something but also itself, and wants not only to more securely compel the listener to share a thought, but also share a feeling. Here it conducts its business to the full – it is indeed so rich that it adds some of its own ingredient even to the smallest bit, at first according to the inspiration of the moment, apparently without rule but always meaningfully; then as time progresses ever more under the force of habitual norms.
(Gabelentz 2016[1891]: 381)

Deutlichkeit or “distinctness”, in an extended sense, lies behind the Formungstrieb. On this level, distinctness is a temperamental and aesthetic category. It is not simply a matter of amplifying a faded phonetic signal; it is also about branding the linguistic expression with the speaker’s own individual, subjective feeling:

Nicht immer jedoch ist das Deutlichkeitsbedürfniss seinem Grunde und Zwecke nach geschäftlich: es kann auch gemüthlich und ästhetisch sein, und dann redet man wohl lieber von ausdrucksvoller, anschaulicher, eindringlicher Sprache, als von deutlicher. Und doch ist es im Grunde immer die Deutlichkeit, auf die es dabei ankommt. Es fragt sich nur: Was soll angedeutet werden, was wird bedeutet? Auch jene Formen und Wendungen in der Rede dienen der Deutlichkeit, in denen der Redende und Phrasen, die der Rede das Gepräge breiter Gemüthlichkeit, bedächtiger Überlegung oder heftiger Erregung verleihen, die Äusserungen der Bescheidenheit und Höflichkeit, Umschreibungen aller Art, Euphemismen und ihr Gegentheil, die der Sache besondere Merkmale abgwennen, – man denke an die vielerlei Ausdrücke für sterben, betrunken sein u.s.w. Deutlich in diesem Sinne ist das Persönliche und Zarte nicht minder, als das Sachliche und Derbe.

However, the reason and purpose of the need for distinctness is not always related to business: it can also be temperamental and aesthetic, and in this case we prefer to speak more of expressive, vivid, striking language than distinct language. But it is still related to essentially the same distinctness. The question is only: what is supposed to be indicated, what is meant? Distinctness is served even by those forms and turns of speech in which the speaker manifests his subjectivity or wants to influence the mood of the hearer, those particles and phrases that give speech the character of broad temperament, considered thought or hefty excitement, the manifestations of modesty and politeness, circumlocutions of all kinds, euphemisms and their opposites, which emphasise particular properties of things. We might think of the many expressions for “to die”, “to be drunk”, etc. What is clear in this sense is no less the personal and tender than the objective and rough.
(Gabelentz 2016[1891]: 194)

Meillet’s use of “expressive” would seem to involve similar subjective and aesthetic considerations. Expressivité was a central concept in the contemporary stylistic work of such figures as Charles Bally (1865–1947), which drives speakers to shun old and hackneyed linguistic expressions and promotes the creation of new, more vivid forms (see Hellmann 1988: 65-70). Bally (1965[1913]: 41-43) also illustrated one of his discussions of expressivité with those now familiar examples of grammaticalization in the Romance languages, the cyclical development of the periphrastic future and the emergence of the -ment(e) suffix. While Meillet was not uncritical of Bally’s work in stylistics and other related efforts of the time (see, e.g., Meillet 1910; 1913; 1926), he cites, in a footnote later added to his classic grammaticalization paper (Meillet 1921[1912]: 148), Bally and Leo Spitzer (1887–1960) for the light they cast on the “rôle du sentiment dans la création des formes grammaticales” (“role of sentiment in the creation of grammatical forms”).

There is much more to be said about the place of Gabelentz in the history of grammaticalization than the standard narrative might suggest. In one respect, he was not necessarily the great innovator he is often portrayed to be: his competing forces of comfort and distinctness and the spiral they produce were all very much present in contemporary linguistic discourse. In another respect, his conceptions of the nature of grammar and of what consituted comfort and distinctness are more multi-faceted than generally assumed.

I would like to thank Arwen Cross and Johannes Mücke for their comments on draft versions of this post.

Notes

[1] Lehmann (2015[1982]) and Gabelentz (2016[1891]) have both recently appeared in new editions from the open access publisher Language Science Press. These books can be downloaded for free or bought from print on demand for the price of printing and postage alone.

[2] In their summary history of grammaticalization, Heine et al (1991: 7-8) mention Whitney (1875) for principles of semantic change he proposed that involve the movement of linguistic elements towards grammatical meanings. They do not discuss his “tendency to ease or economy”, however.

[3] While Meillet (1921[1912]) clearly discussed the notion of innovation as a key property of grammaticalization, he only introduced an explicit distinction between “renewal” and “innovation” later, in Meillet (1921[1915]; cf. Lehmann 2015[1982]: 5).

References

Bally, Charles. 1965[1913]. Le langage et la vie. Genève: Droz.

Delbrück, Berthold. ⁶1919. Einleitung in das Studium der Indogermanischen Sprachen. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Härtel.

Gabelentz, Georg von der. 2016[1891]. Die Sprachwissenschaft: ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bisherigen Ergebnisse. Herausgegeben von Manfred Ringmacher and James McElvenny. Berlin: Language Science Press. http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/97

Heine, Bernd, Ulrike Claudi and Frederike Hünnemeyer. 1991. Grammaticalization: a conceptual framework. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Hellmann, Wilhelm. 1988. Charles Bally: Frühwerk — Rezeption — Bibliographie. Bonn: Romanist Verlag.

Hopper, Paul & Elizabeth Traugott. 2003[1993]. Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lehmann, Christian. 2004. Theory and method in grammaticalization. Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 32.2: 152-187. Pre-print: http://www.christianlehmann.eu/publ/theory_method_in_grammaticalization.pdf

Lehmann, Christian. 2015[1982]. Thoughts on Grammaticalization. Berlin: Language Science Press. http://langsci-press.org/catalog/book/88

McElvenny, James. 2016. The fate of form in the Humboldtian tradition: the Formungstrieb of Georg von der Gabelentz. Language and Communciation 47: 30-42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langcom.2015.12.004

Meillet, Antoine. 1910. Compte-rendu: Ch. Bally — Traité de stylistique française. Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris 16: cxviii-cxxii. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k321579/f125.image

Meillet, Antoine. 1913. Compte-rendu: Ch. Bally — Le langage et la vie. Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris 18: clxxix-clxxxii. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k321590/f184.image

Meillet, Antoine. 1921[1912]. L’évolution des formes grammaticales. In: Meillet (1921), 130-148. (Original in Scientia [Rivista di Scienza] 12.26. Available at: http://amshistorica.unibo.it/7 )

Meillet, Antoine. 1921[1915]. Le renouvellement des conjonctions. In: Meillet (1921), 159-174. (Original in Annuaire de l’École Pratique des Hautes Études, section historique et philologique 48.1: 9-28)

Meillet, Antoine, ed. 1921. Linguistique historique et linguistique générale. Paris: Champion. https://archive.org/details/linguistiquehist00meil

Meillet, Antoine. 1926. Compte-rendu: Ch. Bally — Le langage et la vie, seconde édition. Bulletin de la Société de linguistique de Paris 27.82: 14-16. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k32168z/f255.image

Plank, Frans. 1992. Language and Earth as Recycling Machines. In: Naumann, Bernd, Frans Plank, Gottfried Hofbauer, eds., Language and Earth: effective affinities between the emerging sciences of linguistics and geology, 221-269. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Schiller, Friedrich. 1960[1795]. Briefe über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen. Edited by Albert Reble. Bad Heilbrunn: Klinkhardt.

Whitney, William Dwight. 1875. The Life and Growth of Language. London: King & Co. https://archive.org/details/lifeandgrowthla01whitgoog

How to cite this post

McElvenny, James. 2016. The secret history of grammaticalization. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2016/04/28/the-secret-history-of-grammaticalization

Nick Riemer
University of Sydney & HTL, Université Paris-Diderot

Antonio Gramsci, a co-founder of the Italian Communist Party and one of the twentieth century’s most prominent intellectuals. Gramsci studied linguistics and wrote about linguistic topics throughout his life. ‘Study, because we’ll need all your intelligence’.

What connections might linguists’ professional activities have to politics? Most recently, the question has been posed by the collective self-dismissal of the Lingua board and the journal’s metamorphosis into the open-access Glossa – a welcome attempt to break the monopoly of profiteering multinationals over the dissemination of research. Initiatives like Glossa or Language Science Press are much-needed, and all too rare, instances of scholarly activism against the widespread ‘enclosure’ of knowledge characteristic of our age (Riemer forthcoming). As such, they are compatible with the ‘vague form of liberal progressiveness’ that Hutton (2001: 295) has identified as the ethos of contemporary linguistics. But how might other aspects of linguistics as an institution fit, or not, into this frame? What can we say about how linguistics might relate to characteristic progressive priorities like support for diversity, opposition to discrimination and domination, commitment to democracy, and to the overall political contexts in which efforts to advance those priorities are situated?

There’s been little shortage of critical discussion of linguistics’ ideological and political valencies, though it has often come from sources other than linguists themselves.[1] Linguists have, in fact, on the whole been strikingly reluctant to direct against their own discipline the kinds of critique that swept over the rest of the humanities in the final third of the last century. Linguistics’ scientistic pretensions act as a strong brake on any attempt even to think in critical terms about the epistemic status of the discipline’s results, let alone to explore the field’s wider political effects or determinants.[2]

Reflection on both, however, is important, in the interests of disciplinary self-awareness at least. Not just that, though: linguists who identify with the ‘vague form of liberal progressiveness’ mentioned by Hutton, or whose political sympathies lie further to the left, have an interest in thinking not just about how social and political factors influence linguistics, but also about how what they do as linguists might feed back into the societies to which they belong. Like other academic corporations, linguists probably mostly have a strong sense of their own distinctness. But we are nevertheless a part of the body politic, and our professional activities influence it in various ways.

Formatting human nature for the market

Ideological critique of linguistics, especially of ‘core’ domains like grammar, phonology, semantics and pragmatics, has often focussed on what we might call the discipline’s overwhelming individualistic rational universalism. This emerges clearly in the assumptions that students are encouraged to assimilate when they are instructed in the discipline’s basic concepts and procedures. If we had to detail these assumptions, we might come up with a list like this:

Assumptions about people

• individualism: as a cognitive or psychological faculty, language is understood to be, at base, an individual phenomenon;
• rationalism: speakers and hearers are to be understood as essentially rational agents (the emotional dimension of personhood, by contrast, unambiguously playing second fiddle);
• uniformity: the biological identity of the human species is reflected in the fundamental identity (commensurability) of human languages.

Assumptions about linguistics’ relation to language

• objectivity: there is a fact of the matter about the structure of language: a unique and unambiguous level of semantic content; a unique representation of syntactic and phonological structure; a unique information structure, and so on;
• reducibility: the diversity of observed utterances in any domain of linguistic phenomena are realizations of a much more restricted template (grammar, underlying forms, phonological structure, etc.), capturable in a unique analytical metalanguage, where cultural and cognitive diversity bottom out;
• formalizability: language can be described through formal (or quasi-formal) rule systems;
• transparency: this formalization is intuitive and shallow, since the theorist’s L1 can be used to express the rules assumed to underlie language without being enriched with an extensive apparatus of technical concepts. For example, the definitions of thematic roles and the protocols for subject-assignment that they participate in make reference to ordinary language terms like ‘move’, ‘action’, ‘place’, or ‘possession’; the definition of lexical aspectual classes are about commonsensical notions like ‘bounded’, ‘instantaneous’ and so on. Wierzbicka and Goddard’s Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach is a particularly obvious instance of this phenomenon. Not all theories are as averse as NSM to technicality – think Minimalism, or phonological theory. But the generalization holds for those domains of linguistics most prominent in standard undergraduate syllabuses – which, as I’ll explain in a moment, is the part that counts. As a wise linguist once commented to me, ‘Linguistics ain’t rocket science’.

Assumptions about the epistemic status of linguistics

• scientific authority of the discipline: as a result, linguistics is ‘scientific’ and linguists detain an intellectual authority that allows us to say what people are like insofar as their linguistic practices are concerned, without mastering technical competencies of anything like the degree of complexity necessary to the ‘hard sciences’.

Probably none of these principles would be accepted without qualification by all linguists – in particular, any linguists for whom language is an abstract object or system strictly independent of its psychological manifestations will reject the whole first category. Nevertheless, it seems to me the list as a whole fairly captures the essential mindset that the vast majority of students are encouraged to adopt in their early encounter with the discipline. (It’s this early encounter which is most relevant, since most students don’t hang around long enough to be exposed to the inevitable nuancing the ideas undergo later: if we want to explore the ideological effects of linguistics, we need to look at undergraduates, not PhD students.)

Why highlight these assumptions? Because many of them fulfil rather an obvious ideological function: they reinforce a model of personhood – a model of what people are like – particularly compatible with the requirements of contemporary ‘globalized’, capitalist economies. Just like the other ‘human sciences’ (see Riemer (2015) for more), linguistics contributes to one of universities’ most essential roles: ideologically ‘formatting’ students into the atomized, normalized, and rationalistic subjects that best match market norms.

Human nature as idealized by linguistic theory – individualized, intellectualist, rule-following and uniform – embodies the perfect participant in technocratic capitalist economies. If the predictable (i.e. rule-following), rational, conformist individuals presupposed in linguistic models of speaker-hearers really existed, they would be model consumers and employees:

Students who major in linguistics acquire valuable intellectual skills, such as analytical reasoning, critical thinking, argumentation, and clarity of expression. This means making insightful observations, formulating clear, testable hypotheses, generating predictions, making arguments and drawing conclusions, and communicating findings to a wider community. Linguistics majors are therefore well equipped for a variety of graduate-level and professional programs and careers.
(Linguistic Society of America, ‘Why major in Linguistics?’)

Given the attractiveness to graduates, if only for reasons of job-security, of careers in complex organizations (multinational and other businesses, government departments, media organizations, etc.), the similarity between the constrained, rule-based reasoning linguistics students are trained in and Weber’s principles of bureaucracy starts to look like not such an accident:

(1) All official actions are bound by rules with the official subject to strict and systematic control from above.
(2) Each functionary has a limited and defined sphere of competence.
(3) The organization of offices follows a principle of hierarchy with each lower one subordinate to each higher one.
(4) Candidates are selected only from the basis of technical qualification: ‘They are appointed, not elected’.
(5) Officials are salaried and have no right of ownership over their job: ‘The salary scale is graded according to rank in the hierarchy: but in addition to this criterion…the requirements’ of incumbents’ social status may be taken into account.’
(6) The office is the sole, or at least primary, occupation of the incumbent and it constitutes a career: ‘Promotion is dependent on the judgement of superiors’
(summary of Max Weber, Economic and Social Organization, quoted by Blackburn 1967: 177-8)

In advancing a procedural, rule-based approach to the complexity  of language use, Linguistics education normalizes a Taylorist conception of work. Through its psychologism (cognitivism), it suggests that language, a quintessentially social phenomenon, can be best understood as an individual one. This has a clear ideological utility, as Margaret Thatcher (‘there is no such thing as society’) would have understood. As Alex Callinicos observes, ‘it is at least arguable that social stability depends not on the subordinate classes’ belief in the legitimacy of the status quo but on a fragmentation of social consciousness which prevents them from developing a comprehensive perspective on society as a whole’ (1990: 116). By focussing attention inwards onto the linguistic ‘soul’, linguistics does just that. In impressing its ‘assumptions about people’ on students, it encourages them to internalize a model of personhood that fits the market economy like a glove.

Our language, our meanings: the only ones that exist

Title page to the 1660 Port Royal Grammar: General and reasoned grammar, containing the foundations of the art of speech, explained in a natural and clear manner; the reasons for what is common to all languages and the principal differences that are encountered; and several new remarks on French.

Linguistics’ assumptions about its own relation to language (the second category in the list) play a different role. Ideas about ‘reducibility’, ‘objectivity’ and ‘transparency’ confine languages within a centralizing and universalizing dynamic, the aim of which is to boil the diversity of a speech community’s linguistic practices down to a single template called a ‘grammar’ – and, frequently, then to claim that all languages can be understood with reference to a unique master-set of categories (Universal Grammar, ‘the basic blueprint that all languages follow’, to adopt the terms of Fromkin et al. 2010: 18). Language structure, including meaning, is presented as a unique, determinate object open to empirical methods aspiring to the (imagined) epistemology of the natural sciences.

It is in my own field, semantics – crucial to understanding other domains of structure – that the effect of these assumptions are clearest. Semantics is predicated on the belief that the linguist’s own L1 – English, French, Chinese – can serve as an adequate representational medium for the meanings of all languages.[3] In other words, if my semantic theory is mentalist, as most are, I can use an only minimally enriched version of my own native tongue to show what you, regardless of what language you speak, have in your head – both what you mean, and the conceptual operations on which this lies. And I can do so ‘scientifically’ – in such a way, that is, that people have to believe me. The linguistic imperialism of a world in which English is everywhere is replicated in the domain of linguistic theory. I am the authority over what is happening in your head.

This brings some uncomfortable consequences: even though ‘exotic’ languages may be configured differently from English (or French, or Chinese), nevertheless, at base, they can all be enclosed within English (or French, or Chinese, or whatever the ‘substratum’ is for the linguist’s theoretical metalanguage). Linguists’ mainly first-world L1s are not, then, languages just like any other, into which other speakers’ L1s can be translated in rough and ready, contextually variable ways for a variety of purposes. They are, instead, hegemonic master-codes in which fixed, context-independent, explanatory representations of exotic meaning can be given once and for all.

It is one thing to affirm, undeniably, the translatability and intercomprehensibility of different languages for a wide range of purposes and interactions. But it is quite another to assume that this reflects an underlying psychological (as opposed to neurological) identity and that a single language – most often English – can provide the explanatory metalanguage in which anyone’s meaning can be theoretically represented. From ‘explain’ and ‘represent’, it is only a small symbolic step to ‘possess’, ‘control’ or ‘dominate’:

Enlightenment stands in the same relationship to things as the dictator to human beings. He knows them to the extent that he can manipulate them. The man of science knows things to the extent that he can make them. Their “in-itself” becomes “for him.” In their transformation the essence of things is revealed as always the same, a substrate of domination. This identity constitutes the unity of nature.
(Horkheimer and Adorno 2002: 6)

It is, for the worldview encouraged by linguistic assumptions, more or less impossible that other people’s concepts might escape the representational capacities of our own linguistic categories. We can theoretically explain everything. Difference is abolished: our intellectual sovereignty knows no frontier. Our language, our meanings, the student learns, are, in a sense, the only ones that exist. The formulae of linguistic theory conjure into being a homogeneous and uniform world. Is it a coincidence that this is the world that offers the ideal market for mass-produced consumer goods and the perfect terra nullius for the West’s economic and cultural expansion? As Augustine (City of God, 19.7) put it: ‘the imperial city has endeavoured to impose on subject nations not only her yoke, but her language’. If linguistic results are representative, one could be excused for thinking that ‘globalization’ – the relentless spread of multinational capitalist ascendancy – is no more than manifest destiny.

Linguists don’t make good racists

No sooner is this kind of suggestion raised than it risks being indignantly denounced for its ‘absurdity’, ‘lack of balance’, ‘irresponsibility’ or similar heinous crimes. And it’s certainly true that many linguists, as Hutton has noted, are explicitly opposed to the kind of politics I’m claiming our discipline can tacitly support. But this in no way disqualifies my analysis: there would be no such thing as ideology if political intentions and beliefs corresponded perfectly to actions.

Another consideration that goes against the analysis I’ve been offering comes from the fact that the totalizing, imperialist subtext of linguist theory that I’ve claimed to detect is certainly not the only one that students will retain from their linguistic studies. The intellectual climate associated with linguistics is, for the most part, broadly progressive and, in particular, anti-chauvinist: ‘Looking more closely at languages, and in particular at languages that might seem exotic to us, can make us more tolerant’, one introduction (Gasser 2012) claims. The opposition to prescriptivism drummed into students from an early stage is the most concrete manifestation of this attitude. The discipline also encourages such values as curiosity, logical rigour, and problem-solving. While all of these are clearly prized by the reigning economic order, they may also be enlisted for counter-cultural, critical purposes. It’s certainly not to linguistics graduates that one looks, for instance, for the most likely candidates for blinkered racists. Surely, then, it’s arbitrary to single out the discipline’s putative negative effects, as I’ve been doing?

Objections like these are reasonable – in part. They don’t show that the ideological effects I’ve identified don’t exist, but they do suggest that they’re not the only ones at work. To answer them, and to properly appreciate linguistics’ role in producing the kinds of graduates modern states need, we have to concentrate on the form in which the list’s assumptions are presented to students. Here, a less ambiguous picture emerges.

From domination in theory to domination in practice?

A tree for the sentence ‘The beautiful girl from Brazil found syntax books in the library’. Source.

From the outset of their studies, students learn that language is to be approached in a highly systematizing and totalizing way. They are instructed in an essentially reductive and classificatory approach to human diversity that defines a single normative model of language (the ‘language faculty’, ‘linguistic universals’, ‘grammatical structure’ etc.) to which linguistic diversity is referred. The rules, generalizations, and categorizations that students learn to make throughout the discipline (and not just in its core subfields) all tend in a single direction: almost exclusively, intellectual effort is devoted to bringing complex facts under the scope of general rules, and to reducing the kaleidoscopic manifestations of language to the operations of a unique and singular structure.

Students in different parts of the discipline learn, for instance, that event predicates should universally be sorted into a handful of types (Vendler’s); that the basic unit of language is the sentence (utterance, turn, proposition – it doesn’t matter: the point is that there has to be a basic unit); that some sentences should be considered grammatical, others ungrammatical; that propositions are the base of meaning; that concise ‘conversational maxims’ or principles like them govern our social use of language; that ‘information’ observes a ‘topic-comment’ structure; that speech acts are constative or performative; that a limited palette of classifications can describe the interpersonal meanings conveyed by texts; that the multiplicity of words’ uses can be reduced to their unique ‘meaning’ or ‘meanings’ and that meaning itself is reducible to some set of ‘conceptual primitives’ – and so on.

Behind the diversity and complexity of human linguistic behaviour, there lies, students are encouraged to believe, a single underlying power – abstract linguistic ‘reason’, deriving from the constants of psychology, human nature, or the essential properties of the linguistic ‘system’ itself. Concepts like lexical aspectual categories and the others mentioned are not typically presented as partial, interpretative perspectives on linguistic facts, useful for some purposes and not for others. Instead, they are reified into the permanent essence of linguistic structure. Students are trained, and tested, in formal operations of reduction and analysis far more than in hermeneutic ones of interpretation or complexification. Linguistic diversity is presented as what is left over once winner-takes-all generalizations have swept up as many particulars as possible.[4] The diverse linguistic aspects of human life are presented as the rational products of underlying rule systems. To accomplish this, language is heavily idealized: except in a handful of domains, what is studied are ‘grammars’, ‘vocabularies’, ‘language families’ – imaginary, idealized constructs remote from the realities of situated linguistic ‘performance’.

Gelli’s Dialogue on the difficulty of ordering the [Florentine] language, published in 1551 as an appendage to Giambullari’s Language spoken and written in Florence. Source.

It is only because they have been idealized that languages admit the generalizations about them that students are taught to draw. Generalization and idealization are, of course, central to intellectual activity and could not somehow be disappeared from linguistics (or, for that matter, from any other kind of rational enquiry). But they can be conducted and presented to students in a number of different forms, of which the totalizing, universalizing form present in linguistics is just one. This particular mode of idealization would be perfectly fine – if it actually worked. Really worked. But that’s exactly the problem: despite the high inherent interest and intellectual richness of the analytical posits and theoretical categories I’ve mentioned, the discipline hasn’t been able to agree that any of them does actually do what it’s meant to. They are all, precisely, preliminary hypotheses about underlying structure, yet to be accepted by the entire community of linguists, and the objects of sometimes furious disagreement among them. They are, in addition, heavily dependent on the way in which performance data is idealized in the first place. Are the Berlin and Kay colour generalizations really true? What about the thematic hierarchy? Are simple noun phrases really always monotonic? Can interpretation really be reduced to a Q-principle and an R-principle? Is information always to be conceived of as either old (topic) or new (focus)? The answers depend on a multitude of little decisions about how you idealize and normalize a chaos of variable performance data into the imaginary constructs of a ‘language’ or a ‘grammar’. These are creative decisions informed by a host of considerations over which opinions can legitimately differ.[5] Elevating any one of them into the fact of the matter about language is unwarranted.[6]

The theoretical ‘results’ taught to linguistics students in their opening years of study do not command anywhere near the level of disciplinary consensus as the results taught to undergraduate science students. Yet, more often than not, linguistic theories are presented to beginning students as ‘scientific’ and hence as enjoying an authority that’s similar in kind to those of the natural sciences – not as great, certainly, but in the same league. Some linguists may hesitate to make that claim directly, but it is nonetheless always there in the background (just look at a random sample of departments’ ‘why study linguistics’ pages if you want to confirm this).

Students quickly learn, then, that linguistic experts can claim a ‘scientific’ authority for their own favourite candidate theory even in the absence of any disciplinary consensus. A student taught by Chomskyans will be taught the correctness of generativism and the folly of cognitive grammar. Cognitive linguists trade on the authority of science for their own entirely subjective analyses. Systemic-functional linguists likewise claim a uniqueness, necessity and objectivity for their own proposals. For all the live-and-let-live civility of most linguistics departments, the discipline often resembles a slowly churning snake-pit of competing academic ‘lobbies’ (I owe the expression to Rastier 1993: 155), each presenting its own way of understanding language as correct and, more often than not, uniquely so.

This competition is not just over immaterial, intellectual stakes. Since theories are the instruments of careers, they crucially concern the acquisition and exercise of institutional power, embodied in good marks for students and successful careers for academics. Education in linguistics comes to prefigure the clash of interests in society: students learn that they have to fight for their corner, and that they can deploy the full ideological power of claims of scientificity, reason, empirical responsibility, etc., to do so.

Politics, linguistics, or both?

Neither oversensitivity nor contrarianism

I’ve suggested that students are encouraged to generalize and theorize about the human world in a highly idealized way subject to only loose empirical controls, and strongly open to discretionary, preferential choices, while at the same time arrogating ‘scientific’ authority to this activity. The effect of this, it seems to me, is to accustom them, in the symbolic order, to the kinds of arbitrary domination that they will both perpetuate and endure through their position in society after graduation. Once ejected from university, students must be able to rationalize for themselves the varied forms of arbitrary domination and exploitation, along class, race, and ethnic lines, among others, that the economy entails. They will both enact and undergo the exploitation of the neoliberal economy, justified, in the face of all evidence, as the only possible horizon for the organization of human societies. Can we be sure that the ‘training’ they receive in linguistics, with all the properties I’ve described, dispensed at the very moment they are preparing to enter the labour market, does not play a role in normalizing this kind of unjustifiable domination? I think there’s a serious risk that the kinds of justification for the theorizing undertaken – or, rather, the licence to claim the authority of science for what are essentially discretionary and unoperationalized interpretations – prepare students for the arbitrary and unjustifiable experience of hegemony in society. I develop these ideas, with a focus on the humanities in general, in Riemer (forthcoming), cited earlier.

But, in the end, why worry about linguistics’ ideological feedback on society? Wouldn’t it be better for linguists who are concerned about politics to spend time doing direct political work (involvement with social movements, parties, campaign groups, etc.) rather than wasting it denouncing their discipline for effects like the ones discussed here – many of which, on my own admission, are highly contradictory, refracted and attenuated?

Quite aside from the fact that most linguists don’t have time to properly devote themselves to politics,[7] the answer, it seems to me, is no. If linguistics was a hard science – if, in other words, theorizing was governed by discipline-wide protocols that produced objectivity and consensus – then there would certainly be grounds for simply accepting whatever procedures enquiry demanded, regardless of their apparent ideological import. But that is not the case. For no linguistic subfield do we have a single best theory accepted across the discipline: we do not even have any agreement on how to define linguistics’ object of study. If I can be allowed some self-quotation, the conclusion I’ve reached elsewhere about semantics applies more generally:

As a human “science”, semantics concerns a sphere which is intrinsically bound up with the behaviour of autonomous creatures with their own pluralistic ways of being and understanding. In such a domain, it is not immediately clear that theoretical insight is best obtained by objectifying reduction, assimilating meaning to a unique object open to empirical methods deriving from the study of the objective world, instead of by pluralistic interpretation, assimilating the study of meaning to that of higher-level socio-cultural manifestations. Cultural anthropology, literary history and sociology – all three empirical disciplines which offer explanations, and not just descriptions, of their objects of study – do not aim to produce unique and reductive analyses of their explananda; it is no more obvious that semanticists should try to uniquely characterize the literal meaning of an expression, than it is that literary historians should try to uniquely pin down the single correct interpretation of a canonical text.
(Riemer 2016: 4)

We should resist the attempt to impose a single vision of language, meaning or human nature, when this vision is empirically contested, and, crucially, unoperationalized. We should also hesitate to accustom students to the instrumentalization of truth claims in the service of institutional power struggles. I’m not sure whether we should say that science is, all other things being equal, progressive – but it seems reasonably clear that scientism isn’t. Assuming, on very narrow grounds, that the diversity of human ‘languaging’ can be enclosed in the totalizing schemes of our models, and claiming the warrant of science for these schemes despite the absence of disciplinary consensus over them, don’t look to me like an intellectual trajectory likely to foster the ‘bond of peace’ that Augustine, immediately following the quotation given earlier, saw in linguistic uniformity.

These concerns have been growing on me over some years, as a result of the undergraduate teaching in semantics and pragmatics for which I am responsible. These are fields of enormous intellectual richness and interest – but I worry about the world-view that, in their traditional form, they can reinforce. Oversensitivity? Contrarianism? Inadequate trust in students’ discernment? I don’t think so. The world is not in a good way, either socially or environmentally. As people responsible for educationally preparing the next generation, we cannot think too deeply about what kind of societies we are helping, in our small way, to form.

Acknowledgements

I’m grateful to James McElvenny and Jacqueline Léon for having discussed these ideas with me, and to James McElvenny for his careful editorial suggestions. Neither should be assumed to agree with anything argued here.

Notes

[1] This is a blog-post, so I’m not going to document or reference any of these claims extensively or, often, at all. A more scholarly presentation of some of these ideas is currently in the works.

[2] Given this, it’s no surprise that many practising linguists really don’t like it when you try to call their models’ objectivity or scientificity into question. As attested by the scarcity of serious metatheoretical, foundational theorizing in linguistics, the discipline’s culture is strongly positivistic.

[3] It would take far more space than I have here to develop and justify this claim properly. Anyone interested should consult the first and last chapters of my (2005) for a general defence of the interpretative and therefore hermeneutic (non-objective) nature of semantics.

[4] It’s interesting to note from this angle how in typology ‘universals’ don’t have to be universal at all – they can be statistical. But linguistic diversity is still approached as a hunt for what is universal, and particulars are of interest only to the extent that they enrich more general schemes.

[5] For example, decisions about what counts as the ‘simplest’ theoretical model cannot be settled objectively – see Ludlow (1999).

[6] Compare the situation in the hard sciences. Here, the theoretical models taught to undergraduates can be deidealized in order to accomplish two key empirical goals: making accurate predictions about actual events, and producing machines that can effectively ‘work’ in the real world. The traditional theories of core linguistics allow them to do neither: since the utterances we produce bear only a tenuous resemblance to the normative structures which serve as the basis of linguistic theory, no one can yet deidealize linguistic models to show how they actually relate to observed linguistic behaviour. See Riemer (2009) for discussion relevant to syntax; in semantics, consider the simple fact that theories of meaning always depend at some point or another on a distinction between the literal and the metaphorical, but we have no idea of how such a distinction might properly be drawn. It’s true that, as James McElvenny comments, fields like speech recognition and synthesis, machine translation, and data mining represent applications of theoretical approaches to language. But these typically use empirical and often statistical models remote from the centre of either descriptive or theoretical work in the discipline. See for instance Jurafsky & Martin 2007 Speech and Language Processing: An introduction to natural language processing, computational linguistics, and speech recognition.

[7] I’d be keen to hear of exceptions beyond the obvious example of Chomsky. Geoffrey Sampson, for instance, has been a Conservative UK council member. And according to Ben Braithwaite, ‘Former Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago, Kamla Persad-Bissessar once worked as a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics and English at the UWI’s Mona campus in Jamaica, and President, Anthony Carmona was lecturer in the Department of Language and Linguistics in Trinidad and Tobago. Sir Colville Young, Governor-General of Belize, and Dame Pearlette Louisy, Governor-General of St Lucia, are trained linguists. Basically, if you want to be a world leader, do linguistics’ (https://languageblag.com/2016/03/06/why-study-linguistics/).

References

Blackburn, Robin. 1967. A brief guide to bourgeois ideology. In A. Cockburn and R. Blackburn (eds) Student Power. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Callinicos, Alex. 1990. Against Postmodernism. New York: St Martin’s Press.

Fromkin, Victoria, R. Rodman, N. Hyams. 2010. An Introduction to Language. 9ed. Wadsworth: Cengage Learning.

Gasser, Michael. 2012. How Language Works. The Cognitive Science of Linguistics. 3ed. http://www.indiana.edu/~hlw/index.html

Horkheimer, Max and Adorno, Theodor W. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Philosophical fragments. (Edmund Jephcott, tr.). Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Hutton, Christopher. 2001. Cultural and conceptual relativism, universalism and the politics of linguistics: dilemmas of a would-be progressive linguistics. In René Dirven, Bruce Hawkins, and Esra Sandikcioglu (eds.) Language and Ideology: Cognitive Theoretical Approaches. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 277-296.

Ludlow, Peter. 1998. Simplicity and Generative Grammar, in Stainton, R. and Murasugi, K. (eds.) Philosophy and Linguistics. Boulder: Westview Press.

Rastier, François. 1993. La sémantique cognitive: éléments d’histoire et d’épistémologie. Histoire Épistémologie Langage 15: 153–187.

Riemer, Nick. 2005. The Semantics of Polysemy. Reading Meaning in English and Warlpiri. Berlin: Mouton.

Riemer, Nick. 2009. Grammaticality as evidence and prediction in a Galilean linguistics. Language Sciences 31: 612–633. https://www.academia.edu/15577226/Grammaticality_as_evidence_and_as_prediction_in_a_Galilean_linguistics

Riemer, Nick. 2015. How to justify a crisis. Jacobin Magazine, October 5. https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/10/refugee-crisis-europe-zizek-habermas-singer-greece-syria-academia/

Riemer, Nick. 2016. Semantics – a theory in search of an object. In N. Riemer (ed.) The Routledge Handbook of Semantics. Abingdon: Routledge, 1–10. https://www.academia.edu/15576800/Introduction_Semantics_a_theory_in_search_of_an_object._In_Nick_Riemer_ed._The_Routledge_handbook_of_Semantics_Abingdon_Routledge_2015_

Riemer, Nick. Forthcoming. Academics, the humanities and the enclosure of knowledge: the worm in the fruit. Australian Universities’ Review 2016. https://www.academia.edu/17869935/Academics_the_humanities_and_the_enclosure_of_knowledge_the_worm_in_the_fruit

How to cite this post

Riemer, Nick. 2016. Diversity, linguistics and domination: how linguistic theory can feed a kind of politics most linguists would oppose. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2016/05/11/diversity-linguistics-and-domination-how-linguistic-theory-can-feed-a-kind-of-politics-most-linguists-would-oppose

A.W. Carus
Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, LMU, Munich

The question how language, a sequence of events in spacetime, can have meaning — which seems not to be in spacetime — has puzzled philosophers since antiquity, though it only came to dominate philosophy explicitly over a century or so of wide-ranging developments that culminated, provisionally, in the work of the later Wittgenstein. Philosophers continue to discuss these questions, and to read Wittgenstein, but they also seem largely unaware that their central questions about the nature and possibility of meaning, which they approach in the abstract, as conceptual questions, have also become a thriving subject of empirical research. This post briefly explores some consequences of this new research for philosophical questions about meaning.

One relevant context for such questions has always been the puzzle of how to coordinate two aspects of language, its subjective or cultural aspect (“meaning” in the sense of what a sentence, or any other object or action, “means to me”) and its computational aspect (“meaning” in the sense of generative linguistics or in the sense of a computer program, in which a syntactic structure built up from atomic components is endowed – or not – with an analogously compositional semantics). The subjective aspect is inherently more salient with respect to natural languages, while the computational aspect is more in the foreground where constructed languages are concerned, especially axiomatically constructed (or otherwise clearly defined) languages of mathematics or computation. What they gain in precision, though, such languages sacrifice in rhetorical power and suggestiveness; there would appear to be a trade-off between the cultural and the computational aspects of language. However, while this Janus-faced property of language has been apparent to all major theorists of language from Locke to Frege and Saussure, their interest in language has usually focussed mainly on only one of the two aspects at the expense of the other, and theories of the coordination between these two aspects have remained quite superficial. The few attempts at bringing these aspects into some sort of relation to each other have usually tried to reduce one of them to the other. The later Wittgenstein (followed in this respect by ordinary language philosophers) tried to bring logic and constructed languages more generally within the scope of social practices and the natural languages mediating them, while Chomsky tried to bring ordinary language within the scope of the combinatorial.

The empirical research of recent decades on these subjects has mostly avoided this kind of reductionism. It does usually focus on only one of these aspects or kinds of language — naturally enough, because you have to start somewhere, and where you start generally influences which kinds or aspects of language you consider. But there is on the whole, in most of this research, a recognition that both aspects (and both kinds of language) exist, but there is little explicit discussion of the relation between them.

I will focus here on only one research project from each of the two sides, one concerned with ordinary language and one concerned with more artificial constructed languages: N.J. Enfield’s (2015) investigations about how meaning is arrived at in the ordinary languages spoken in Laos, and Edwin Hutchins’s (1995) well-known work on the context in which constructed languages are employed in the navigation of large ships. Neither of these approaches is reductionistic in the sense that it regards one or the other of the two kinds or aspects of language as fundamental, or that it regards one as parasitic on the other. But nor does either really pay attention to the aspect it is not mainly focussing on. Each of these two approaches sees the emergence of meaning in the kind of language it studies as traceable to the utility of the respective language system to the society in which that system is used. Each has an account of how the linguistic subsystem it studies is embedded in an overall social system that maintains it. Also, each has an account of the subjectivity of each participant individual’s perspective within the social network that nonetheless gives rise to objective meaning.

However, they focus on very different scales of linguistic activity, so there are some obvious surface differences between them. Enfield (2015) looks closely at how particular words function in specific practical situations. He shows how the minimization of effort (on the model of Gigerenzer’s “fast and frugal” heuristics) leads individuals to widely different hypotheses about word meaning, but as these are confronted with evidence of actual use in the course of language learning and everyday practical interaction, public word significations converge and become sufficiently precise for purposes of ordinary communication. Utility of a word for this interpersonal communicative purpose, he argues, not the utility of its referent for any other practical or social purpose, is what underpins a word’s meaning and keeps it in circulation. The utility that motivates meaning is that of the signifier, not of the signified.

Hutchins (1995), meanwhile, is more concerned to show that the practice of navigation is a widely distributed expertise, not localizeable in any particular individual brain but requiring the coordination of many individuals of different specific expertise, transmitted by apprenticeship, within the framework of various languages in which concepts directly relevant to navigation are encoded. The picture is a Vygotskian one, of a widely distributed social software being installed, via a learning process of active assimilation, in the individual hardware (with machine code) of those who participate in it. There is room in this picture for both of the kinds of language we’ve been discussing, ordinary natural languages and constructed languages, but the relation between them is not specifically probed. Natural languages serve as the social interface for everyday communication while the navigation-specific concepts employed by (or in the background of) navigational practice are encoded in constructed languages, but these are not specifically discussed in their relation to the natural language in which they are mediated to their practitioner-users, and in which the concepts are embedded in the social interactions surrounding their practical application.

So while there are certain analogies between Enfield’s and Hutchins’s empirically detailed pictures of language and the basis of meaning, there is still a gap between the characterization of meaning in ordinary languages and the characterization of meaning in constructed languages. Even in Hutchins himself there is more or less that same gap between his characterizations of natural language and constructed language. But in Hutchins there is also a level of explanation that is missing in Enfield, perhaps because Enfield’s attention is devoted almost exclusively to the basis of meaning in ordinary language. For Enfield, the emergence of meaning proceeds directly from individual utilities to social outcomes, as in economic or other rational-choice models, with no intermediate levels of explanation. For Hutchins’s Vygotskian account, in contrast, social practices play an essential role, at an explanatory level between that of individual rationality (e.g. effort minimization in the generation of hypotheses about meaning) and social outcomes (e.g. convergence of word meanings to a sufficient degree of precision for successful interpersonal communication).

I would suggest that, to bridge this gap, it could make sense to think of evolved natural languages and constructed natural languages as two different kinds of system, between which, however, one could recognize a continuum of intermediate gradations. Instead of considering evolved and constructed languages categorically, then, one could think in terms of degrees of constructedness.

This is perhaps easiest to discuss from Enfield’s perspective, which emphasizes utility more explicitly and systematically. One can concede everything he says about natural languages (the subjectivity of the individual perspective, and also the mechanism of convergence on relatively clear meanings when these are useful from a social actor’s viewpoint) — but still note that he leaves out an important class of utilities: those that involve the creation, i.e. rule-evolution, of a new artificial language for a particular common purpose among a subgroup. We don’t know much about the early beginnings of such more constructed languages. Perhaps the earliest tendencies toward such artificial language manifested themselves in the practice of the law, which evolved over millenia. Much more sudden and epoch-making (though not at the time of much worldly significance) was the invention of geometry and the discovery of mathematical proof (Netz 1999). Also known in antiquity were accounting systems and (in various antiquities around the world, as Hutchins explains at length) systems of navigation. If we put ordinary language at one endpoint, and geometry at the other, then on a scale of constructedness of languages available in western antiquity the languages of law, navigation, and accounting would be in between those two endpoints, perhaps in that order.

Enfield’s account of convergence, which works brilliantly for natural languages, is less convincing for more artificial systems. It seems (though this obviously would require a broad program of detailed empirical exploration to investigate) that such systems require actual enforcement of some kind. Enfield too invokes enforcement, but makes a persuasive case that in the convergence of natural-language meanings, the enforcement is almost entirely self-enforcement, guaranteed by a convergence of interests, since language users have a common interest in conforming to established word usage to make their participation in society possible. On a larger scale than particular words, there is an analogous convergence; however widely human phenotypes differ along countless dimensions (and however divergent their subjectivities), they also recognize a common interest in a framework of communication, and will therefore tend to defer to equilibria that maximize its communicative efficiency (Enfield does not explicitly invoke optimality theory, but is is clearly in the background of his account).

There is no such automatic or self-propelled convergence in the case of specialized minority preoccupations such as physics or accounting. In such cases, a highly technical and refined system of intermediation lies at the heart of the enterprise, and acculturation to that particular system is essential for anyone to make a contribution to the discussion that other subgroup-participants can recognize as such. Therefore, enforcement in such cases is much more explicit, and is not spontaneous; it is entrusted to organizations that specialize in the enforcement of subgroup norms on new recruits (Campbell 1979, 1986), and their ejection from their apprenticeship when these norms are not respected and the use of the discipline’s terms is not well internalized. (This is all plain from Hutchins’ account of navigation as well, but he doesn’t stress this enforcement dimension, which would actually reinforce his picture.)

It may be hypothesized that degree of constructedness corresponds directly to, and results from, the degree of enforcement. This would be an empirical hypothesis — and in fact one of the motivations for introducing the terminology of constructedness is to make it possible to ask and address such empirical questions.

We can now also, in these terms of constructedness, express the trade-off between the kinds of expressive power available to evolved and constructed languages a little more precisely. For the two endpoints of the scale of constructedness correspond also to two different modes of communicative behavior, between which there are many gradations. Borrowing a term from Malinowski (1923), we can label the behavior corresponding to the less constructed end “phatic” communication, while at the more constructed end we have “literal” communication. Phatic communication need not even use language as a vehicle, though it often does. When it does, the literal, computational aspect of the language is far in the background; the burden of the intended communication is carried by an affective dramatization of which the words are a subordinate, almost arbitrary, part. The speaker may be using words, but the purpose is not to convey literal semantic meaning; it is to threaten, for instance, or to ingratiate, or flirt. Language certainly has “meaning,” in phatic communication, but the meaning is not the literal, semantic content of the speech, it is the meaning conveyed by the overall performance of which speech is a subordinate part. The words hardly matter.

Most language use, most of the time, is undoubtedly phatic. Certainly this is true in ordinary language; more constructed languages would appear to leave less leeway for phatic employment; presumably the more constructed, the less phatic. In ordinary language, though, the phatic and the literal components of language are subjectively co-present, much of the time, and inherently difficult to distinguish. Phenomenologically, the literal and phatic dimensions, together with all the affective associations and other connotations of words and usages, blend seamlessly together into a familiar toolkit of das Zuhandene used to negotiate one’s physical and social surroundings. This is the “user interface” of language, this is how it comes across to its speakers and listeners. This cultural front end acts as a user interface for the (largely) self-enforcing syntactic and computational system of literal meaning-conveyance. How do these components interact? From an evolutionary viewpoint, the cultural, subjective component was there first (Donald 1991, Burling 2005, Tomasello 1999), but does that make the literal, computational part a “mere superstructure” of the cultural part? Or is the computational part autonomous to some degree? These are fundamental questions — not to be addressed here! — and again, one of the motivations of suggesting that we talk in terms of degrees of constructedness is to make it possible to ask them. Without such an apparatus, and the associated complications concerning enforcement, an answer is presupposed, and the question can’t be asked.

The reconsideration of these two perennial aspects of language in terms of constructedness also, finally, yields an empirical (or empirically tractable) restatement of a widely discussed philosophical problem — the question whether constructed languages are “parasitic” on evolved languages, which lay at the root of the differences between ordinary-language philosophers and more formally inclined analytic philosophers (Strawson 1963), and is also at the bottom of (part of) the notorious debate between Quine and Carnap about analyticity. In natural languages, there is (as Quine argued convincingly) no possible behavioral criterion of analyticity; definitions are attempts to give loose guidelines to current (or past) actual use. But in constructed languages (as Carnap responded), definitions can be strict, and more or less precise — think, for instance, of the defined terms in any legal contract, which in the rest of the contract simply mean what they are there defined to mean; no court would think of questioning such definitions unless they are unclear or contradictory.

One remaining question concerns the utility of constructed languages. In Enfield’s very appropriate starting point, the utility in question (that gives rise to converging sharpness of meaning) is the utility to all participants, i.e. all users of the language in question. There are individual differences in utility functions, but the convergences of word meanings are on core functions that are of use to the language-user population more or less as a whole, with no subgroup differences. But as societies get more complex, specialized subgroups crystallize out who perform functions needed or desired in (some or all parts of) the society outside the subgroup itself, and nothing in Enfield’s utility model would appear to prevent it being applied (modulo some attention to the different forms of enforcement involved) to these situations of increasing complexity.

In those cases, an equilibrium results (and can sometimes be sustained for long periods) in which the subgroup provides sufficient perceived benefits to (at least some members of) the wider society that the enforcement of its constructed language and other institutional components of its subculture (sub-form-of-life) are left to an organized elite of the subgroup. This creates a permanent tension pervasive in modern societies: the subgroup is privileged in certain ways (e.g. is compensated well) for tasks that are at best imperfectly understood by the wider society since a full understanding would require acculturation into the subgroup.

References

Burling, R. (2005) The Talking Ape: How Language Evolved (Oxford).

Campbell, D.T. (1979) “A Tribal Model of the Social System Vehicle Carrying Scientific Knowledge” Knowledge: Creation, Diffusion, Utilization 1, repr. in Campbell 1988.

Campbell, D.T. (1986) “Science’s Social System of Validity-Enhancing Collective Belief Change and the Problems of the Social Sciences” in D.W. Fiske and R.A. Schweder, eds. Metatheory in Social Science: Pluralisms and Subjectivities (Chicago), repr. in Campbell 1988.

Campbell, D.T. (1988) Methodology and Epistemology for Social Science: Selected Papers (Chicago).

Enfield, N.J. (2015) The Utility of Meaning: What Words Mean and Why (Oxford).

Donald, M. (1991) Origins of the Modern Mind: Three Stages in the Evolution of Culture and Cognition (Cambridge, MA).

Hutchins, E. (1995) Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge, MA).

Malinowski, B. (1923) “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages” in C.K. Ogden and I.A. Richards The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of the Influence of Language upon Thought and of the Science of Symbolism (London), Supplement I, pp. 296-336.

Netz, R. (1999) The Shaping of Deduction in Greek Mathematics: A Study in Cognitive History (Cambridge).

Strawson, P.F. (1963) “Carnap’s Views on Constructed Systems versus Natural Languages in Analytic Philosophy” in P. Schilpp, ed. The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap (LaSalle, IL), pp. 503-18.

Tomasello, M. (1999) The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (Cambridge, MA).

How to cite this post

Carus, A.W. 2016. The utility of constructed languages. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2016/06/22/the-utility-of-constructed-languages/

Darío Rojas
University of Chile

Library of the Instituto de Chile. Source

In the present entry, I will make an initial case for the thesis that the Academia Chilena de la Lengua (Chilean Academy of the Spanish Language, from this point forward “Chilean Academy”), founded in 1885, has as its precursor a discourse community which, from the beginnings of the second half of the 19th century, interacted by means of various types of metalinguistic discourses (primarily dictionaries). Through these discourses, the members of this discourse community reproduced and transmitted a historically contextualized version of the standard language ideology (Milroy & Milroy 1999) applied to the Spanish language. This ideology developed naturally amid the political processes of constructing the nation-state of Chile, initiated in the first half of the century.

Historical context

The Spanish language was an element of primary importance in the construction of the Chilean nation-state. This can be seen, of course, on a practical level (language planning activities designed to satisfy certain political needs; see Arnoux & Del Valle 2013: 128), but also and above all on a symbolic level, that is, the construction of certain social representations, through metalinguistic reflection, of what is considered legitimate. In other words, “the political in language” (Del Valle 2014) is starkly revealed in 19^th century Chile. It should be taken into account that in Latin America “during the 19^th century there was little division between the work of intellectuals and the work of politicians” (Jaksić & Posada Carbó 2011: 35). The development of “scientific” and professionalized linguistics, already consolidated in Europe from the beginning of the century, would not have repercussions in Chile until almost the beginning of the following century, such that it was commonplace that those who dedicated themselves to matters of linguistics during this time were politicians, lawyers, or priests. Perhaps the best illustration of the connection between language and politics in this context corresponds to the linguistic work of the Venezuelan Andrés Bello (Arnoux 2008; Jaksić 1999), who became one of the principal architects of the nation-state’s institutional structures following his arrival in Chile in 1829.

In this context, an important aspect of the manifestations of language politics corresponds to the institutionalization of the state’s and the governing elite’s interventions in linguistic matters. Some aspects of this process include the creation of the Spanish language course in the Chilean educational system in 1893 which replaced the Latin course, or the creation of the Philology and Modern Languages lectures in the Pedagogical Institute of the University of Chile in 1889 (Poblete 2003). Another such example, is, of course, the establishment of the Chilean Academy in 1885, whose general aspects I will summarize below.

The Establishment of the Chilean Academy

The establishment of the Chilean Academy (under the name Academia Chilena correspondiente de la Española) can largely be considered a direct result of the Royal Spanish Academy’s efforts to establish an international network of subsidiary or “associated” academies (academias correspondientes) which would operate accoridng to the same logic and language-ideological practices as itself, and which would allow the Spanish Academy to preserve “the right to manage the language within an institutional framework controlled by the Spanish corporation” (Arnoux & Del Valle 2013: 133).

The initiative to create subsidiary academies began in 1870 and had its first successes in Colombia (1871), Ecuador (1874), México (1875), El Salvador (1876) and Venezuela (1883). The official justification for their establishment was to strengthen the unity of the Spanish language, which was one of the primary elements of the “national” Hispanic spirit, understood as the basis for a supranational community: the hispanidad or hispanofonía. Up to the present day, in the official historical accounts of the academies, it can be appreciated that the Spanish Academy itself considers this initiative to be one of its greatest successes and contributions to Hispanic culture, in addition to being a precursor to modern pan-Hispanic language policy (García de la Concha 2014: 218-226).

In the Chilean Academy’s official historical accounts (Amunátegui Reyes 1937; Amunátegui Reyes 1943; Araneda 1976), the authors also coincide in highlighting the Spanish Academy’s initiative as a first milestone in the Chilean Academy’s eventual establishment. This is especially evident in Amunátegui Reyes’ account (director of the institution at the time the account was written), in which he writes: “if, when describing the life of an illustrious person, it is customary to recall who his parents were, I do not esteem it out of place, in writing the history of the Chilean Academy’s establishment, to recall some historical information regarding the distinguished Spanish corporation which created our own” (1937: 1), and then goes on to dedicate six pages to the topic (“Origin, development, and importance of the Spanish Academy”).

In the creation of the Chilean chapter, the Colombian José María Samper played a fundamental role. In 1885, Samper penned a letter to his Chilean friend Miguel Luis Amunátegui Aldunate, urging him to found a subsidiary academy in Chile together with other Chilean associate members (miembros correspondientes) of the Spanish Academy. The suggestion quickly bore fruit. The inaugural session of the Chilean Academy took place on the 5^th of June, 1885, and on November 12^th of the same year, the Spanish Academy granted its authorization for the official installation of the Chilean corporation. Nevertheless, the political occurrences that resulted in the Chilean Civil War of 1891 caused an abrupt and lengthy pause in the Chilean Academy’s activities, which were only to be resumed in 1914, the year of its “re-establishment.” An external agent once again played an important role in this event: the renowned Spanish philologist and historian Ramón Menéndez Pidal, member of the Spanish Academy and future director of the corporation in Madrid. It is worth mentioning that this long pause in no way signified a transformation of the intellectual spirit and political-linguistic agenda of the Chilean Academy, which continued to faithfully comply with its role as an affiliate of its Spanish “mother.”

I believe that the profound success of the Spanish Academy’s initiative in Chile cannot be fully understood without considering the “climate of opinion” in Chile prior to 1885 regarding the language, which was indeed compatible with the vision and thought of the Spanish institution. It thus seems to me important to investigate what occurred in the period prior to the Chilean Academy’s founding, its pre-institutional historical antecedents. Araneda (1976: 9-11) has mentioned various initiatives to create similar institutions beginning in 1811, but I do not refer to this kind of antecedent; rather, what I wish to highlight is that an institution like the Chilean Academy can have a discourse community as its antecedent, a sort of pre- (or para-) institutional antecedent, which is what I will attempt to demonstrate in the following sections. As may be obvious, this idea is inspired by Del Valle’s (2007) interpretation of the present-day discursive activity of the Royal Spanish Academy.

Discourse Community and the Spanish language in 19^th century Chile

I understand the concept of discourse community in the sense of John Swales (1990) and as it has been applied by Richard J. Watts (2008) in the case of the British grammarians of the 18^th century. Watts understands this concept as denoting “a set of individuals who can be interpreted as constituting a community on the basis of the ways in which their oral or written discourse practices reveal common interests, goals and beliefs”, and that “might be defined as an embryonic institution” (Watts 2008: 41). Watts highlights that, in contrast to communities of practice, discourse communities do not necessarily require geographic and temporal coexistence among its members, as their primary mode of interaction is precisely through discourses, which transcend time and space.

In the specific case which I am dealing with here, the discourse community is made up of a series of intellectuals of the Chilean, Spanish-speaking elite who published metalinguistic works with a normative purpose beginning in the decade of the 1830s. Andrés Bello can be considered to be one of the first participants in this community. I wish to highlight that I am not proposing that this discourse community ceased to exist with the Chilean Academy’s founding in 1885; rather, beginning at that time the two entities experienced significant overlap and interaction. Despite their close relationship, it can be demonstrated that the discourse community and the Academy did not completely coincide, as there were cases in which the participants in the community were not part of the process of institutionalization (because they died prior to this date, as did Bello, or for other reasons).

Zorobabel Rodríguez. Source

I do not, on this occasion, have the space necessary to analyze in detail the discourses produced by the multitude of individuals who could be considered part of this community. In lieu of this analysis, I allow myself to refer the reader to previous studies in which my colleagues and I have analyzed some of these cases corresponding to the second half of the 19^th century (Avilés & Rojas 2014; Bustos, Valladares & Rojas 2015; Geraghty 2016; Rojas 2014, 2015a, 2015b; Rojas & Avilés 2015). Here, I will limit myself to illustrating the “spirit of the group” with a prototypical case, as is the lawyer, journalist, writer, and Member of Parliament Zorobabel Rodríguez (1839-1901), a militant member of the Chilean Conservative Party.

In 1875 (a decade before the Academy’s founding) Rodríguez published his only linguistic work: the Diccionario de chilenismos, a text with a normative purpose and pedagogic aim. In it, he comments on close to 1100 words and expressions, above all referring to their normative status (which is to say, whether or not they correspond to “correct” use). In 1883, Rodríguez was named associate member of the Royal Spanish Academy, for which reason he is numbered among the founding members of the Chilean Academy. In fact, he was named Permanent Secretary of the first board of directors.

I will now highlight some key aspects of Rodríguez’ metalinguistic discourses, which indicate the existence of the discourse community in question. Firstly, that Rodríguez’ work was a dictionary provides a good example of the community’s preferred mechanism of discursive interaction: the lexicographical genre. Nevertheless, it should not be thought that these works constituted “dictionaries” as we know them today; rather, each article corresponded to a monograph, which could extend from a couple lines to more than one page, in which the author commented on issues of a diverse nature (both linguistic and encyclopedic). These monographs were headed by a lemma which indicated the topic of the commentary, and which allowed them to be ordered alphabetically, facilitating their consultation. This textual mechanism is explained, of course, by the didactic aim which the author attributed to his work.

The lexicographical genre was also chosen by the Salesian priest Camilo Ortúzar for his Diccionario manual de locuciones viciosas (1893), and by future members of the Chilean Academy, such as the historian and politician Miguel Luis Amunátegui Aldunate (Apuntaciones lexicográficas, 1886), the Catholic priest Manuel Antonio Román (Diccionario de chilenismos, 1905-1918), and the lawyer and politician Aníbal Echeverría y Reyes (Voces usadas en Chile, 1900). Valentín Gormaz’ Correcciones lexigráficas sobre la lengua castellana en Chile (1860) can also be considered to be of this genre, as well as the work’s critical commentaries written by Andrés Bello (cf. Rojas 2015b). In 1866, Ramón Sotomayor Valdés (also a founding member of the Chilean Academy) indicated that the dictionary was an ideal tool for the standardization of language in Hispanic America (cf. Rojas 2014).

Secondly, the members of this community shared a set of goals regarding the Spanish language, among which the preservation of language unity and the perfection of linguistic education in the country stand out. The issue of language unity was, in reality, one of the principal concerns of the majority of Hispanic American intellectuals throughout the century and in the various countries. This topic appears already in the prologue of Andrés Bello’s Gramática de la lengua castellana (published in 1847) and would become the cause of many famous debates such as the one which took place between the Colombian philologist Rufino José Cuervo and the Spanish writer Juan Valera (cf. Del Valle 2002). This concern was, of course, ultimately a political issue: Bello indicates that a break in linguistic unity could hamper “the spread of enlightenment, the execution of laws, the administration of the State, and national unity” ([1847] 1997: 102). The same attitude of alarm (with some nuances) can be seen in various figures from the second half of the 19^th century who would later become members of the Chilean Academy, such as Ramón Sotomayor Valdés, Adolfo Valderrama, Miguel L. Amunátegui Aldunate, Miguel L. Amunátegui Reyes, Aníbal Echeverría y Reyes, and Manuel A. Román (cf. Flores 2016, for a general overview of this topic).

One of the strategies that could slow or stop the linguistic fragmentation of America would consist of the dissemination of a standard norm through the school system, a system whose implementation held an important place in the construction of the Chilean state (Serrano 2010). This explains why the primary space for the circulation of normative discourses was the teaching of the mother tongue at the institutional level. In this way, the homogenization of linguistic practices would have the greatest possible resonance. In various passages of his work, Zorobabel Rodríguez highlights the educational aims which motivated its writing. He indicates the linguistic “incorrectness” of the Chileans is primarily due to the “great void that exists in the instruction of Spanish grammar […] or in the methods or in the texts with which it is taught” (Rodríguez 1875: 7). It is precisely to filling this void that Rodríguez hopes to contribute with his dictionary. Linguistic education, of course, went hand-in-hand with the preservation of the unity of the language.

Finally, the discourse community of which Rodriguez forms part shares a series of beliefs about what the Spanish language ought to be, which determine the characteristics of the standard that would guarantee linguistic unity. (For a detailed analysis of Rodríguez’ normative linguistic beliefs, see Avilés & Rojas 2014.) One of the principles of this norm is that it should fundamentally be based on the speech of educated people. This idea, which harks back to Quintilian’s principle of consensus eruditorum, was disseminated in Chile, first by Andrés Bello for whom the linguistic model should be “the universal and authentic usage of educated persons” ([1847] 1997: 102). Rodríguez, for his part, expresses a generally negative attitude toward the language use of the uneducated (el vulgo, the masses), and he clearly indicates such use as a type of antimodel of language conduct. There are even passages in Rodríguez’ work in which the exaltation of the speech of the educated and cultured class appears explicitly: “viejísimo is how it ought to be said, for having been thus established by the use of learned men, which is the arbiter of language” (Rodríguez 1875: 476). The same sentiment can be appreciated in Aníbal Echeverría y Reyes, for whom “the masses will never be able to define the language” (1900: xv), or in Camilo Ortúzar, who attributes to the speech of the learned and educated the condition of being “lord and master in matters of language” (1893: xix; cf. Geraghty 2016: 37).

Another fundamental belief is that the standard corresponded to the codifications of the Royal Spanish Academy, especially the Diccionario de la lengua castellana. The language codexes of the Spanish Academy were considered by these authors as an objective incarnation of the ideal model of language, thus giving the Spanish corporation an almost indisputable authority with regards to determining correct and incorrect language use. In principle – that is, if the word had no other merits – a word which did not appear in the dictionary of the Spanish Academy did not form part of the standard. Normally, this belief would be intermixed with another: that the standard should follow the patterns of the metropolitan Castilian dialect, which reveals the relative preservation of the symbolic hierarchical relationships of the colonial era. Accordingly, both of these beliefs are seen in Rodríguez, for example when he indicates that “from mordaza should be formed enmordazar, which is what is said in Spain and what is dictated by the [Spanish] Academy’s Dictionary” (Rodríguez 1875: 27). The ideas indicated above (among others) can be seen reiterated with very few nuances in the works of the other members of this discourse community.

Conclusion

Verifying the presence of the three characteristics explained above (preference for a determined discourse genre for the circulation of knowledge within the group, existence of common goals and ideals, presence of beliefs constitutive of an ideology shared by the group) allows me to sustain that this group of Chilean, Spanish-speaking intellectuals forms a discourse community. It is also possible to demonstrate (although it has not been demonstrated here) the presence of other defining characteristics of this type of community, indicated by Swales. One of these is the existence of mechanisms of intercommunication among its members, which is directly related to the lexicographical genre. The reparos, or dictionaries’ critical commentaries, clearly show the exchanges and debates which took place between these individuals (see Rojas & Avilés 2012 and 2015, for examples related to Echeverría y Reyes and Rodríguez, respectively). Another such characteristic is shared terminology, which in this case corresponds to a series of evaluative words applied to linguistic conduct (correcto/incorrecto ‘correct/incorrect’, casticidad ‘purity’, corrupción ‘corruption’), along with metaphorical expressions which project political and moral spheres over the domain of language use (cf. Geraghty 2016 for the example of Camilo Ortúzar).

This discourse community shaped and strengthened a climate of opinion based on standard language ideology which existed in various parts of Latin America during the 19^th century. It seems to me that it is this intellectual climate which then facilitates the institutionalization of this community in the form of the Chilean Academy. We can speak, then, of a type of intellectual “infrastructure” which appeared in Chile during this century, and which the Spanish Academy took advantage of and co-opted toward the end of the century in support of its efforts to create a network of affiliated member corporations; that is to say, the Spanish initiative enters into a synergistic relationship with the language-ideological infrastructure of the Chilean intelligentsia.

The Chilean institution, above all after its “resurrection” in 1914, continued reproducing, in its essential elements, the vision and thought described above, without replacing the discourse community, but rather superimposing itself upon it. Bear in mind that the almost quarter century pause in the Chilean Academy’s activities (between c. 1890 and 1914) has as its counterpart the discourse community which remained very active during those years; that is to say, the Academy persisted in a latent state during this period. On the other hand, by the time the year 1914 arrived, another important (and in terms of underlying ideas, to a certain extent divergent) institutionalization had occurred: the “scientification” of the study of language at the University of Chile, primarily through the influence of Rudolf Lenz and Friedrich Hanssen, a process which occurred in the final decade of the 19^th century. The interrelation, conflict, or lack thereof between the two processes will have to be the topic of another study.

Notes

This research was financially supported by the research grant FONDECYT-Regular 1150127, CONICYT (Chile), and by the Concurso de Pasantías de Investigación 2013, Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities, University of Chile. I especially thank Megan Geraghty for providing the English translation of the original version of this text. We provide English translations for all Spanish quotations.

References

Amunátegui Reyes, M. L. 1937. La Academia Chilena en el cincuentenario de su fundación. Santiago (Chile): Imprenta Jeneral Díaz.

Amunátegui Reyes, M. L. 1943. La Real Academia Española y sus relaciones con sus hijas de América. Santiago (Chile): Imprenta de la Dirección General de Prisiones.

Araneda, F. 1976. La Academia Chilena correspondiente de la Real Española e integrante del Instituto de Chile. Santiago (Chile): Editorial Universitaria.

Arnoux, E. Narvaja de. 2008. Los discursos sobre la nación y el lenguaje en la formación del Estado (Chile, 1842-1862). Estudio glotopolítico. Buenos Aires: Santiago Arcos.

Arnoux, E. Narvaja de, & Del Valle, J. 2013. Introduction to the making of Spanish: Latin American and Transatlantic perspectives. In: J. del Valle (ed.), A Political History of Spanish. The construction of a language, 125-134. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Avilés, T., & Rojas, D. 2014. Argumentación y estandarización lingüística: creencias normativas en el Diccionario de chilenismos (1875) de Zorobabel Rodríguez. Revista Signos. Estudios de Lingüística 85: 142-163.

Bello, A. [1847] 1997. Prologue: Grammar of the Spanish language. In: Selected writings of Andrés Bello, 96-103. Translated from Spanish by Frances M. López-Morillas. Edited, with an Introduction and Notes by Iván Jaksić. New York: Oxford University Press.

Bustos, T.; Valladares, J. C.; & Rojas, D. 2015. José Ramón Saavedra y Adolfo Valderrama: lengua y educación en el Chile del siglo XIX. Universum 30(1): 39-53.

Del Valle, J. 2002. Historical linguistics and cultural history. The polemic between Rufino José Cuervo and Juan Valera. In: J. del Valle & L. Gabriel-Stheeman (eds.), The Battle over Spanish between 1800 and 2000. Language ideologies and Hispanic intellectuals, 64-77. London/New York: Routledge.

Del Valle, J. 2007. La RAE y el español total. ¿Esfera pública o comunidad discursiva? In: J. del Valle (ed.), La lengua, ¿patria común? Ideas e ideologías del español, 81-96. Madrid/ Frankfurt: Iberoamericana/Vervuert.

Del Valle, J. 2014. Lo político del lenguaje y los límites de la política lingüística panhispánica. Boletín de Filología 49(2): 87-112.

Flores, E. 2016. El problema de la fragmentación de la lengua española en el Chile del siglo XIX y comienzos del XX: una aproximación desde la historiografía de las ideologías lingüísticas. Tesis de Licenciatura, Universidad de Chile.

García de la Concha, V. 2014. La Real Academia Española: vida e historia. Barcelona: Espasa.

Geraghty, M. 2016. Lenguaje y religión: ideología lingüística en el Diccionario manual de locuciones viciosas y de correcciones de lenguaje (1893) de Camilo Ortúzar. Tesis de Magíster, Universidad de Chile.

Jaksić, I. 1999. La gramática de la emancipación. In: G. Carrera Damas & J. Lombardi (dirs.), Historia general de América Latina, vol. 5, 513-522. Madrid: Unesco/Trotta.

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Rodríguez, Z. 1875. Diccionario de chilenismos. Santiago (Chile): Imprenta de El Independiente.

Rojas, D. 2014. Diccionario y estandarización lingüística en Hispanoamérica: la visión de Ramón Sotomayor Valdés (1866). Estudios Filológicos 53: 109-121.

Rojas, D. 2015a. El Diccionario de chilenismos (1875) de Zorobabel Rodríguez: ideologías lingüísticas e intertextualidad. Revista de Humanidades 32: 87-116

Rojas, D. 2015b. Ideologías y actitudes lingüísticas en el Chile del siglo XIX: los reparos de Andrés Bello a las Correcciones lexigráficas de Valentín Gormaz. Lexis 39(1): 163-181.

Rojas, D., & Avilés, T. 2012. La recepción de Voces usadas en Chile (1900) de Aníbal Echeverría y Reyes entre sus contemporáneos. Boletín de Filología 47(2): 149-175.

Rojas, D., & Avilés, T. 2015. Ideologías lingüísticas en un debate del siglo XIX chileno: los comentaristas del Diccionario de chilenismos de Zorobabel Rodríguez. Línguas e Instrumentos Lingüísticos 35: 53-72.

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Watts, R. J. 2008. Grammar writers in eighteenth-century Britain: A community of practice or a discourse community? In: I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (ed.), Grammars, Grammarians and Grammar-Writing in Eighteenth-Century England, 37-56. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter.

How to cite this post

Rojas, Darío. 2016. The Chilean Academy of the Spanish Language: the institutionalization of a discourse community. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2016/09/07/the-chilean-academy-of-the-spanish-language-the-institutionalization-of-a-discourse-community/

Jacopo D’Alonzo
Sorbonne Nouvelle & Sapienza Università di Roma

Renato Guttuso, Contadini al lavoro. Source

Introduction

Linguistic naturalism was one of the main positions taken in linguistic research during the 19^th century (for France, see Auroux 1984 and Desmet 1996; for England, see Aarsleff 1983; for Germany, see Knobloch 1988). Although the origin of language is a traditional question of linguistic reflection, linguistic naturalism paid special attention to this topic. According to Auroux (1989, 123), the 19^th century was one of the most fruitful periods in the history of the question of language origins. But the 19^th Century was also the epoch of the well-known official interdiction of that topic promoted by the Linguistic Society of Paris (Société de Linguistique de Paris, founded in 1866). Article 2 of its constitution states, “the Society does not admit any communication regarding language origins as well as the creation of a universal language” (quoted by Auroux 1989, 123). The scepticism concerning that topic was not limited to France. In 1873 the president of Philological Society in Britain, Alexander J. Elis (1814-1890), declared the question of language origins to be “out of the field of philology proper” (quoted by Aarsleff 1983, 230).

Such scepticism was almost certainly reinforced by the main goal of linguistics during the 19^th century. Linguistics wanted to appear as a science and to strengthen its own academic position (Auroux 1989). Questions of a more philosophical nature, such the origins of language, were officially left out. Nonetheless, almost all of linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, biologists and sociologists of the period were more or less interested in the issue of language origins.

Among the scholars who tackled topics of this kind, the German philosopher Ludwig Noiré (1829-1889) deserves special mention. Noiré’s theory appears as one of the most eccentric in that Noiré linked language origins with collective labour. To him, the unique sociability of humans implies cooperation and in turn cooperation involves language. Remarkably, Noiré’s theory deeply influenced the debate on language origins until the 1950s. Noiré’s theory was also mentioned by scholars who did not directly deal with the question of language origins but needed a provisional theory of language origins which would be suitable for their theoretical aims. To give a few examples, Noiré’s theory was meticulously described by Steinthal ([1851] 1888), Plekhanov ([1907] 1976), Mauthner (19122), Bogdanov ([1923] 2015), Cassirer (1980¹³), Jespersen (1922), Janet (1934) and others. Some traces of Noiré’s theory could be seen in no less than the theory of language origins suggested by the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo (1917-1993). Thảo’s theory, set out in his Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (1951), clearly reflected the influence of Noiré’s account. In this case, a philosopher who was interested in a dialectical-materialist theory of the human being argued for a theory of language origins somehow similar to Noiré’s one (see Thảo [1951] 1985, 169-170).

Before offering some theoretical and historical explanations for the enduring influence of Noiré’s theory, it is necessary to describe the general features of his theory and the context in which it arose. After dealing with the German-English debate on language origins during the 19^th century, a section will be especially devoted to Noiré’s theory of language origins. Finally, we will suggest a comparison between Noiré’s insight and the naturalistic framework of the 19^th century.

The 19^th Century Debate on Language Origins

In the 19^th century, the debate on language origins was launched by scholars who argued for the assumption of the divine origin of human language. That theory took two forms. One of the most typical strategies regarded language as gift of God and rejected the thesis that humankind could have created language without any help. This was the solution suggested by the German philosopher Johann Georg Hamann (1730-1788).[1] According to other scholars, the problem of language origins lies not in the authority of Divine Word but in a theoretical conundrum. It is impossible to establish a coherent theory of the human origin of language. To invent language, our ancestors already needed to be intelligent. But to be intelligent, they needed to already have language. So, the only rational solution could be a non-human origin of language. Incidentally, the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778) sympathised with this account.

In the 19^th century, the theory of divine origin of human language was supported by the French intellectual Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise de Bonald (1754-1840) in his Mélanges littéraires, politiques et philosophiques (Literary, Political and Philosophical Melange, 1819).[2] De Bonald’s account stimulated the firm reaction of both the French philologist Ernest Renan (1823-1892) and the German linguist Jacob Grimm (1785-1863). In his De l’origine du langage (The origin of language, 1848), Renan disputed De Bonald’s theory. But he equally criticised the Epicurean Theory (see Gensini 1999 and Bourdier 1978) by arguing that humankind never lived in a state of nature and never spoke a natural language composed of facial movements, gestural expressions and cries. For Renan language arose as a whole and not progressively. On the other hand, in his Ueber den Ursprung der Sprache (1851), Grimm reasoned that language evolved progressively. Deeply influenced by Herder, Grimm reckoned that language and thought are interconnected and evolved simultaneously. At the same time, Grimm neglected any continuity between human language and animal communication systems.

In his Essay on the Origin of Language (1860), the English theologian Frederic W. Farrar (1831-1903) quoted Grimm and criticized Renan. According to Farrar, language is a strictly human product. Humankind has progressively created and developed it. Like Grimm, Farrar rejected the possibility of any continuity between animal communication and human linguistic skills. But in opposition to Grimm, Farrar declared that first words were essentially onomatopoeic. These onomatopoeic words must be thought of as expressions of a subjective reaction under the pressure of passions and needs. Such reactions may follow external stimuli such as the sounds of nature. Thus human voice could subjectively interpret and express some features of things through sounds.[3]

Particularly interesting is the influence of Farrar’s theory in the 19^th-century debate on language origins. In his Dictionary of English Etymology (1859), the English linguist and cousin of Charles Darwin (1809-1892) Hensleigh Wedgwood (1803-1891) made extensive use of the principle of onomatopoeia and subjective iconism (Piattelli 2014). The idea Wedgwood developed in his work built heavily on Farrar’s research. In turn, Darwin was receptive of Farrar in his Descent of Man. But unlike Darwin, Farrar and Wedgwood did not assume any continuity between animal communication systems and human language.

Nobody can overlook that not everyone was accepting of the theory that language arose slowly. For instance, Renan questioned the validity of that insight. To give just one further example, this criticism was also picked up by the German linguist and professor at Oxford University Max Müller (1823-1900). In his Lectures on the Science of Language (1861 and 1863), Müller regarded language as human product that arose in one fell swoop. By quoting Humboldt’s Ueber das vergleichende Sprachstudium (1820), Müller insisted that humankind and full-formed language are inseparable.[4] Müller denied the gradual development of language. To him, the error underlying this way of understanding human language had to be eliminated definitively. So Müller disagreed with Wedgwood’s theory of onomatopoeia and objected that first words were neither instinctive cries nor other expressions of need (Dowling 1982).

Interestingly, Müller did not totally disapprove of Darwin’s theory of evolution. For Müller, Darwin’s error was the assumption of the continuity between animal communication and cognition and human linguistic and conceptual skills (see Knoll 1986; Gensini 2011). Thus Müller wrote his 1873 Lectures on Mr. Darwin’s Philosophy of Language in order to uncover and refute the linguistic implications of Darwin’s theory. One year later, the English philologist William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) took a contrary position to Müller in his Darwinism and Language. In Whitney’s view language progressively arose rather than appearing all at once. Nonetheless, Whitney was partly disappointed by some of Darwin’s conclusions. Specifically, Whitney rejected that the beginnings of human speech could be seen among pre-human ancestors. But he accepted that humankind descends from an animal ancestor (Alter 2005, 183).

Specifically, Whitney’s interpretation of Darwin’s theory differed significantly from that of German philosopher and linguist August Schleicher (1821-1868), who in the same years tried to apply Darwin’s theory to linguistic sciences. This led Schleicher to conceive of language as a law-governed, organic phenomenon. Against this, Whitney argued that language escaped the law of nature as well as other actions guided by human will.

At this point we must say a few words concerning Darwin’s theory, since it introduced in the debate on language origins certain elements which radically changed some aspects of the argument. In The Descent of Man (1871), Darwin suggested the continuity between animal communication systems and human language. The difference between them does not concern semantics – expression of desires and needs – or articulation of sounds – typical of a wide range of species of birds, but rather human “almost infinitely larger power of associating together the most diversified sounds and ideas” (Darwin 1874, 85-86). To Darwin, human language arose from the cognitive capability to fix experiences in sounds. In turn, complexes of sound and experience may amplify the range of actions and understanding. So conceived, Darwin consequently explains, language could progressively reinforce the cognitive skills from which it emerged (see Alter 2007, 2008).

Deeply influenced by the British geologist Charles Lyell (1797-18975), who extended the traditional geological dating in his Principles of Geology (1830-1833), Darwin stated that humankind had evolved from preceding animal species. So our pre-human ancestor was “some unusually wise ape-like animal” who imitated sounds of nature thanks to voice and gestures. Darwin established that human language is rooted in pre-human communication systems. Such an assumption made a decisive impact on the debate on language origins. The argument no longer covered only the history of humankind. Not only did the debate face the issue of human-specific peculiar linguistic skills, it also tackled pre-humans forms of communication. One could say that Darwin reversed the terms of the debate by proposing a proto-linguistic turn. Obviously, not everybody was on Darwin’s side. For example, as has been already seen, Whitney, Farrar and Wedgwood denied that human languages have any relation to animal or pre-human communication systems.

Added to that, Darwin suggested that human use of voice has its natural roots in animal courtship. In this way Darwin overturned the theory set out by Herbert Spencer (1820-1903) in his The Origin and function of music (1858). To Spencer, music was an evolutionary product of language. By contrast, Darwin argued for the existence of some musical skills in nature, as had already been suggested by the German physiologist Hermann von Helmotz (1821-1894).

To summarize, by virtue of the scientific support of his theory of evolution, Darwin’s re-thinking of the problem of the origins of human language redefined the terms of linguistic naturalism (Formigari 2013). In explaining why human language has a natural and inherited component, Darwin rehabilitated languages of other species. Accordingly, human language emerged progressively in pre-human multimodal communication systems constituted by gestures and vocal imitation. Thus the first traces of language must not be seen only in the history of genus Homo but before. Finally, human language is a quantitative enhancement of some cognitive skills. At the same time language outperforms cognition. So there is a co-evolutionary loop between the former and the latter (Ferretti & Adornetti, 2012, 24).

The German debate

The influence of Darwin’s theory on the German debate on language is best illustrated by the example of Schleicher’s Die Darwin’sche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft (The Darwinian Theory and the Science of Language, 1863). Schleicher showed a desire to reconcile linguistics with the natural sciences. Specifically, Schleicher’s well-known theory of the linguistic genealogical tree (Stammbaumtheorie, family tree theory; first suggested in his Die ersten Spaltungen des indogermanischen Urvolkes, 1853) depended upon the model of botanical taxonomy. After reading Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), Schleicher argued that languages evolved because of competition. For him, languages necessarily pass through a life cycle similar to organisms. Schleicher also asserted that languages are initially simple and become progressively more complex.

Schleicher’s theory was often mentioned by natural scientists of his period. For instance, the English geologist Lyell in his The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man (1863) cited Schleicher’s theory to explain the development of languages (see Taub 1993). Furthermore, Darwin cited Schleicher’s theory of languages as natural organisms in the Descent of Man. But Darwin’s more general linguistic account differed in fundamental ways from Schleicher’s (see Maher 1983). Darwin argued for gradual origins of language from pre-human ancestors until actual humankind, but Schleicher narrowed this down. To him, language arose with humankind during the pre-historical era.

The same disagreement with Darwin’s theory of language origins could be seen in Noiré’s theory. Like Schleicher, Noiré quoted Darwin’s findings with admiration. But he did not totally agree with Darwin’s linguistic views. Noiré set out his theory in a book entitled Ursprung der Sprache (Origin of Language, 1877). The major premise of that book is that language arose gradually. But the minor premise is that only humankind had the skills for creating language. According to Noiré, the necessary skills for creating language did not depend upon rationality. For him, language arose as a result of the unique sociability of humans.

To some extent, Noiré’s theory assumes that humankind has a natural origin. Consequently, our ancestors naturally invented language. Nonetheless, the deep difference between human language and animal communication systems implies at least two consequences. First, human language represents a new stage in the history of animal languages. Secondly, human language uniqueness is embedded within a peculiar feature of humankind. More narrowly, Noiré identified such a feature in cooperation. The unique sociability of humans implied an unprecedented form of cooperation already at an early stage of human development. To simplify, before speaking our ancestors already cooperated to achieve common ends.

Language, Noiré consequently declared, arose in the context of cooperative tasks. Under the pressure of those tasks, physical efforts involuntary involved exclamations. Over time these involuntary vocalisations became shared and recognised by the group. They originally mean some aspects of the action. So involuntary vocal emissions uttered during cooperative tasks could be regarded as the first words of human language.

In the same years, other German linguists did not accept Darwin’s proto-linguistic turn. This is the case of H. Steinthal (1823-1899). Deeply influenced by Humboldt’s philosophy of language, Steinthal refused to consider human language as a developed form of pre-human communication systems. But it should be remembered that Steinthal adopted some aspects of Darwin’s theory in the third and fourth edition of his Der Ursprung der Sprache. Specifically, Steinthal went so far as to suggest that searching for the origin of language could prove that humankind descends from animals (Agard 2004).

To Steinthal (1881), human language is irreducible to other communication systems. He also refused the linguistic evolutionary theory of Schleicher (Pénisson 1998). Specifically, Steinthal accepted only the possibility of creating the taxonomy of languages, but nothing more than this. Steinthal argued for the indissoluble link between humankind and language. And to him, the origin of language must be conceived of in conjunction with the progressive origin of consciousness (Craig 1989). In his Der Ursprung der Sprache (1851, 1858, 1877, 1888), Steinthal (1881, 361) reasoned that vocal reflexes could be the precursors of speech and articulated sounds. According to him, any psychical excitation corresponds to involuntary reflected bodily movement. Thus speech was originally involuntary reflex-actions (Reflexbewegungen). As a matter of fact, voice had the function of motor and mechanical externalization of perceptions and experiences. For this reason, Steinthal labelled voice reflex-sound (Reflexlaut). Communicative intentionality arose later. It controls expressions performed independently from communication.

Among other scholars, the German sociologist Georg Simmel (1858-1918) also marked the limits of Darwin’s theory of language origins. Simmel wrote for the journal Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, which was founded by Steinthal and Moritz Lazarus (1824-1903). In his article Psychologische und ethnologische Studien über Musik (Psychological and Ethnological Studies about Music, 1882), Simmel sharply criticized Darwin’s theory of the musical origins of human language (Agard 2004). Such a theory had recently been endorsed by the German zoologist Gustav Jäger (1832–1917).

To conclude, Darwin’s theory of language origins and in particular his assumption of the continuity between human language and pre-human communication systems rarely found supporters in Great Britain or Germany. Of course, many scholars were ready to defend a naturalist account which excludes any transcendental cause of language origin. But there were not many scholars that argued for the continuist theory of language origins.

Noiré’s theory of language origins

Signature of Ludwig Noiré. Source

Noiré’s Ursprung der Sprache begins with a quotation from the German philosopher Lazarus Geiger (1829-1860). Interestingly, Geiger did not simply assume the coincidence of language (Sprache) and reasoning (Vernunft) as Humboldt had done. Geiger (1868, Vorrede) also claimed the primacy of language over thought: “Die Sprache hat die Vernunft erschaffen, vor der Sprache war der Mensch vernunftlos” (Language has created reasoning, before language man was without reason).

Before coming to the core of Noiré’s considerations, we must say a few words concerning Geiger’s theory. The reason for this digression is the fact that Noiré said that he was deeply influenced by Geiger. But Geiger’s theory has been often treated in same way as Noiré’s after the publication of Noiré’s Ursprung der Sprache. Nonetheless, Noiré felt a certain dissatisfaction with Geiger’s theory even if he acknowledged the significant findings of his predecessor.

In 1868 and in 1872 Geiger published the two volumes of his Ursprung und Entwickelung der menschlichen Sprache und Vernunft. In the period between the publication of the first volume and the second one, he wrote a smaller essay devoted to the same topic (Geiger 1869). In essence, Geiger suggested that our human ancestors were speechless, helpless, and without religion, art, and morals. Language arose from gestures which originally were as insignificant as trifling cries (Sprachschreie, interjections). Those cries expressed emotions without purpose or consciousness. For a long time, sounds varied and differentiated. In the meantime, sounds allowed our ancestors to reinforce their familiarity with the world and consequently prepared for the first steps of reasoning. Imitative skills peculiar to humankind had been the precondition for sharing sounds among our ancestors. Thus they began to understand each other and sounds gradually became meaningful. Consequently, Geiger argued that such sounds were the first linguistic roots.

Noiré’s book is deeply influenced by the linguistic reflections of Herder, Humboldt and Geiger. As a matter of fact, their names appear on the first page of Noiré’s Ursprung der Sprache. Indeed Noiré agreed with them by assuming that reason is the peculiar feature of humankind and reasoning cannot be possible without language. Accordingly, Noiré merged the question concerning the origins of humankind and reason with the issue of language origins. It is quite interesting that Noiré juxtaposed the names of Herder, Geiger and Humboldt. On the one hand, Herder and Geiger developed two theories of language origins which were based upon the assumption of the gradual origin of human language. On the other hand, Humboldt refused to consider language origins as a meaningful question. To him, humankind and full-formed languages are indissoluble. The common ground that Noiré sees in the linguistic theories of Herder, Humboldt and Geiger is probably their strong naturalism as well as their thesis of language-thought relation. Despite essential divergences concerning the relation between humankind and other animals, Noiré appropriated Humboldt’s theory of language as Denkorgan (Thought-Instrument) and thus he highlighted the correlation between language, reasoning and human nature.

What Noiré considered his own contribution to the debate on language origins was his assumption that language (and reasoning, of course) originally arose during social goal-oriented actions. So he wrote: “Es war die auf einen gemeinsamen Zweck gerichtete gemeinsame Thätigkeit, es war die urälteste Arbeit unserer Stammeltern, aus welcher Sprache und Vernunftleben hervorquoll” (Language and life of thought arose in the context of shared and common goals posed by common action, that was the original work of our ancestors; Noiré 1877, 331). Our human ancestors lived like animals and tried to survive in wild nature. For this reason they worked together to produce their means of subsistence. Their common activity was mostly physical. So during their common efforts they produced some involuntary sounds. The peculiar feature of these sounds was the fact that they were the same for all of the members of the group. Hence, these common sounds (gemeinsame Laute) originally had social value.

According to Noiré, the same involuntary sounds were uttered during the collective actions. This fact implies that these sounds were recognised and understood as meaningful by all of the members of the group. Noiré (1877, 332) explained this point in the following manner:

Hier ist also der Ursprung des Lautes, der, gemeinsam erklingend, gemeinsam hervorgebracht, gemeinsam verstanden, nachmals zum menschlichen Worte sich entwickelte. Denn seine Eigentümlicheit war und mußte bleiben, daß er an eine bestimmte Thätigkit erinnerte und verstanden wurde (Here one can find the origin of [linguistic] sound. Sounds resounded together, they are performed together, and they are understood by all [of the members during their common efforts]. Thereafter, these sounds turned into human words. Indeed, the peculiar feature of [linguistic] sounds was and had to remain the fact that sounds has been recognized and understood by meaning a given action).

Noiré called Gemeingefühl a common and pre-linguistic sentiment of shared goals and intentions. This sentiment accompanied peculiar human cooperation. At the same time, Gemeingefühl should pave the way for understanding intentions of the others and what the others would communicate. Consequently, Noiré (1877, 333) underlined how Gemeingefühl ensured social character of primitive sounds: “Der Sprachlaut ist also in seiner Entstehung der die gemeinsame Thätigkeit begleitende Ausdruck des erhöhten Gemeingefühls” (With regards to its origin, linguistic sound is moreover the expression of the most elevated common sentiment which follows a common action, 333). Accordingly, Noiré (1877, 334) argued for the priority of Collectivwesen (social being) over individuals. So Noiré (1877, 323) quoted Feuerbach’s Philosophie der Zukunft (Philosophy of the Future, 1843) with regard to the social dimension of thought: “die Gemeinshaft des Menschen mit dem Menschen ist das erste Prinzip und Kriterium der Wahrheit und Allgemeinheit” (The community of humans with humans is the first principle and criterion of truth and general; Feuerbach 1843, 152).

Assuming that Gemeingefühl was a psychological condition for having mutual understanding of sounds, Noiré (1877, 341) explained the way in which phonetic signs represent the objective word. On each occasion, Noiré described sounds in their connection with goal-oriented social activities. Interestingly, sounds were emitted during the same actions: certain sounds constantly corresponded to the same action. This allows, in Noiré’s view, the stability of reference. Further, sounds designated things as object of actions. To Noiré (1877, 342; 1885, 135, 143), first words originally designate action (Verbum) and patient (Objekt) at the same time (as Geiger 1868, 386; Steinthal, [1851] 1888, 295).

Cassirer (1980¹³, 286) noted that for Noiré, “the original sounds originated not in the objective intuition of substance but in the subjective intuition of action”. Actions modified objects and allowed our ancestor to designate them. So designation presupposes social relations and cooperation. As Cassirer notes, “if the phonetic sign had merely expressed an individual representation produced in the individual consciousness, it would have remained imprisoned in the individual consciousness, without power to pass beyond it”. In Noiré’s view, it is important to emphasise that the social nature of linguistic sounds is the unique feature which distinguishes human language from animal communication. Assuming that primordial linguistic sounds depend upon social context, they could change historically. On the contrary, animal cries are uttered independently from social context and do not change over time. In this respect a remark concerning Geiger’s theory is necessary to better understand Noiré’s strategy. Indeed, Geiger (1869, 184-185) had been more open than Noiré to accepting the continuity between animal communication and human languages. For Geiger, the latter is rooted in the former.

Conclusion

Starting from a preliminary overview of the debate on language origins that took place during the 19^th century, it is possible to see some implications of Noiré’s theory. Firstly, Noiré, like other scholars (Renan, Grimm, Wedgwood, Whitney, etc.), rejected the divine origin of language and suggested a naturalistic account without invoking transcendent causes.

Secondly, like Farrar, Whitney, Steinthal and others, Noiré argued for progressive origins of human language. Unlike Müller, Noiré did not propose that language arose in one fell swoop. Nonetheless, like many others, Noiré was unwilling to accept any relation between human language and pre-human communication. This point led him away from Geiger’s theory as well as from Darwin’s.

Thirdly, in spite of Schleicher, Noiré refused to reduce language to a law of nature. For him, language opens the dimension of culture and history. But like Steinthal, Noiré considered original sounds as involuntary and non-communicative expressions. But like Steinthal, the link between those sounds and bodily movement is for Noiré not enough to establish reference. Reference needs previous social relations.

Taking his cue from Herder, Geiger, Humboldt and Feuerbach, Noiré was increasingly concerned with a definition of humankind as social, linguistic and rational animal. This led him to suggest a theory of language origins which implied the co-evolution of language and reason in the context of goal-oriented cooperation.

As he implicitly demonstrated through an analysis of language origins, Noiré (1877, 342) rejected the most common theories concerning this topic. He distanced himself from the theory of onomatopoeia (Farrar and Wedgwood). Somehow, the same fate seems to have befallen Steinthal’s theory of reflex-sounds. Noiré criticized Darwin’s theory of imitation as well as Geiger’s theory of pantomime. According to Noiré, all of these theories cannot account for the social context in which language arose.

It would now be useful to quote some lines from Darwin’s Descent of Man. This quote may serve to establish a further comparison between Noiré and another philosopher who suggested a theory of language origins close to Noiré’s.

Darwin (1871, II, 295) mentioned the English philosopher Chauncey Wright (1830-1875) and his hypothesis according to which “the continued use of language will have reacted on the brain, and produced an inherited effect; and this again will have reacted on the improvement of language”. Assuming Darwin’s theory of evolution in his The Evolution of Self-Consciousness (1873), Wright (1873, 217) declared that language “would spring from the social nature of the animal, from the use of mental communication between the members of a community, and from the desire to communicate”. Accordingly, Wright argued that language was rooted in the social life of our pre-human ancestors. In Wright’s view, language was originally composed by gestures and cries. The most fundamental linguistic function was communication. After the repetitive use of primitive signs, the meditative function of language arose and allowed memory, reflection and thought (Pasqua Mocerino 2014).

Like Noiré, Wright reckoned that reason and language are interdependent.[5] More significantly, both of them argued for the primacy of language over reason. In the same way, they suggested that language arose in social context. So Wright and Noiré concluded that humans think because they speak and not vice versa. Like Wright, Noiré explained that self-consciousness arose after the invention of language.

But the theory Noiré proposed only appears to resemble Wright’s. Firstly, Noiré – like Müller – described our human ancestors as physiologically and anatomically like us. The only difference between actual and past humankind concerns language and cognition. Thus the origin of language is to be located among our human ancestors. On the contrary Wright argued for a more Darwinian view. For him, between human and pre-human language there is merely a difference of degree. Secondly, for Wright language arose under the pressure of the need to communicate. Against this, Noiré highlighted that communication is a more recent function of linguistic sounds.

In this way, it would be useful to remember that Noiré was deeply influenced by the thought of his friend Müller.[6] Above all, like Müller, Noiré suggested a kind of evolutionism without considering human language as the result of the development of animal communication systems. Nonetheless, Noiré focused on sociability and cooperation more than Müller. And this is Noiré’s most significant contribution to the debate on language origins. So Noiré’s theory will find supporters among Marxists. In Noiré’s theory some Marxist philosophers – such as Bogdanov, Bukharin, and Thảo – found certain elements which allow them to formulate a Marxist theory of language origins. And Noiré’s theory often completed Engels’ sketched out view of language origins (MEW 20, 305-570). It cannot be denied that Feuerbach represents the meeting point for the two traditions. Marxists were especially interested in the central role Noiré assigned to sociality as well as his identification of labour as the context in which language and cognition arose. But the same is true for the social nature of language and cognition and the dependence of language on labour.

Notes

This article has been carried in the context of a PhD project financed by USPC.

[1] In the Old Testament, however, one cannot find any reference to the origins of human language: for the storyteller, language was one of the typical capabilities of humankind (Albertz 1989).

[2] Indeed, in the previous century the German mathematician Johann Peter Süssmilch (1707-1767) suggested a rationalistic and non-theological version of the theory of divine origin. But this version was sharply criticized by the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) in his Abhandlung ueber den Ursprung der Sprache (Essay on Origins of Language, 1772).

[3] By the way, such a hypothesis had already been formulated by Leibniz in the third book of Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (New Essays on Human Understanding, 1765; for Leibniz, see Gensini 1991) and mentioned by De Brosses in his Traité de la formation méchanique des langues (Essay on the mechanical development of languages, 1765; see De Palo 2005; Gensini 2014, 63).

[4] In Germany, the philosophy of language of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) seems to play the main role in ispiring discontinuist theories. In detail, Humboldt stated that language constitutes the main feature of humankind as a natural species. Consequently, drawing links between animals and humankind would lead to a total misunderstanding of human nature.

[5] By the way, Noiré calls such a theory Noology. In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (A271/B327) Noology was a theory of knowledge that explains concepts as result of sensation. Kant indeed used this notion for describing Locke’s account.

[6] The friendship between Noiré and Müller was very close. Müller dedicated his Science of Thought (1887) to Noiré. In turn Noiré shows great respect for Müller in his Die Welt als Entwicklung des Geistes (Noiré 1874, 246) and in his Max Müller & the philosophy of language (1879). Noiré’s theory also influenced some Müller’s linguistic works. For instance, in his Das Denken im Lichte der Sprache (Müller 1888, 371, 571), Müller reduced the roots of Sanskrit to a limited number of simplest human activities. Noiré (1877, 311, 341) argued for the same assumption (for this point see Cassirer 1980¹³, 266). Finally, Müller (1888) is dedicated to Noiré.

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How to cite this post

D’Alonzo, Jacopo. 2016. Ludwig Noiré and the Debate on Language Origins in the 19th Century. History and Philosophy of the Languge Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2016/09/28/ludwig-noire-and-the-debate-on-language-origins-in-the-19th-century

David Moore
University of Western Australia

Introduction

This article explores the outstanding contribution of German Lutheran missionaries to linguistics, language documentation and translation in Aboriginal languages in Central Australia from the last decade of the nineteenth century to the years leading up to the First World War. The Hermannsburg missionaries compiled texts, grammars, dictionaries and translations of Aboriginal languages. The Hermannsburg missionaries laid the groundwork for this linguistic work, establishing the Hermannsburg mission in 1877. Hermann Kempe pioneered language description of the Aranda (Arrernte, Arrarnta) language. The Neuendettelsau missionaries however were more highly trained in languages and undertook more extensive linguistic work. Missionary Carl Strehlow (1871-1922) worked at the Hermannsburg mission from 1894 until his death in 1922.

Humanism and the Reformation

The German use of the original sources and respect for the vernacular goes back to the Lutheran Reformation and, ultimately, to the sixteenth century Humanists. The foundation that knowledge of ancient source languages was central to understanding of the ancient world became the basis for Humanists who developed the tools for linguistic scholarship in the sixteenth century. Building on their work, Martin Luther translated the German New Testament in 1522 and the Old Testament and complete German Bible by 1534 (Wendt 2001:8), thus transforming the German language. Vernacular Bible translations were then made in other Protestant territories of Europe. The most influential Reformer in education was Luther’s younger colleague and successor Phillip Melanchthon (1497-1560), who developed a Christian Humanist education which focused upon the learning of the ancient languages Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The Lutheran Reformers developed an education system in which the study of languages played an important part. The Melanchthon Gymnasium was established in Nürnberg in 1526. Lutheran churches and schools were key institutions which the Lutheran missionaries established in Central Australia at Lake Killalpannina (1866) and Hermannsburg (1877).

The following sections show the connections between the Lutheran tradition and linguistics, the German philosophy of language and linguistics and fieldwork in the following two centuries. The first section looks at the German philosophy of language and its continuation through “general linguistics” of the nineteenth century. The second section briefly traces the development of philology in Germany at the Neuendettelsau mission institution in the late nineteenth century. The third section outlines text-based philology as fieldwork in the early twentieth century.

Philosophy of language and language ideologies

By the late eighteenth century a philosophy of language emerged which was best exemplified by Johann Georg Hamann (1730-88) and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). Herder was a Lutheran pastor who trained in theology and who continued to further, and also to challenge, Luther’s insights into translation and became a founder of cultural anthropology. Both Hamann and Herder learned languages and spent a significant amount of their time working as translators. Forster (2010:208) outlines two of the key principles of the Hamann-Herder philosophy of language which developed in reaction to Enlightenment philosophies of language. Firstly that “all thought is essentially dependent upon and bounded by language”, meaning that thought without language is not possible. Secondly that “meanings consist of real word-usages” rather than mental images or ideas. These two key language ideologies led to the need to learn languages and engage in language research as Herder outlined in his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Humanity (Herder 1803). A third language ideology stressed linguistic diversity. Hamann, Herder and many of their contemporaries experienced the difficulty of translation between languages and incommensurability due to conceptual differences between people in different times and places. The insight into linguistic diversity led to the need to work hard at translation and to strive for accuracy and fidelity to source texts. The language philosophy of the late eighteenth century led to further developments in the study of language and the transmission of these language ideologies through linguistic anthropology and missionary linguistics in the nineteenth century.

Missionary linguistics and translation

The greatest achievements in Germany in the nineteenth century were in the field of philology consisting of textual scholarship, hermeneutics and translation. Humanist philology developed to a high degree through Language Seminars (Moore 2014). Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) wrote an influential paper on translation (Schleiermacher 1813). As a further development of Herder’s call to investigate linguistic diversity, Friedrich Schlegel (1772-1829) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) developed linguistics in the nineteenth century through the further exploration of a larger number of languages than was possible for the eighteenth century philosophers. In terms of Schleicher’s (1850) division of philology and linguistics, the missionaries were clearly more aligned with the text-based philology of general linguistics, rather than the Comparative Philology which developed in the late nineteenth century. At Neuendettelsau the missionary candidates were thoroughly trained in Humanist philology which was studied with theology as it had been in the sixteenth century Reformation. The Neuendettelsau curriculum was established by Friedrich Bauer (1813-1874) who had been trained at the Melanchthon Gymnasium in Nürnberg. He later studied at Erlangen (1830-32 and 1833-5) and at Halle (1832-33), institutions which continued Humanist education in the nineteenth century. At Halle Bauer studied with Wilhelm Gesenius (1786–1842), the author of the Hebrew-German lexicon (Rossler 2013:18). Bauer wrote an innovative German pedagogical grammar (Bauer 1850) which he continued to revise in step with current linguistic theories (Fuchshuber-Weiß 2013). Mission candidates were trained in biblical and classical languages and German, translation, interpretation and rhetoric.

Missionaries codified the language by the collection of texts and the making of wordlists and grammars to understand texts, languages and their speakers. The willingness and seriousness of missionaries in learning languages enabled them to make discoveries about the structures of Aboriginal languages. Initially describing Aboriginal languages in terms of the familiar European languages, they became increasingly aware of the complexity of Aboriginal languages. They sought to collaborate with professional scholars. Kempe (1891:25) commented, “[T]here are many questions related herein which would require a philologist to classify or properly arrange, and any hints in this direction would be thankfully received by the writer.” A language ideology that all languages are complex arose in opposition to the notion of “primitive languages” which was shared, along with the other three language ideologies already mentioned, with Humboldtians. Leonhardi corresponded with linguists from the “general linguistics” Humboldtian tradition who were interested in non-Indo-European languages and fieldwork, for example, he corresponded with Franz N. Finck about Aranda grammar.

Linguistic Fieldwork and Die Aranda

Initial missionary fieldwork revolved around the need to find theological key terms for Bible translation. The earlier phase of language documentation at Hermannsburg saw the first grammar and wordlist (Kempe 1891) of the Aranda language. Carl Strehlow learned Aranda and collected words and key terms in the first phase of fieldwork from 1894-1904. Later in response to queries from Moritz von Leonhardi, his collaborator in Germany, he extended the earlier research and also began to investigate the Loritja language. Strehlow began writing Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (The Aranda and Loritja Tribes of Central Australia), corresponding with Leonhardi from 1905 to 1910. In a letter to Strehlow of the 9th September 1905 Leonhardi described this collection as Sprache, Sagen und Gebräuche (language, myths and customs). He further outlined the project:

Legends in Aranda language written down with literal interlinear translations would be very valuable, for which lexicon and grammar would then provide the key. A lexicon which besides the meaning of the word also provides a short explanation of the individual objects, characters in legends etc. is very popular and valuable to scholarship.

Most important for Leonhardi was the original language as he wrote in a letter of the 2^nd June 1906 Strehlow (VL 1906-2-1) (2/6/06). The Urtext (original text) was seen as the most authentic expression of Aranda and Luritja worldviews. Strehlow recorded the Urtext in interlinear texts in which each word of the original language was translated into German. It was most important for the reader who didn’t know the language to have an accurate translation. Leonhardi also indicated that a free translation would be necessary for the reader to “penetrate into the spirit of the language and of the beliefs”. Strehlow’s Die Aranda involved describing the Aranda and Luritja traditions with the long-established methods of Humanist Philology, that is, the compilation of texts, a dictionary (Strehlow 1909) and grammar (Strehlow 1910). In their correspondence there is little evidence that Strehlow and Leonhardi saw their work as “ethnography”. The first instalments of Die Aranda concern language and myths. This view contrasts with that of Kenny (2013:28) who describes Die Aranda as Carl Strehlow’s “ethnographic oeuvre” as a “transitional” anthropology. But Strehlow’s Die Aranda reflects his training at Neuendettelsau in an established tradition of philology and translation and its application to unwritten languages. As Kenny (2013:83) admits, “Ethnographic approaches or methodology do not appear to have been part of the curriculum; anthropological study came mainly through language study.”

Leonhardi (23-12-1908) wrote to Strehlow, “As the culmination of the total work you must finally write a language study of Aranda and Loritja.” This statement surely suggests that the linguistic work was the Krönung, the high point or peak or culmination (Kenny 2013:98) of Die Aranda and its major focal point. Strehlow’s Die Aranda is primarily a collection of texts with a dictionary and grammar and an explanation of aspects of culture in answer to questions of interest to Ethnology.

Reasons why their work was sidelined

Protestant Germans and British cooperated throughout the nineteenth century. This was no more evident than in missionary ventures, where Britons and Germans worked together for the spread of the Christian message through the British and Foreign Bible Society and other evangelical organisations. This unity and common purpose broke down in the twentieth century in the First World War. Their work was overshadowed by later developments in linguistics and anthropology. Probably most significant was the history of anthropology throughout the twentieth century. Veit (1991:119) mentions “the paradigmatic change in Australian anthropology” as the major cause for the abandonment of Humanist philology. A shift to the methods of the natural sciences was already happening in the early part of the twentieth century and well under way in the mid-twentieth. The structural-functionalist anthropology of Radcliffe-Brown had little concern with language learning and linguistics. Unfortunately Australian linguistics was often founded upon structuralist-functionalist anthropological foundations with a lack of interest in language that paralleled the situation in Britain.

Concluding remarks

The arrival of German Lutheran missionaries in remote and largely monolingual Australia was fortuitous for the recording of Aboriginal languages. The language ideologies of language diversity and language complexity and their linguistic training and language acquisition led the missionaries to contribute to linguistic knowledge through their thorough documentation of Central Australian languages. Through their training and long-term engagement with Aboriginal languages the missionaries were able to provide accurate first-hand information about them. They opposed the social evolutionary view and notions about “primitive languages” at a time when this view was still reflected in the works of Anglophone anthropologists. Carl Strehlow took a firm stand against “primitive languages”, recognising that Aranda was a fully adequate means of communication. The Hermannsburg mission became the base for ongoing linguistic work and the influence of a certain strand of German philology and linguistics in Australia, one which valued languages and had the training and humanistic appreciation of them.

Correspondence

Leonhardi to Strehlow 9-9-05 (Strehlow Research Centre, VL 1905-1-1)

Published references

Bauer, Friedrich. 1850. Grundzüge der neuhochdeutschen Grammatik für höhere Bildungsanstalten und zur Selbstbelehrung für Gebildete. Nördlingen: CH Beck’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung.

Crick, Malcolm. 1976. Explorations in language and meaning: towards a semantic anthropology. London: Malaby Press.

Forster, Michael N. 2010. After Herder: Philosophy of language in the German tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Finnegan, R. 1969. Attitudes to the Study of Oral Literature in British Social Anthropology. Man 4 (N.S): 59-69.

Fuchshuber-Weiß, Elisabeth. 2013. Vor der Übersicht zur Einsicht. In Friedrich Bauer (1812-1874) Pionier in der Weltmission, Wegbereiter des Duden, edited by Claudia Jahnel and Hermann Vorländer, 77-134. Neuendettelsau: Erlanger Verlag für Mission und Ökumene.

Henson, Hilary. 1974. British social anthropologists and language: a history of separate development. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Herder, J.G. 1803. Outlines of a Philosophy of the History of Man. Translated by T. Churchill (ed.) London: J. Johnson/L. Hansard.

Kempe, A. H. 1891. A Grammar and Vocabulary of the language of the natives of the McDonnell ranges. Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia XIV 1-54.

Kenny, Anna. 2013. The Aranda’s Pepa: An introduction to Carl Strehlow’s Masterpiece Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien (1907-1920). Canberra: ANU E Press.

Moore, David. 2014. German Lutheran missionaries and the linguistic landscape of Central Australia 1890–1910. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. Available at: https://hiphilangsci.net/2014/10/02/german-lutheran-missionaries-and-the-linguistic-landscape-of-central-australia-1890-1910

How to cite this post

Moore, David. 2016. Missionary linguistics and the German contribution to Central Australian language research and fieldwork 1890-1910. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2016/10/21/missionary-linguistics-and-the-german-contribution-to-central-australian-language-research-and-fieldwork-1890-1910

Jan David Braun
University of Vienna

Map of Deutscher Volks- und Kulturboden, by Albrecht Penck (design) and Arnold Hillen Ziegfeld (cartographer; Penck 1925: 73).

Introduction

Beginning with the history of cartography, this paper will first discuss the development of spatial thinking in different scientific contexts. It will then deal with the practice of linguistic mapping in German dialectology. As dialectology is by definition the discipline that investigates the spread of language in geographic space, it is clear that we have to consider the connection of geographic and, of course, cartographic disciplines with variety linguistics. Astonishingly, this connection is not yet an established object of research, neither for the history of science nor for the history of cartography. But the links between dialectology, cartography and geography are fundamental, going beyond their common spatial orientation and external — i.e. institutional — circumstances.

This relation is also quite obvious if we consider the various multidisciplinary projects on which linguists and geographers worked together in the 20^th century, along with researchers from other, not primarily linguistic disciplines in the humanities, such as history, ethnology and archaeology. In these Gemeinschaftsarbeiten (community works), as they were later called, various thematic atlases were produced and published that showed the linkage of scientific, political, territorial and expansionist thinking in the period from the 1920s to the 1940s in German dialectology and other disciplines of the humanities. This way of thinking was not some kind of state political instruction coming from “above”: it can be detected in the disciplinary works of both dialectology and geography since the territorial losses after Word War I and the decreased self-esteem of all scientists who called themselves “German” and embraced nationalistic thought. This can also be seen in the shift of 1920s academic geographers from pure physical geography to so-called “cultural geography”, which sought to study the Volksboden (soil of the people) and Kulturboden (soil of the culture). In the resulting Volks- und Kulturbodentheorie (theory of the soil of the people and of the culture), an undeniably political notion emerged in the idea of German Lebensraum (living space) in Eastern Europe, a notion that was motivated and justified by the apparent existence of German settlements in Eastern Europe since the time of the great migrations in the early middle ages. At this point, dialectological research, language historical research etc. came to underpin the expansion of the Third Reich into Eastern Europe.

In order to additionally provide a contemporary insight into current spatial thinking in dialectology, relatively new methodological and theoretical developments in the field will be presented: with the emergence of cognitive maps and the research of perceptual dialectology we can see partly a shift (or theoretical supplement) in the discipline from the problematic image of objective dialect areas to a rather constructivist view consisting of an understanding that attitudes and subjective perception of dialect produce the space that we want to observe and that it is by no means a representation of the “real” space.

Nevertheless, the desideratum of a theoretical and historical reflection of the common but less criticized use of dialect maps and dialect atlases still remains.

1. History of Cartography, Linguistic Cartography and the Nation State

The history of cartography today focuses on the question of maps as instruments for territorial, imperial and expansionist claims or for the stabilization of the hegemonial position of the nation state since its emergence in the 19^th century. As the history of cartography has developed in the past fifty years as an independent discipline (see Buisseret 2010: 223), so has the awareness “that cartography as a primary human activity may be found in virtually every human society […]” (Buisseret 2010: 223). This human activity was indeed perpetuated by imperialism, as is well explained in the book edited by James R. Akerman (2009) The Imperial Map: Cartography and the Mastery of Empire, which gives an overview of cartographic practice from the late 17^th to the early 20^th century. In this work the crucial point of inquiry lies in “imperial mapping”: in the context of imperialism, maps are not only produced as aids to navigation and orientation,[1] but also as a means of gaining power over the spaces staked out on the map. This claim to power also extends to everything which is situated in these spaces: people, (economic) resources and living space.[2]

But the relatively recent construction of the nation state seems in particular to fit well with the instrument of cartographic mapping. In his paper “Putting the State on The Map: Cartography, Territory and European State Formation”, the historian Michael Biggs makes it clear that the term “territory” is linked to the modern state in an epistemological way. Biggs (1999: 375) says that “[t]he state, after all, is a spatial form […].” In reference to a socioeconomic analysis of British state-owned economic developments across the centuries by the sociologist Michael Mann, Biggs says that the main property of the modern nation state has to be a centralized, unitary place, as opposed to the situation in feudal kingdoms.[3] Biggs also makes it clear that modern cartographic practice with the technique of scaling was essential for the production of spatial knowledge which differed from other spatial concepts, such as medieval space conceptions, which were mainly mapless (cf. Biggs 1999: 376):

The formation of the modern state depicted on the map was constituted in part through cartography as a store of knowledge reflecting surveys that rulers sponsored to penetrate the ground over which they ruled; as a spatial form modeled on the map’s linear boundary and homogeneous space; and, in the imagination, as political authority symbolized by territory and the earth’s surface comprehended as a composite of states.
(Biggs 1999: 374)

This epistemological basis of the nation state — the territory as captured by cartography — is also necessary to understand the development of language and dialect cartography. When the librarian Georg Wenker (1852-1911) began his first research in Marburg, Germany, for the Atlas of the German Empire, the empire itself was only five years old (founded in 1871). The goal of his atlas was to assert that the areas covered were not merely a geographical region but that they were united by the German language: the atlas should show the language of the young German empire as a “monument” of the German people. The national focus of this work was not Wenker’s own idea: Wenker was instructed by the new government in Berlin to not only map places where German was spoken (which would have led his research in another direction), but to map every single language and dialect inside the borders of the newly established empire (cf. Auer 2004: 151). As the linguist Peter Auer (2004) points out in his paper “Sprache, Grenze, Raum”, both dialectology and the concept of nation state can be seen as an increase in spatial thinking in terms of territories and borders.[4] German dialectology (in the same way as nationalism) has since its beginning been, as Auer claims, very interested in demarcations and borders, although the spatial concepts themselves were never theoretically elaborated but remained rather naïve (cf. Auer 2004: 151).[5]

A map of the participle gebracht around Karlsruhe in Georg Wenker’s Sprachatlas. Source

But the final decades of the 20^th century and the 21^th century are characterized by an increase in theoretical reflection and a shift in focus in dialectological research: the object of inquiry is no longer the objective area of German dialects, but subjective attitudes concerning dialect and images of dialects (see Krause et al. 2003). Since we are now dealing with questions of prestige and stigma, contemporary dialectology has a much greater sociolinguistic character (see Anders et al. 2010; Purschke 2011) and has left the realm of traditional dialectology, which at times employed sociolinguistic approaches, but was not a social science from the beginning. A new dimension was added through the transfer of methods from psychology, the drawing of cognitive/mental maps, known as “mapping”. Under this approach, linguistically untrained observers are instructed to draw a dialect area or to draw specific areas on an existing map. In these “ethnodialectological practices”, as they are sometimes called,[6] Auer (2004) sees the possibility of realizing that space is a mental construct which governs our perception of reality but is not a simple fact. We must also think about this when we consider language itself: “Nicht die Struktur des Raums schafft sprachliche Unterschiede, sondern unsere dialektalen kognitiven Landkarten sind Ordnungsstrategien, mit denen wir das ‘Chaos’ der Heteroglossie bewältigen” (Auer 2004: 160).

Therefore, such hand drawn maps are used in perceptual psychology, social science and linguistics. In every discipline it is more or less important to observe mental representations and how spatiality is imagined (Kitazawa 1999: 300).

Although there is undoubtedly a shift from objective dialect areas to subjective (language) attitudes, the concept of dialect borders, so-called “isoglosses”, a typical topic of dialectological research from Wenker up to the present day, is not generally considered to be a concept with its origins in 19^th century nationalism. But isoglosses are epistemologically connected with territorial and expansionist thinking and nationalist imagery of space, language, language in space, and the representation of disciplinary knowledge and its concepts in dialect maps with basic territorial maps.[7] In putting language on the map, we create the cartographic and political entities of borders and territories and impose specific epistemological descisions and our conception of language and language varieties. Auer clearly states how the scientific socialization of dialectologists is shaped through this thinking in terms of borders and territories and that

[…] jedem Studienanfänger in der Germanistik [die] vertraute Karte der deutschen Dialekte, aufgebaut [ist] wie geopolitische Karten nach dem Sieg der nationalstaatlichen Idee: Die Sprachkarten zerschneiden den deutschen Sprachraum exhaustiv in Dialektregionen, die intern nicht mehr weiter differenziert werden; gerade so wie zum Beispiel eine politische Europakarte die Staaten eindeutig gegeneinander abgrenzt.
(Auer 2004: 152)

Using the term “geopolitical”, Auer highlights a crucial point in the history of German and Austrian dialectological research: the connection of dialectology to not only geographical but indeed geopolitical thought, geopolitically motivated collective works and multidisciplinary institutions from the 1920s to the 1940s and beyond. Auer, in transcending the naïve idea of objective dialect spaces and simple spatial conceptions clearly understands the suggestive power of mapping languages (or using maps in general) and opens the field to a specific and controversial object of inquiry which was never explored before: the (potential) contiguity of linguistic mapping with so-called “suggestive cartography” (see section 3).

From this point on, the starting point of German philology was the philology of a nation — all the subsequent debates and conflicts in linguistics often depended on the affirmation or rejection of nationalist thought and implications. This can be seen in the early beginnings of dialectological and dialect cartographical research in Austria and Germany, in the different linguistic regional atlases, in different disciplinary and multidisciplinary projects during the period of National Socialism (see section 3), in the history of language, in the so-called Sprachinselforschung (language island research),[8] but also later in the paradigm of pluricentricity,[9] in the debate about multilingualism in Central Europe and so on (see Franceschini 2011).[10]

In addition, the power of socio-political discourses of Europe in general and Central Europe in particular since the founding of nation states after World War I were — and still are — aspects that we should not neglect. Friedrich Naumanns Mitteleuropa, published during World War I in 1915, influenced the idea of a league of states under German control, both military and economically and had its focus on Germany and the Monarchy of Austria-Hungary. Nauman says:

[d]as, wovon ich reden will, ist das Zusammenwachsen derjenigen Staaten, die weder zum englisch-französischen Westbunde gehören noch zum russischen Reiche, vor allem aber ist es der Zusammenschluss des Deutschen Reiches mit der österreichisch-ungarischen Doppelmonarchie, denn alle weiteren Pläne über mitteleuropäische Völkerverbindungen hängen davon ab, ob es gelingt, zuerst die zwei Zentralstaaten selber zusammenzufassen.
(Naumann 1916: 1)[11]

The discourses of nationality and Volkstum are undeniably connected to the question of which language is spoken in the marked areas. It seems astonishing that the basic observation that maps are not just simple tools for representing a territory or, in the case of thematic cartography, of representing other scientific aspects within these spaces (ethnicity, language and so on), but that they also have a very specific way of conceiving of the features shown seems to have been underestimated in the linguistic discipline that revolved around drawing maps. In addition, maps in themselves constitute an independent semiotic system, perhaps even an independent language (see e.g. Du 2003),[12] an epistemic fact that was also often underestimated in linguistic theory, method and practice.

To return to the quotation of Biggs, we have to mention that the so-called homogenous space of the nation state was often conceptualized with the idea of a centralized space which rules or determines the territory. Coming to the 20^th century, we can see different ideas occurring with the same underlying thought: space as an entity linked to the Volk (people) which culminated in the National Socialist formula of Blut und Boden (Blood and soil) or the so-called Zentrale-Orte-Theorie (Central-Space-Theory) of Walter Christaller (1893-1969), a term which gained massive popularity in National Socialist geopolitics and its expansionist efforts and resettlements.[13] Christaller’s ideas oscillated between spatial policies of Großraum (in the East) and Lebensraum and culminated in such plans as the so-called Generalplan Ost (see Barnes & Minca 2013: 671-680). The Zentrale-Orte-Theorie also sought to provide a model for establishing cities as central socio-economic spaces or spaces in terms of interaction.

To understand the different depictions of space conceptions, we have to take a look to German and Austrian geography after 1918. The shrinking of the great Habsburg Empire to a little country called Deutsch-Österreich and the territorial loss of the German Empire in general was a major shock for many German and Austrian scientists, especially those who were active in the humanities. From the debates of the Treaty of Versailles and the rejection of these political events mainly by national conservative currents, we can see a development in German and Austrian geography that involves leaving the realm of physical geography and shifting interest more and more to cultural geography/human geography. As the linguists who investigated the spatial dimension of language were connected with geography, their attitude displays the same shift in ideas influenced by natural science to a more cultural scientific approach. This provided opportunities for multidisciplinary perspectives and the emergence of new branches of research (e.g. the young discipline of Volkskunde)[14] when dealing with linguistic questions, but also led to a more and more völkisch approach. In addition, the research into cultural space (Kulturraumforschung) was not principally a branch of geographic research, but rather maintained by the linguist Theodor Frings and other linguistic researchers. This means that the hard science “geography” gradually became a discipline of the humanities and with it began the connection to all other cultural studies, such as history; European ethnology (Volkskunde); linguistics, especially dialectology; onomastics; language island research and so on.

2. Dialect Borders and Cultural Spaces

The demarcation lines and the concepts of political and territorial history in Germany and Central Europe that were put on the map by German geographers from the 1920s onwards in their work on Volks- und Kulturbodenforschung show undeniable epistemic parallels with the usual language and cultural borders in dialectology. The notion of Kulturraum (cultural space) in linguistic research loosely converged in this period with the geographical notion of the Kulturgrenze (cultural border). But we have to differentiate between two perspectives on borders and language in linguistics. On the one hand, we have concepts about the borders within German dialects (i.e. within the subsystem of the natural language German) and, on the other, language space concepts of different natural languages. The dialectal variation of the German language had a clear focus on German (dialectal) variation within the German language, whereas language spaces of different natural languages corresponded with ideas of culture and nationality. There is an intersection of these two scientific realms through what is known as border languages and border language research (Grenzsprachenforschung) and language island research (Sprachinselforschung), with the metaphor of islands of German language in a sea of foreign language and culture.[15]

Hence the intersection of these two border concepts combined the question of (German) dialects with the question of cultural membership and the spreading of Deutschtum and led to the topic of Volkstum, separating German language from non-German language in the scientific practice of dialectologists and cultural geographers such as Albrecht Penck and his colleagues. The Slavonic parts of Central Europe and Southeast Europe were seen in particular as less civilized areas where German living space could be created. The attitude of discrimination characterized both geographical and dialectological research.[16]

The first kinds of border concepts, the dialect borders, are called isoglosses. These isoglosses of the German dialects were, put simply, mainly defined through the history of language and the development of dialectal varieties. The most important isoglosses of German dialectology are the Benrather Linie, the Speyerer Linie, and the Rheinischer Fächer.

The Benrather Linie seperates the High German area from the Low German area. An example of this division is the word “make”, which has the form maken in Low German and machen in High German. The different appearance of these words is explained by the High German Consonant Shift in the early middle ages, a change in the consonants of Germanic languages where some of the voiceless plosives became fricatives (e.g. p➜f, ship➜schiff), which continues to have a visible influence on the German dialectal landscape up to the present day (see Händler & Wiegand 1982; Niebaum & Macha 2006: 106).

As dialectology has always taken spoken language as its object of study, the main focus in the exploration of isoglosses was on the phonetic and phonological setting of the German language and dialects since the time of the High German Consonant Shift and the settlements of the Germanic tribes — such as Bavarians, Alemanni, Franks — in the early middle ages in Central Europe, from Austria and South Bavaria to east of today’s Germany (see Vogel 2012: 7). From the beginning of dialectology with Wenker’s Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reiches to the time of National Socialism these tribes and their original settlement areas were assumed to exist right up to the present. This evoked the idea of a historical continuity of German settlement in Central Europe since the time of the (late) migration period. We could legitimately ask why the names of the dialects and the dialect spaces are still influenced by this mainly historicist paradigm, whose terminological and methodological roots go back to the time of the establishment of the German Empire.[17] Of course it is no coincidence that the successor of Georg Wenker and the Deutscher Sprachatlas, Ferdinand Wrede, stated that the historical atlas has to be the most important instrument for the dialectologist (for Wrede’s position, see Wiesinger 1999: 296).

At this point we have to mention the Volks- und Kulturbodenforschung, mainly characterized by the German geographer Albrecht Penck (1858-1945), who was introduced above. This kind of human geography as a part of cultural studies had its beginning in national conservative discourses in the early 1900s. The term Volksboden implied the idea of the soil where Germans had their original area of settlements. However, the term Kulturboden is a bit more complex (and also ambiguous):

Ähnlich wie mit dem Begriff des ‘Volksbodens’ verhielt es sich zur gleichen Zeit mit dem Begriff des ‘Kulturbodens’. Allerdings war dieser Begriff weit vielschichtiger, da er einerseits als Bezeichnung für das agronomische Potential des Bodens für die landwirtschaftliche Nutzung, andererseits als Synonym für ‘Kulturlandschaft’ und schließlich darauf aufbauend auch im Zusammenhang mit den nationalen Konflikten innerhalb der Habsburgermonarchie als Schlagwort bzw. Kampfbegriff verwendet wurde. Von nationalliberalen und vor allem deutschnationalen Akteuren, wurde mit diesem Begriff der Topos eines vermeintlich dominierenden historischen Einflusses der Deutschen auf die Generierung einer spezifischen Kulturlandschaft beschworen. Dieser Topos war zugleich mit territorialen Machtansprüchen verknüpft, der sich mehrheitlich gegen die panslawistischen Bestrebungen richtete.
(Henniges 2015: 1314)

Language island and border language research was followed particularly closely by national conservative efforts to label regions outside Germany as German Volksboden/Kulturboden and to gain the upper hand over contested language borders (see Henniges 2015: 1313). Above all the Habsburg Empire, with its complicated language situation, raised questions of language policy from the late 19^th century onwards (see Henniges 2015: 1313).

Dialect map, Anton Pfalz (1939: 145). The map shows the spread of dialectal consonants and vowels in Austria and the Sudetenland after 1938. It is interesting that the map does not show the Austrian Gaue, even though it is from the year 1939 (the separation of the Gaue was adopted on 14 April 1939 through the Ostmarkgesetz).

As Albrecht Penck himself comments, the borders of Germany after 1918 are not enough to explain Deutschtum as a whole: “Sowohl das alte bis 1806 bestehende Deutsche Reich als auch das neue Reich Bismarcks griffen hier über die 606000 Quadratkilometer […] deutschen Volksbodens hinaus”, and so, says Penck, there is a difficulty in the “Begrenzung eines rein nationalen Deutschland” (Penck 1925: 62-63).

Penck’s maps often seem like hybrids of different topics of thematic cartography. His so-called Volkstumskarten (ethnographical maps) often showed aspects and statistical data about language or religion.[18]

Penck also worked together with the creator of so-called “suggestive cartography”, Arnold Hillen Ziegfeld, who established a kind of cartography that made it clear that the use of maps has to be an explicit political enterprise.

As Ziegfeld himself says, suggestive maps are indisputably connected with geopolitics: “Das heißt […], daß die Kartenarbeit nur als eine politische Aufgabe gelöst werden kann, so wie sie es ihrem Wesen nach ist” (Ziegfeld 1935: 247). In addition to the journal Geopolitik, Ziegfeld also drew maps for the journal Volk und Reich (see Prehn 2010). It is still an open question whether such suggestive maps were the blueprints of some dialect maps or other language maps. If so, we can consider the main parts of dialectology of the whole 20^th century to be predicated on explicit political and politically intended thoughts and space conceptions.

The works of the dialectologist Theodor Frings (1886-1968) spurred on Kulturraumforschung, an extralinguistic approach to dialect cartography in which it was assumed that cultural space is convergent with language space and that non-linguistic factors (interaction, settlement and territorial changes) have significantly influenced the development of German dialects across centuries (see Niebaum & Macha 2006: 99). Frings, together with the historian Hermann Aubin (1885-1969), worked on the historical and linguistic landscape of the Rhineland (see Wiesinger 1999: 295-296).[19] Hermann Aubin established the Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde (ADV), a project to collect and visualize linguistic, folkloristic and cultural aspects of German life, which was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft from the 1920s to 1980s. Aubin is well known in the history of science due to his heavy involvement in National Socialist Ostforschung. For example, he declared Poland nothing more than a German cultural landscape and developed a doctrine that promoted the resettlement of Polish and Jewish people (see Klee 2003: 20-21).

3. Words, Things and Atlases: Political Implications and Multidisciplinarity

Among the numerous kinds of thematic atlases that emerged in the 20^th century was the linguistic atlas, which attempted to visualize and map the results of linguistic research. The dialect maps contained in such atlases were mainly maps of different lexemes or maps showing the spread of variant vowels and consonants. The first atlas of this kind, Wenker’s Deutscher Sprachatlas, was begun in the late 1870s, but the publication of the whole atlas started only in the 1920s and went on into the 1950s (see Deutscher Sprachatlas 2016). In addition, a special form of atlas was promoted: the multidisciplinary atlas, combining different kinds of disciplines of the humanities such as geography, history, linguistics, anthropology and ethnology (Volkskunde). The young discipline of Raumforschung (see Svatek 2009b; Svatek 2015) in particular facilitated a multidisciplinary perspective, as Petra Svatek showed with the example of the Viennese geographer Hugo Hassinger. Hassinger established the Südostdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (SODFG) in 1931 in order to further and to legitimize the extension of this work into Southeast Europe, even though he had no clear definition of what Southeast Europe should be and which countries and nations the term should include. Proclaiming Vienna “the gate to the South-East”, Hassinger built a great career under National Socialism, even though he never became a member of the NSDAP. He was active in several different origanizations, such as the Südosteuropagegesellschaft (SOG), the AG-Raumforschung of the University of Vienna and the AG-Raumforschung der Wiener Hochschulen. His collaborators in such multidisciplinary efforts were mainly members of different disciplines of the humanities (see Svatek 2010b: 113-138). The linguistic researchers who were active in Hassingers network (which went beyond Austria due to its connections to Germany and the Southeast) were mainly dialectologists.[20]

After World War II, Hassinger played a leading role in the reconstruction of Vienna and was the leader of a scientific commission of the Austrian Academy of Science handling reconstruction efforts (see Svatek 2010a: 291).

Comparable connections of dialectology, Volkskunde and Raumforschung can be detected in Austria with the Burgenlandatlas, a multidisciplinary atlas of the 1930s which was promoted through financial resources of Nazi Germany long before the Anschluss (see Svatek 2009a). The atlas was published in 1941, edited by Fritz Bodo and Hugo Hassinger. A lot of the scientist who worked on the atlas were already National Socialists in the period when the party was outlawed in Austria and then, after the Anschluss, had important roles in scientific institutions of the humanities.[21]

For example, two dialectologists who worked on the Burgenlandatlas later worked on the Gauatlas Niederdonau, an atlas which provided a new geographic outlook on Austria, now ruled by National Socialists, with the focus on lower Austria. A map created by the Viennese dialectologist and pre-Anschluss National Socialist Anton Pfalz (1885-1958) and geographer Egon Lendl (1906-1989) visualize the deutsche Volksboden, which converges with the spaces of the German tribes (the Stammesräume; cf. Bodo Fritz, Hassinger & Hugo 1941: 1-2.). Other maps in this atlas offer a rather folkloristic look on German life, language and settlement. Still to this day there is a huge output of linguistic atlases, also with a folkloristic approach, such as the Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz (AIS).

The dimension of cultural objects/objects of cultural practice is something that leads with a detour to cartography. In the Deutsche Volkskunde at the beginning of the 20th century it was common to describe material culture together with dialectal words; as mentioned before, these ideas culminated in such great efforts as the Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde (ADV). The historian Friedemann Schmoll published a book about this work that was financially supported by the German Research Association (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft; see Schmoll 2009).

The atlas was not only influenced by the current of words and things (Wörter- und Sachen-Bewegung; cf. Meringer 1904/1905; Schuchardt 1912), which observed the folklorist-cultural dependence of words and their objects of reference.[22] It also showed epistemic, structural and personal intersections with (linguistic) atlas projects other than the Deutsche Sprachatlas (DSA) in Marburg and specific politicized projects in the period of National Socialism; for example, with the connection to the two leaders of the Sprachatlas from 1933, Walter Mitzka and Bernhard Martin. In their work of the 1930s and 1940s, both offer the formula that language is equal to Volkstum and with it the importance of German settlement, German-ruled areas and of a sprachliche Raumgewinnung (Auer 2004: 156).[23] From this evolved an explicitly völkisch and expansionist approach. In addition, Martin was in contact with the Reichsarbeitsgemeinschaft für Raumforschung (RAG; Becker 2005: 107), a spatial planning institution for Southeast Europe. Martin was also the leader of the department Volkssprache in the Reichsgemeinschaft für Deutsche Volksforschung (Becker 2005: 195).

The question of what politics or policy in these contexts really mean or could mean is something that I want to explain with reference to two different theoretical approaches, those of the authors Volker Roelcke and Mitchell G. Ash.

Volker Roelcke explained his plea for a political-historical epistemology in an approach that seeks to transcend the historical epistemology of the historian of science Hans-Jörg Rheinberger. For Roelcke “[d]ie zentrale Hypothese […] besteht darin, dass die systematisierte Einbeziehung und Reflexion der politischen Dimension bei der Produktion von neuem Wissen in den Wissenschaften für ein angemessenes Verständnis vieler historischer Phänomene unverzichtbar ist” (Roelcke 2010: 177). Hence the political aspects not only of scientific knowledge, but of knowledge production in general are a crucial point of his claim. Reading Mitchell G. Ash, we can see that science and policy can be seen as resources for one another — cognitive, conceptional or institutional resources (see Ash 2006: 25; Ash 2002) — and that we can identify, as Ash suggests, a pluralistic meaning of policy: the great policy, policy in a rather narrow sense (e.g. cultural policy) and policy of the small (power relationships in institutions etc.; see Ash 2006: 21-22).

There are three examples in dialectology of the early 20^th century where we can see the implicit political aspect in a quite transparent way: first, the inquiry of the language islands of Central Europe and Southeast-Europe (Czechoslovakia, Slovenia, Italy, Romania); second, the linguistic inquiry of politically contested border spaces like the Rhineland, the territories of Austria at the border of the Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia; and third the lack of inquiry of the non-European language islands (e.g. Brazil, USA etc.) which were not of interest to the agenda of expansion because of the geographical distance.

4. Conclusion

To date there has been much discipline-internal study of the history of language and dialect cartography, but it has not yet been drawn into the ambit of the history of science. This is necessary in order to write an adequate and comprehensive history of cartography. Not only is the historical context of the formation of mapping language and mapping dialects in the 19^th century connected with nationalism and political space concepts (which led to an expansionist, political and ideological climax in the 20^th century in the context of the two World Wars), but also the continuity of method and practice of linguistic mapping in dialectology to this day makes it clear that mapping is an important instrument which should be reflected on in different disciplines to enhance a multidisciplinary perspective on these visualizing strategies of linguistic knowledge.

If we focus on dialectology in the time of National Socialism we have to rethink the position of German linguistics in the Third Reich. This particular discipline, which was open to other linguistic approaches and was less specialized in the first half of the 20^th century (see Ehlers 2010: 27), was not only the product of völkisch and national conservative currents since the 1920s, but was indeed the supporting force for expansionist thought and National Socialist geopolitics.[24] With its per se spatial approach the discipline provided the space concepts of propagandistic Volkstumsforschung, border and space policy and offered at the same time a scientific vindication of them. It functioned as a fundamental mainspring of language policy concerning Eastern Europe and other contested areas.

With its focus on aspects of the historical and spatial development of (German) language, an epistemic bridge was built between geography and language issues that worked together with instruments of cultural geography. Connections to suggestive cartography can be detected, but still require detailed research.

Notes

[1] Akerman also highlighted the very specific practice of not only producing maps, but also collecting them in atlases, thereby providing a social meaning with this collective work whilst structuring the perception of these contents. Besides, “Atlas structure — the architecture of the selection, arrangement, and design of the maps — manipulates political territory chiefly by manipulating regions: identifying them, defining their limits, moving them around, enlarging and contracting them, and giving them political meaning within the two-tiered space of a book” (Akerman 1995: 139).

[2] “Living space” is a heavily loaded term in German: Lebensraum was a rhetorical resource whose roots lie in Friedrich Ratzel’s work in the 19^th century. It was later often used by national conservative currents and by the National Socialists (see Barnes & Minca 2013).

[3] See also Mann (1986: 123), who says that “[…] the power of the state is irreducible in quite a different socio-spatial and organizational sense. Only the state is inherently centralized over a delimited territory over which it has authorative power.”

[4] Auer is talking about the ideology of the nation state (see Auer 2004: 150). Historically, I guess, it would be better not to understand the “young” concept of the nation state in the 19^th century as an ideology, but rather (neutrally) as a newly emerging political conception. The critique of nationalism as an ideology is legitimate if we observe historical events of the last decades, but misses its aim if projected to events centuries ago.

[5] Auer says that today the ideas of language spaces in dialectology are still very naïve and lack a complex theoretical foundation. Indeed, the new conceptualizations of space in modern physics since the beginning of the 20^th century as well as the term “spatial turn” of cultural studies were never received in dialectology, and so all of “traditional dialectology” was searching for objective dialect spaces whilst employing quasi-scientific terms.

[6] For an extended description of the term ethnodialectology, see Spiekermann & Anders (2012).

[7] These maps are the visualizations of dialectological knowledge. The area of spread of dialects can be seen as the epistemisches Ding (epistemic thing), i.e. the entity under examination, not yet discovered or interpreted. The dialect map was then the carried out technisches Ding (technical thing) of linguistic-spatial knowledge about the spread of language in space. For the terms epistemisches/technisches Ding, see Rheinberger (1992).

[8] The term Sprachinselforschung has been replaced in the last few decades with the term Sprachkontaktforschung and focuses now on the idea of the contact of different languages. The problem with the term “language island” is that this metaphor evokes the image of an encapsuled entity in a foreign sea which can be and of course was put into the service of political agendas.

[9] The paradigm of pluricentricity is applied especially in the discussion of the German language: “Den Kern des ‘plurinationalen’ Paradigmas stellt das Postulat von staatsspezifisch distinkten Erscheinungsformen der deutschen Standardsprache dar, die – auf Basis der Gleichsetzung von ‘Staat’ und ‘Nation’ – als ‘Nationalvarietäten’ (bzw. ‘nationale Varietäten’) bezeichnet werden“ (Glauninger 2007/2011: 1).

[10] For Franceschini there is not only a multilgual co-existence in the area of Europe that involves migrant languages, national languages, sign languages and so on, but also an empirically examined interactional aspect.

[11] The economic aspect in these discourses about Central Europe should not be underestimated, as is demonstrated by non-gonvernmental but economically influential protagonists, such as private think tanks that deal with the Central European economic zone. For a historical inquiry of these ideas of Central Europe, see the broad-ranging examination of Central Europe and Southeast Europe as a planning zone during the World Wars (including also Southeast Europe) in Sachse (2010). This work not only shows the theoretical discourses of Central Europe in the period of the World Wars, but explains their expression in specific socio-economic concepts and entrepreneurship. These early approaches of a huge German zone (Greater Germany) were later used as a point of reference and realized with the Anschluss of Austria onto the Third Reich. A more detailed discussion of the Anschluss-movement is not possible in this paper.

[12] Du takes the inverse approach, not coming from linguistics, but from the discipline of environmental science and geography. In linguistic paradigms Du sees the chance to add new aspects to the realm of geographic information systems (GIS) and the question of the semioticity of maps.

[13] These resettlements in Central Europe are discussed by Barnes and Minca as a process of deterritorialization with subsequent re-territorialization (see Barnes & Minca 2013: 672).

[14] The first official position for Volkskunde at a university in Germany was established in the year 1933 (see Schmoll 2009: 47).

[15] The metaphor of language and water was often used, e.g. in the Wellentheorie (wave theory), a linguistic theory of the development of language and the interference of different Indo-European languages. Similar to the movement of waves, languages would interfere with each other and would decrease with the passage of time. For the wave theory, see Höfler (1955).

[16] The disparagement of Slavonic languages and Slavonic people is a huge chapter of German science in the early 20^th century, but cannot be treated explicitly in this paper.

[17] For the term “historicism”, see Kiesewetter & Popper (2003). For Popper, historicism is a form of belief that assumes the possibility of historical prediction. If so, we could predict the direction of societies historically which was part of ideologies in different totalitarian regimes.

[18] The connection of such maps and language statistics and the relationship of population politics and language policy is very important, but unfortunately I cannot go further into the topic here.

[19] It is irritating that the dialectologist Peter Wiesinger conceals the clearly political aspects of the Kulturraumforschung of Aubin and Frings. Considering the cultural-political meaning of the Atlas der Rheinprovinz (1920), this lack of awareness is astonishing given that the Rhineland was a contested area in 1919 with its occupation through French and Belgian troops. In the face of Aubin’s deep Involvement in the NS-Ostforschung the expungement of political aspects is not only a strange move, but distorts the image of Hermann Aubin as a scientist and affects (and trivializes) the perception of Frings as well.

[20] For example, Anton Pfalz, Professor at the University of Vienna and the leader of the Wiener Wörterbuchkanzei (Academy of Science) since 1920 (see Fengler 2013: 238; Svatek 2010b: 124), Walter Steinhauser, another member of the university teaching people in Vienna and also working at the Wörterbuchkanzlei (see Fengler 2013: 249; Ranzmaier 2010: 430; Svatek 2010b: 114), Erich Gierach from the University of Munich (Svatek 2010b: 115), Franz J. Beranek who observed the dialects in Moravia and was later known for his involvement in National Socialist Judenforschung (see Svatek 2010b: 115; Steinweis 2008: 152-156), Hans Karner who had his focus on the dialects of the Burgenland (see Svatek 2010b: 115). The ethnological perspective was represented through such scientists as Kurt Wilvonseder (see Svatek 2010b: 125), Richard Wolfram (see Svatek 2010b: 124) and Arthur Haberlandt (Svatek 2010b: 124).

[21] Collaborators on the atlas were Fritz Bodo, Hugo Hassinger, Otto Brunner, Arthur Haberlandt, Anton Pfalz, Walter Steinhauser, Kurt Wilvonseder, Ernst Klebel, Viktor Lebzelter, Egon Lendl and others (see Bodo Fritz, Hassinger & Hugo 1941).

[22] This material dimension is something that can be interpreted as a carrier of traditional knowledge, which could perhaps be seen as opposed to scientific knowledge. This traditional knowledge, recorded in physical objects, is something that can be seen as a space of both phenomenological and literal meaning (see Safier 2010: 139). The contemporary Anglo-American material culture studies are disciplines which examine the material dimension of cultural goods and museum artefacts (see Thiemeyer 2011: 6).

[23] See Wilking (2003: 103-122), who talks in particular about Mitzkas involvement in the Kriegseinsatz der Geisteswissenschaften.

[24] This cannot be seen as enslavement from above, nor should it be interpreted in the sense of little political indiscretions of otherwise apolitical people or contexts. Political implications of dialectological terms and concepts of traditional dialectology are sedimented (to use a ground metaphor) deep into methods and theory. This does not mean that these concepts are non-scientific: the problem is rather ignoring the serious connection of scientific (dialectological) knowledge and political contexts as science is always influenced by society and time. A lot of dialectologists were serious scientists (in the context of their time) but had very problematic political positions as well. Authors like Eberhard Kranzmayer, Anton Pfalz, Bernhard Martin and Walther Mitzka were not only important persons for science policy, but also led volkstumswissenschaftliche institutions such as the Institut für Kärntner Landesforschung, a departement of the SS-Ahnenerbe (Eberhard Kranzmayer led this institution; see Bockhorn 2010: 209), as collaborators on political atlases or in the context of the Volksdeutschen Forschungsgemeinschaften (Anton Pfalz in the Südostdeutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft-SODFG and the Alpenländische Forschungsgemeinschaft-AFG; see Fürst 2012: 180), in the context of structuring the universities after National Socialist ideas and so on.

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Roelcke, Volker (2010): Auf der Suche nach der Politik in der Wissensproduktion: Plädoyer für eine historisch-politische Epistemologie. In Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte (33), pp. 176–192.

Sachse, Carola (2010): “Mitteleuropa” und “Südosteuropa” als Planungsraum. Wirtschafts- und kulturpolitische Expertisen im Zeitalter der Weltkriege. Göttingen: Wallstein (Diktaturen und ihre Überwindung im 20. und 21. Jahrhundert, Bd. 4).

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How to cite this post

Braun, Jan David. 2016. Mapping Language: linguistic cartography as a topic for the history of science. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2016/11/03/mapping-language/

Chloé Laplantine
UMR 7597 – Laboratoire Histoire des Théories Linguistiques, Université Paris Diderot

F. Boas posant en train de représenter un chasseur de phoque inuit (Minden, Allemagne, 1885)

As we require a new point of view now, so future times will require new points of view and for these the texts, and ample texts, must be made available.[1]
Comme nous avons besoin d’un nouveau point de vue maintenant, et de la même manière les temps futurs auront besoin de nouveaux points de vue et pour ceux-là les textes, et beaucoup de textes, doivent être rendus accessibles.

En dehors de l’ouvrage Primitive art (traduit en 2003), l’œuvre de Franz Boas n’a jusqu’à maintenant pas été traduite en français[2]. La réception du travail de Boas en France est très mince et réservée certainement aux étudiants en ethnologie (ce qui participe aussi à la réduction de l’envergure de cette œuvre). Dans son article « Histoire et ethnologie » (1949), qui deviendra l’introduction de Anthropologie structurale, Claude Lévi Strauss avait donné à lire en traduction différents passages de textes de Boas. Mais en dehors de cet important écho, et de cet effort de passage en français, Boas reste en France un inconnu lu en anglais et par bribes. Pour ce qui est de sa réflexion linguistique, il est celui qui parle de la neige, et des phoques.

F. Boas a ré-organisé l’étude des langues amérindiennes (à la suite du Major J.W. Powell), en établissant une méthode neuve d’analyse, et l’« Introduction » du Handbook (texte de 83 pages) est le texte-manifeste de ce projet, dans lequel il enrôle ses disciples et collègues. L’une des nouveautés du projet linguistique de Boas est l’abandon du modèle de la grammaire latine, pour une grammaire analytique écrite depuis le point de vue amérindien : the grammar has been treated as though an intelligent Indian was going to develop the forms of his own thoughts by ananalysis of his own form of speech. (p.81[3]) – « la grammaire a été traitée comme si un Indien intelligent se mettait à développer les formes de ses propres pensées par une analyse de sa propre forme de discours ».

Le travail de traduction rend inévitablement sensible à la manière d’écrire d’un auteur. Chez Franz Boas, cette manière d’écrire n’est pas séparable de la manière d’aborder les problèmes. En lisant et traduisant l’« Introduction » du Handbook of American Indian Languages (travail en collaboration avec Andrew Eastman), on remarque que la théorie du point de vue que Franz Boas développe, et qui constitue un argument majeur contre les théories racistes ou banalement ethnocentriques de son époque, n’est pas séparable d’une écriture du point de vue.

L’anglais n’est pas la langue native de Boas ; son anglais n’est ni idiomatique ni esthétique (à tel point que la traduction peut être difficile car on traduit un anglais un peu limité), néanmoins, aussi limité qu’il soit, répétitif, aussi lourd parfois, on doit reconnaître que la manière d’écrire de Boas est la mise en œuvre et l’enseignement d’une méthodologie du travail en sciences humaines et qu’on aurait du mal à vouloir qu’elle soit différente.

Croquis d’un iceberg par F. Boas, 28 juillet 1883.

Une pensée et une écriture du point de vue.

Le point de départ de l’ « Introduction » du Handbook est la discussion des théories qui tentent de classer l’humanité selon des critères de types physique, de langues, de coutumes, de cheveux etc. Le premier geste de Boas est de rendre compte de ces classifications en tant que « tentatives » (attempts) et d’introduire la notion de « points de vue » (points of view), ou celle de « considération » (consideration), travaillant à donner une perspective d’analyse historique et épistémologique aux recherches anthropologiques, et en premier lieu à la sienne propre.

Ainsi, nous pouvons lire

The attempts that have thus been made have led to entirely different results. Blumenbach, one of the first scientists who attempted to classify mankind, first distinguished five races – the Caucasian, Mongolian, Ethiopian, American, and Malay. It is fairly clear that this classification is based as much on geographical as on anatomical considerations […] (p.7)

Ces différentes tentatives ont conduit à des résultats entièrement différents. Blumenbach, un des premiers scientifiques qui a tenté de classifier l’humanité, distingua d’abord cinq races – la caucasienne, la mongolienne, l’éthiopienne, l’américaine et la malaise. Il est assez clair que cette classification est fondée autant sur des considérations géographiques qu’anatomiques […]

ou, un peu plus loin :

The most typical attempt to classify mankind from a consideration of both anatomical and linguistic points of view is that of Friederich [sic] Müller […] (p.7)

La tentative la plus typique de classification de l’humanité à partir de points de vue à la fois anatomiques et linguistiques est celle de Friedrich Müller […]

De théorie du point de vue, de distance et d’auto-analyse, évidemment, les théories racistes n’en n’ont pas. Aussi, dans les premières pages de l’« Introduction », Boas travaille-t-il à démonter, par l’examen de cas précis, les a priori des idéologies racistes qui cherchent à faire se correspondre (dans l’origine) un type physique, une langue et des coutumes. Boas n’hésite pas à exprimer de la prudence même par rapport à ce qu’il dit lui-même, comme pour donner une leçon de démarche scientifique à ceux qui n’en ont pas : « Without historical evidence this process can not, of course, be proved ».

Boas écrit un discours d’hypothèse et non un discours de vérité : If this is true, then it is obvious […] (p.11), et à propos du « problème Aryen » : If this be true, then a problem like the much discussed Aryan problem really does not exist, because the problem is primarily a linguistic one (p.11) – « Si cela est vrai, alors un problème tel que le très controversé problème aryen n’existe vraiment pas, parce que ce problème est essentiellement d’ordre linguistique, relatif à l’histoire des langues aryennes […] ».

Boas met en avant dans l’« Introduction » du Handbook une pensée et une écriture du point de vue. La notion de « point de vue » (point of view) apparaît à de nombreuses reprises[4], aussi sous la forme « vue » (view)[5], views[6] (par exemple, our religious views ; our scientific views ; the views and customs of the peoples of the world. Il va jusqu’à construire des objets théoriques nouveaux : « le point de vue indien » (the indian point of view, p.59), ou bien l’idée d’une projection linguistique : « du point de vue d’une autre langue » (from the point of view of another language, p.26).

La mise en avant du regard n’est pas particulière à Boas, on la retrouve chez son contemporain Ferdinand de Saussure pour qui le point de vue CREE l’objet, on la retrouve en art dès la seconde partie du 19^e siècle (en littérature comme dans les arts visuels) où l’intérêt est porté sur l’observation du mouvement davantage que sur les choses mêmes. Boas a aussi en commun avec Boas la notion d’« arbitraire » (arbitrary), qui est continue à la notion de point de vue.

Les objets d’étude du linguiste ne sont pas conçus comme des réalités essentielles mais comme des objets représentés, analysés par un regard formé.

Boas parle de ce qui s’est fait avant lui comme de « tentatives » (attempts), mais l’approche qu’il développe n’est pas moins présentée également comme une ébauche appelant sa poursuite. La forme des grammaires des différents volumes du Handbook en est peut-être la meilleure illustration. Les descriptions des langues ne constituent pas du tout des grammaires totalisantes (sur le modèle de la grammaire latine), elles posent davantage des problèmes ordonnés par l’originalité de la langue abordée.

Masque Kwakiutl dessiné par F. Boas, avec notes.

Boas aborde la question de la phonologie des langues amérindiennes en s’intéressant à la question de la « perception » des sons par les auditeurs étrangers. Son article « On alternating sounds »[7] en 1889, examinait la théorie selon laquelle les sons des langues amérindiennes seraient imprécis, prenant parfois tel ou tel aspect, cette singularité (ce daltonisme) étant le révélateur d’un état primitif de ces langues. Pour Boas, il s’agit uniquement d’un phénomène de perception (apperception, to apperceive, termes-clé de l’article) :

« Ceci peut s’expliquer seulement par le fait que chacun perçoit les sons inconnus par le biais des sons de sa propre langue » – This can be explained only by the fact that each apperceives the unknown sounds by the means of the sounds of his own language[8]

et plus loin :

« que l’alternance des sons est en réalité une alternance de perceptions » – that alternating sounds are in reality alternating apperceptions of one and the same sound[9].

Dans l’introduction du Handbook, Boas reprend cette même approche du problème de la phonologie des langues amérindiennes, et introduit l’idée de « système de sons » :

« Ce qui prouve peut-être le plus clairement la justesse de cette interprétation de la phonétique indienne est le fait que des observateurs qui sont de nationalités différentes auront tendance à percevoir les sons selon le système de sons qui leur est familier » – The correctness of this interpretation of Indian phonetics is perhaps best proved by the fact that observers belonging to different nationalities readily perceive the sounds in accordance with the system of sounds with which they are familiar. (p.18)

Une écriture modalisée.

Un trait prégnant de l’écriture de Boas est la modalisation de son discours. Il ne met pas en place un discours de vérité, mais rend le lecteur attentif à une distanciation critique, au rapport réflexif à son propre discours. Il serait intéressant de comparer sur ce point son écriture à celle de ses contemporains, pour mesurer à quel point il s’agit ou non d’un trait original. Une des expressions récurrentes est it seems (par exemple, it seems fairly evident (p.26); It seems desirable to consider (p.8); They seem to have adopted (p.9); It seems most plausible (p.9-10), etc.). De même, la distance d’un travail d’observation est exprimée de manière répétée par le verbe to appear : par exemple « ce qui apparaît comme une seule idée simple » – what appears as a single simple idea (p.26), ou encore « Il apparaît ainsi que d’un point de vue pratique, aussi bien que théorique, l’étude du langage doit être considérée comme une des branches les plus importantes de l’étude ethnologique » – Thus it appears that from practical, as well as from theoretical, points of view, the study of language must be considered as one of the most important branches of ethnological study (p.73).

D’autres expressions abondent : it may (it may be said (p.8) ; it may be added (p.14), etc.), ou it might (It might seem that speech (p.27) ; it might seem that a word like stone is a natural unit (p.28). Les expressions modalisées par will sont fréquentes également : it will be seen, it will be recognized.

Lorsque Boas donne des exemples, il écrit que tel exemple « pourra être donné » (may be given), ou, toujours en renvoyant à un travail d’observation, il écrit « nous trouvons / nous voyons » (we find) :

« Pour donner un exemple de ce genre, nous constatons que, dans les langues les plus diverses de la côte Nord du Pacifique, les ordres sont donnés sous la forme périphrastique Il serait bon si tu faisais ainsi ». – To give an instance of this kind, we find that, in the most diverse languages of the North Pacific coast, commands are given in the periphrastic form, It would be good if you did so and so. (p.48)

« Pour n’en mentionner que quelques-uns : nous trouvons les objets classifiés selon le sexe, ou comme animés et inanimés, ou selon la forme ». – To mention only a few: we find objects classified according to sex, or as animate and inanimate, or according to form. (p.67)

Le pronom we est fréquent, le I également (pour exprimer le doute ou la prudence ; par exemple, I believe that it may be safely said (p.12), I doubt very much (p. 30), etc.). Aussi peut-on être étonnés par rapport à ces formes personnelles de la concurrence des tournures impersonnelles et passives (qui passent d’ailleurs très mal en français) et qui sembleraient au contraire ne pas mettre en avant l’observateur, mais chercher une sorte de neutralité. Mais, néanmoins, lorsqu’on lit des phrases telle Thus it will be seen that the concept of a linguistic family can not be sharply defined (p.58) – « On voit ainsi que le concept de famille linguistique ne peut pas être défini de manière nette », l’accent est mis sur will et seen, sur les modalités d’approche des réalités. Et peut-être même que le it qu’on voit revenir avec les verbes modaux, les tournures passives ou les expressions it is possible, it is obvious, etc., n’est pas une forme impersonnelle. Dans le dialogue avec son lecteur, ce it devient peut-être une forme transpersonnelle, comme le « on » en français.

Kwknma (petit hibou), croquis d’un masque Bella Coola par Boas (1923)

Notes

[1] Lettre à de F. Boas à W. H. Holmes du 24 juillet 1905, Archives du Bureau of American Ethnology.

[2] Une anthologie de textes de Boas doit paraître prochainement chez Flammarion (sous la direction d’Isabelle Kalinowski et Camille Joseph) et la traduction de l’ « Introduction » du Handbook of American Indian Languages (sous la direction de Andrew Eastman et Chloé Laplantine) devrait paraître courant 2017.

[3] Les références renvoient à l’édition originale, Handbook of American Indian Languages, Vol. 1, Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40. Washington, Government Print Office (Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology), 1911.

[4] p. 5, 6, 7, 11, 14, 18, 24, 26, 28, 36, 40, 53, 59, 66, 70, 71, 73.

[5] p. 16, 18, 64, 65, 71, 75.

[6] p. 59, 70, 72, 73, 81.

[7] F. Boas, « On alternating sounds », American Anthropologist, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Jan., 1889), pp. 47-54.

[8] Ibid, p. 51.

[9] Ibid., p. 52.

How to cite this post

Laplantine, Chloé. 2017. La langue de Boas. Quelques remarques à propos de l’écriture de Franz Boas. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2017/02/16/la-langue-de-boas

Bart Karstens
University of Amsterdam

In recent historiography an upsurge in interest in the interaction between academic disciplines can be seen. This is in no small part due to the rise of the history of humanities as a specialized field of study.[1] On the one hand, writing a comprehensive history of the humanities is motivated by the idea that in some sense the humanistic disciplines form a whole and without general perspectives we cannot gain a proper understanding of the history of the separate disciplines that together constitute the humanistic spectrum.[2] On the other hand, there is the broader aim to integrate the history of the humanities with mainstream history of science and for this to happen the history of humanities should first become clearly recognizable as a respectable field of study. We are still a long way off from an integrated historiography of all knowledge-making disciplines, as the humanities have been largely neglected in historiography of science, and this attitude is not easy to overcome.[3]

An integrated picture may emerge through an analysis of connections between knowledge-making disciplines that have been established in the past. These connections are ultimately the result of the epistemic transfer of ideas, methods, experimental practices, teaching models, etc. Consider the case of the encounter between Roman Jakobson and Claude Lévi-Strauss in New York in 1941, where both were in exile at the time. As is well known, Lévi-Strauss acquired the structuralist method of analyzing kinship relations through his contact with Jakobson, who had been among the founders of structuralism in linguistics.[4] Consequently, structuralism had an enormous impact on anthropology, and from there also on a host of other disciplines. It is thus impossible to gain a proper understanding of modern anthropology without taking into account the epistemic transfer that took place between linguistics and anthropology in the 1940s.

The history of linguistics may potentially serve as a useful laboratory to study the interaction between disciplines, as the past has shown abundant cross-over between linguistics and a great variety of other fields, including biology, philosophy, computer science and psychology (to name just a few), with linguistics being on both the sending and receiving end of communication. This has of course not gone unnoticed in historiography of the language sciences, but may gain renewed importance when put in broader perspective.[5] The expertise of historians of linguistics can in this way also potentially reach a wider audience. Moreover, our analysis and assessment of the importance of the relation(s) between linguistics and other disciplines may still be incomplete. An example is the birth of historical and comparative linguistics in the 19^th century. About this Morpurgo Davies writes: “In Germany, but also elsewhere, organic metaphors are often accompanied by references to the natural sciences and/or to the scientific character of the new linguistics. How important is the connection? How much did Friedrich Schlegel and his followers know about the sciences? How influential were these in the development of the new linguistics? A full enquiry is still a desideratum.”[6]

Another desideratum presents itself on a historiographical level. We are still in need of a satisfactory approach that can capture the full scope of the interaction of knowledge-making disciplines. At the University of Amsterdam, a 4-year research project started in 2016 that has a primary focus on what we call ‘the flow of cognitive goods’. ‘Cognitive goods’ is an umbrella term that was introduced to capture all elements of past science that have moved between disciplines. These include research methods, formalisms, principles, patterns, intellectual, theoretical and moral virtues, concepts, metaphors, argumentative and demonstrative techniques, and institutional practices. The idea is that following the career of such goods enables us to write a post-disciplinary history. Every flow makes a causal connection, and when these are added up we can distinguish causal chains that demonstrate how disciplines, at least historically, hang together.[7]

Causal connections have to be carefully distinguished from noting ‘influence’ or mere parallels. The spurious claim of Schleicher’s Darwinism can still sometimes be heard even when it has been made clear long ago that Schleicher did not appropriate Darwin’s evolutionary concept to the study of language but merely noted parallels between the Origin of Species and what he had been doing all along in his research on the life of linguistic ‘organisms’.[8] We confront the difficult problem of distinguishing a noted parallel from a causal connection when we are trying to explain the genesis of the structuralist method of analyzing linguistic phenomena. According to Flack, Roman Jakobson must occupy a central position in this story, contrary to what generally happens in the historiography of structuralism in which both Saussure and Lévi-Strauss more often than not are presented as the main actors on the stage.[9]

Jakobson was a scholar of staggering versatility, who drew inspiration from avant-garde art, folklore, phenomenology, Gestalt psychology and the natural sciences.[10] Connections between linguistic structuralism and all these fields have been the subject of research.[11] Yet, there is still a lot to learn about the ideas Jakobson actually took over (instead of noting mere parallels), and how he fused these ideas together. A full investigation would require following the trajectory of cognitive goods, such as the very notion of structure, which came to play a prominent role in academic discourse only from the 19^th century onwards.[12]

In the remainder of this blogpost, I would like to focus on one example of cross-disciplinary contact, namely that between musicology and linguistics. Jakobson wrote a brief article on this subject called ‘Musikwissenschaft und Linguistik’, which was published in the newspaper Prager Presse on 7 December 1932.[13] This newspaper was a platform for publications of the Prague Linguistic Circle, which was strongly supported by the Czech philosopher and statesman Masaryk, who also was the founder of the Prager Presse, a German-language newspaper which had the aim of integrating the German speaking minority into Czech society (see picture).[14] Jakobson’s contribution contains a reflection on a lecture given by professor of musicology Gustav Wilhelm Becking in the context of the regular meetings of the Prague Linguistic Circle. Jakobson claims that this lecture “gehört zu den bedeutendsten Ereignissen des Prager wissenschaftlichen Lebens der letzten Zeit.” Given the timing of the lecture this suggests that it might have contributed to shaping structuralism, and more specifically Jakobson’s phonological theory of distinctive features, which was then still in development.[15] Let us therefore carefully examine the points of convergence that Jakobson highlights.

According to Jakobson, Becking, who had earlier discussed analogies between ‘den phonologischen Grundproblemen und den Grundproblemen der modernen Musikwissenschaft’, had now convincingly proved that the similarity between musicology and phonology was fundamental. In both musical and phonological systems the value of a sign depends on its position and on the relations it has to other signs in a particular system of signification. The physical realization in writing (notes or letters) or sound cannot be completely separated from the ‘Ton’ and ‘Phonem’ they represent, given the supposed unity of form and meaning, but the physical realization is nonetheless of secondary importance in both musical and phonological systems. Of central importance is the auditive and phonological value of the expressions and both musicology and linguistics must study (and come to understand) the relational systems in which these values acquire their full meaning.

In the lecture Becking gave the example of the difference in music perception of an African and a European. For an African it is the timbre (‘Klangfarbe’) that matters, for the European the pitch (‘Tonhöhe’). Also when we compare medieval Gregorian chant with modern European music, it can, according to Becking, be noticed that in medieval times it was glissando (‘Tonbewegung’) that mattered most. These differences can for example lead to differences in perception of identity of pieces of music. From these examples Jakobson draws the following conclusion: “Das Wichtige in der Musik ist nicht die naturalistische Gegebenheit, nicht diejenigen Töne, die realisiert werden, sondern die, die gemeint werden. Der Eingeborene und der Europäer hören denselben Ton und meinen dabei ganz verschiedene Dinge, da sie ihn in Bezug auf zwei verschiedene musikalische Systeme auffassen; der Ton fungiert in der Musik als ‘System-Ton’.”[16] So, next to a distinction between physical realization and sound value we must not only place sound values into a system but at the same realize that a musical arrangement has been put together with particular intentions in mind. As Umberto Eco points out, music is not just organized sound, it is intentionally organized sound.[17] The implication is of course that phonological systems in languages work the same way. In the article Jakobson further argues that linguistic conventions, including accepted ways to convey intentions, must be sought on the level of the phonological system and not in etymology or the lexicon.

According to Becking, particular musical systems are closely connected to particular worldviews. He was working on a typology of musical systems consisting of four dimensions of increasing complexity. This interested Jakobson very much: “Die Gesetzmässigkeit des Systembaues erinnert an die Typologie der phonologischen Systemen.”[18] With other members of the Prague school he had proposed a new way of classifying languages, not primarily on the basis of genealogical descent, which had been the common way of classification in the 19^th century, but on the basis of structural similarities and differences. One could still find genetically related groups within the classification, but in the structuralist framework this has become a secondary analytical step. Languages could also have gained similarities through their proximity, which need not presuppose historic ties stretching over very long periods of time. Jakobson no longer spoke of language families but of language bonds. All languages characterized by phonological correlation of palatalization were for example classified as members of the Eurasian ‘Sprachbund’.[19] In his lecture, Becking defended the theory that peoples of the Far East share a common musical system, which is characterized by a great number of small intervals. Jakobson now conjectures that phonological bonds may show considerable overlap with musical bonds. He says that the boundaries and characteristics of musical and phonological bonds need to be carefully compared and if musicology is further developed in this respect linguistics must follow suit and benefit from musicological expertise.

Finally, because of the structural similarities, the principles of development (‘Grundsätze der Mutationen’) of musical systems are akin to patterns of phonological development. In this respect musicology can learn from linguistics, which according to Jakobson had probed deeper into ‘das ganzheitliche Verfahren’ of phonological systems and as a consequence possessed a better articulated ‘Theorie des Systembaus’. For example, he suggests that the concept of markedness, which had been developed in phonology, and the idea that particular marked and unmarked values are always correlated in terms of oppositions, should be applied to musical systems as well. Furthermore he believes that especially the poetic form of linguistic expression will provide excellent material for comparison with music (‘besonders dankbares material’).

Music is closest to language as a semiotic system in all these respects. For the most part Jakobson notes mere parallels between musical and phonological systems and hence we cannot speak of a flow between musicology and phonology. No ideas from musicology seem to have had a causal impact on the theory of distinctive features that was developed in this period.[20] However, with respect to systematic classification based on shared characteristics, linguistics could take up insights gained in musicology. Vice versa the concept of markedness can be said to have flown from linguistics to other fields of study, including musicology. But these can be considered as ‘minor flows’ as in both cases the general framework of analysis was already in place.

Yet we should not forget that structuralism was minted as a catch-all term to capture a profound change in thinking about science in all disciplines that was occurring at the time. “Were we to comprise the leading idea of present-day science in its most various manifestations, we could hardly find a more appropriate designation than structuralism. Any set of phenomena examined by contemporary science is treated not as a mechanical agglomeration but as a structural whole, and the basic task is to reveal the inner, whether static or developmental, laws of this system. What appears to be the focus of scientific preoccupations is no longer the outer stimulus, but the internal premises of the development; now the mechanical conception of processes yields to the question of their functions.”[21] Establishing strong parallels with musicology reinforces this message even more so because the theory of musical systems provides insight in the workings of the human mind and the way perception operates. It can therefore hardly come closer to the theory of language systems. In this sense we can attach deeper significance to the similarities noted by Jakobson between linguistics and musicology, which goes beyond registering mere parallels between two distinct fields of study.

Notes

[1] Institutionalization is shaped through the conference series ‘The Making of the Humanities’, which has turned into an annual event and will be held for the 6^th time in Oxford (UK) this year from 28-30 September. Last year the Society for the History of Humanities was created and the first issue of the new journal History of Humanities appeared with University of Chicago Press. See http://www.historyofhumanities.org for further information.

[2] Important book publications offering a comparative overview of the humanities include Bod, R. (2013) A New History of the Humanities: The Search for Principles and Patterns from Antiquity to the Present. Oxford: Oxford University Press and Turner, J. (2014) Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

[3] The journal History of Humanities aims to be a platform for both forms of integration. A strong plea for the second one can be found in the Focus section titled ‘The History of Humanities and the History of Science’ in the leading history of science journal Isis 106, vol. 2.

[4] Mehlman, J. (2002) Émigré New York. French Intellectuals in Wartime Manhattan, 1940-1944. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

[5] Just to give a few publications in which cross-over between linguistics and other disciplines stands central: Bartsch R. and Vennemann T. eds. (1973) Linguistik und Nachbarwissenschaften. Kronberg: Scriptor Verlag; Hoenigswald H.M. and Wiener L. F. eds. (1987) Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: an Interdisciplinary Perspective. London: Frances Pinter; Levelt W. (2013) A History of Psycholinguistics. The Pre-Chomskyan Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press and Bod (2013).

[6] Morpurgo Davies, A. (1998) History of Linguistics. Vol IV: Nineteenth-Century Linguistics. London and New York: Longman, pp. 88-89. For an attempt at clarification see Karstens, B. (2012) ‘Bopp the Builder. Discipline Formation as Hybridization: the Case of Comparative Linguistics’. In: R. Bod, J. Maat and T. Weststeijn, eds., The Making of the Humanities. Volume II: From Early Modern to Modern Disciplines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, pp.103-127.

[7] See the website http://www.flow.humanities.uva.nl. The project is very much open to suggestions and comments, for which a discussion platform has been created.

[8] Koerner, E.F.K. (1989) ‘On the Problem of ‘Influence’ in Linguistic Historiography’. In: idem. Practicing Linguistics Historiography. Selected Essays. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 31-46. The key primary source is: August Schleicher, Die Darwinische Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft. Offenes Sendschreiben an Herrn Dr. Ernst Häckel, Professor der Zoologie und Director des zoologischen Museums an der Universität Jena (Weimar 1863).

[9] Flack, P. (2016) ‘Roman Jakobson and the Transition of German Thought to the Structuralist Paradigm’. Acta Structuralica 1-1, pp.1-15.

[10] Gasparov, B. (2014) ‘Futurism and Phonology: The Futurist Roots of Jakobson’s Approach to Language’. Ulbandus Review 16, pp. 84-112; Holenstein, E. (1975) Roman Jakobsons Phänomenologischer Strukturalismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Jakobson devoted several papers to the relation between linguistics and other disciplines, which can be found in the Selected Writings series: https://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/16068 .

[11] The central point of reference now is Sériot, P. (2014) Structure and the Whole. East, West and Non-Darwinian Biology in the Origins of Structural Linguistics. Trans. A. Jacobs-Colas. Boston, Berlin: De Gruyter, Mouton.

[12] To find the roots of 20^th century structuralism, Flack (2016) also suggests that we need to probe deeper into the 19^th century, especially with respect to phenomenology.

[13] Reprinted in: Jakobson, R. (1971) ‘Musikwissenschaft und Linguistik’. In: R. Jakobson ed., Selected Writings II: Word and Language. The Hague-Paris: Mouton, pp. 551-553.

[14] Bernátek, M. (2014) ‘The Prague Linguistic Circle and the Prager Presse’. Theatralia, Brno: Masarykova univerzita, roč. 17, č. 2, pp. 175-187.

[15] Sériot (2014) pp. 73-78.

[16] Jakobson (1971) pp. 551-552, emphasis added.

[17] Here the connection to German phenomenology, in particular the Brentano school, presents itself: Eco, U (1987) ‘The Influence of Roman Jakobson on the Development of Semiotics’. In: M. Krampen et al. (eds.), Classics of Semiotics. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 109-127.

[18] Jakobson (1971) p. 552.

[19] The Eurasian ‘Sprachbund’ roughly corresponded to the borders of the Soviet Union. The political implications of this theory are a hot potato, and continue to be highly controversial to the present day. See Marácz, L. (2015) Towards Eurasian Linguistic Isoglosses: the Case of Turkic and Hungarian. Astana, Kazakhstan: International Turkic Academy.

[20] At least I have not been able to find such a reference in any of Jakobson’s papers.

[21] Jakobson R. (1929) ‘Romantické všeslovanství-nová slavistika [Romantic pan-Slavism: a new Slavistics’]. Čin 1-1, pp. 10–12, there p.11. Percival, K.W. (2011) ’Roman Jakobson and the Birth of Linguistic Structuralism’. Sign Systems Studies 1, pp. 236-262 gives the same quote on p. 244 and suggests that this is actually the earliest use of the word structuralism by a linguist.

How to cite this post

Karstens, Bart. 2017. The Prague Linguistic Circle and the Analogy between Musicology and Linguistics. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2017/03/07/prague-musicology-linguistics/

Judith Kaplan
University of Pennsylvania

In John Webster Spargo’s 1931 translation of Holger Pedersen’s contribution to the genre of Disziplingeschichte, readers are introduced to a legion of mostly well-bearded men, marching toward the ‘discovery’ of the Comparative Method. Summing up his approach to nineteenth-century developments, Pedersen writes: “Evolution of method and expansion of material went on side by side, with constant reciprocal influence. But in the following treatment, the two sides of the growth of our science will be considered separately.”[1] This way of writing the history of linguistics—differentiating substrate from substance—has had enduring appeal, with emphasis given primarily to the latter. In what follows, I attempt to reunite the material and intellectual ‘sides’ of linguistic research, paying attention to the ‘constant reciprocal influence’ between Joseph Greenberg’s (1915-2001) comparative notebooks, on the one hand, and his inclusive genetic hypotheses, on the other.

Greenberg’s training, like his subsequent linguistic research, was staggeringly broad by contemporary standards. Not only was he an accomplished musician (see the previous hiphilangsci post for more on the productive exchange between music and linguistics), his work bore the imprint of early exposure to American structuralism, European structuralism, comparative-historical linguistics, logical positivism, and cultural anthropology as well.[2] Furthermore, Greenberg was committed to exploring intersections between (what came to be) linguistics and various allied disciplines, which provided crucial reinforcements to his own theories in return. As he wrote in the preface to Essays in Linguistics in 1957:

In the nature of things, problems as diverse as those dealt with here often have solutions which do not depend on one another. If there is any single point of view that runs through the whole, it is that further substantial progress in linguistics requires the abandonment of its traditional isolationism, one for which there was formerly much justification, in favor of a willingness to explore connections in other directions. The borderline areas most prominent in the present essays are those with logic, mathematics, anthropology, and psychology, but of course, others exist.[3]

Autonomy was won from philology and anthropology only to beg the question of their newly interdisciplinary significance. Despite such breadth of research outlook, Greenberg is best remembered for two contributions—to linguistic typology and genetic classification. Nor were these disconnected. As others have noted, Greenberg regarded the work of genetic classification as a necessary preliminary to typological analysis, in which he sought to identify universal phenomena through constraints on cross-linguistic variation (ranging over distinct family and areal groupings, once established), rather than cross-linguistic uniformity.[4]

My remarks in what follows will focus on three of Greenberg’s genetic studies—concerning the Indo-Pacific, Amerind, and Eurasian hypotheses—setting to one side his most celebrated work on the languages of Africa.[5] Each one of these cases represents Greenberg’s irrepressible research style. As he told Peter Thomas in a 1994 interview looking back on the African classification, “I’m attracted…to areas of the world in which classification has not yet been accomplished to people’s satisfaction. There are always new etymologies to be discovered…it’s very much like detective work.”[6] Just how was this detective work to be carried out? He continued,

In Africa…it seemed to me that the sensible thing was to actually look at all of the languages. I usually had preliminary notebooks in which I took those elements of a language, which, on the whole, we know are the most stable over time…I would look at a very large number of languages in regard to these matters, and I did find that they fell into quite obvious groupings.

Two aspects of this recollection stand out to me: Greenberg’s allusion to the controversial method of multilateral comparison, and his introduction of the comparative notebooks.

The method, of course, would become a lightening rod after the 1987 publication of Language in the Americas.[7] But it was anticipated already in a 1953 essay on the study of “Historical Linguistics and Unwritten Languages,” published in Alfred Kroeber’s encyclopedic project, Anthropology Today.[8] Revised and expanded for Essays in Linguistics, this relied on a two-fold justification of the “technique of group comparison of languages.”[9] The first point had to do with statistical power:

The likelihood of finding a resemblance in sound and meaning in three languages is the square of its probability in two languages. In general, the probability for a single language must be raised to the (n—1th) power for n languages…Hence the presence of a fair number of recurrent sound-meaning resemblances in three, four, or more languages is a certain indication of historical connection.

The second concerned the historical validity of a stepwise grouping procedure: “…it is not mere percentage of resemblances between pairs of languages which is decisive,” he wrote, “but rather the setting-up of restricted groups of related languages which then enter integrally into more distant comparisons.” The “effectiveness” of the procedure was asserted visually with the following table.

Fig. 1: From Greenberg, “Genetic Relationship Among Languages,” in Essays in Linguistics (New York: Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology No. 24, 1957), 43.

This table reflects certain “affordances” and limits of using “paper tools” to work with language data—it is easy to see that rows and columns in the table above are duplicated to fit words of more than six and nine characters, respectively.[10] The material possibilities and constraints of managing data on paper played a part in Greenberg’s research practice as well. His comparative tables were inscribed within standard-issue narrow-ruled (e.g. Hammermill “eye-ease”) notebooks, forty-one lines from top to bottom. Though he would often defend the method of multilateral comparison in terms of the statistical power to be gained from detecting patterns across as many languages as possible, in actual practice, one could only ‘eyeball’ data from as many languages as would fit on a given notebook opening with forty rows.

Fig. 2: Cover of Eurasiatic Comparative Notebook. Joseph H. Greenberg Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries: SC 0615, Accn. # 2001-126, Box 2.

Greenberg was evidently and justifiably proud of his unique solution to the problem of linguistic data management. He credited his notebooks directly in a seldom-recognized 1971 publication on the “Indo-Pacific” hypothesis, which argued for a new macro-family of the same name.[11] In it, he wrote:

Since 1960, I have assembled virtually exhaustive vocabulary information from published sources and a few unpublished ones…These were entered in 12 notebooks each of which contains places for upwards of 350 entries, many of which however, are obviously not available in the existing sources. Each notebook contains entries from 60 up to 80 language sources and is organized roughly by groupings of languages whose closer relationship to each other are evident on inspection. In addition detailed notes on grammar were copied in three additional notebooks and reclassified by historically significant rubrics in still another notebook.[12]

Greenberg was able to make data from sixty-to-eighty languages fathomable at a single glance by taping wings to the cover boards, front and back, on which they were listed; and by duplicating semantic field columns, left then right, for each opening. His manipulation of paper thus promoted what Lorraine Daston has referred to as the “all-at-once-ness of virtuoso perception” by making broad comparisons ready for a “mental picture recorded through the eye.”[13]

Elaborating on his procedure for television viewers in 1994, Greenberg recalled the path to Amerind:

I began to take the common words, write them down, so on, and look at them. And eventually, I put them into notebooks, and the notebooks are like the ones I have here, in which you have the names of languages down one side, and down the other. One can get   eighty languages in a notebook like this. And across, I have various words in English for which we find translations in the American Indian languages. So, for example, on this page, after having finished putting the numerals in, I have the pronouns, so I have “I” and “thou,” the second person singular pronoun. But, the notebook is actually fairly extensive and contains hundreds of words…[14]

Though Greenberg’s approach was decidedly empirical, it is worth mentioning that the vast majority of his notebook entries were copied from the publications and fieldwork of other linguists. In this way, they reflect the “logic of distributed effort” that contemporary data curators have attributed to the sub-discipline of genetic linguistics.[15] The idea, simply put, being that linguistic fieldwork is too time and resource intensive for any one linguist to survey all the languages that would need to be compared. This has meant that there is more trust, greater intertextuality, and less verification in comparative-historical linguistics than in other data-intensive research traditions. Greenberg frankly acknowledged this state of affairs in prefacing Language in the Americas: “The present work is in many respects a pioneering one…” he wrote, “[a]lthough I have exercised great care, it would be miraculous if, in handling such a vast mass of material, there were no errors of fact or interpretation.”[16] Readers were invited to track citations through manuscript copies of the notebooks, which Greenberg deposited—anticipating open source ethics today—at Stanford University’s Green Library.[17] Even so, potential errors could be absorbed by the method of multilateral comparison itself. In one of the most controversial claims he made on behalf of the method, anticipating contemporary “data-driven” science, Greenberg asserted it “is so powerful that it will give reliable results even with the poorest of materials. Incorrect material should have merely a randomizing effect. If a clear pattern emerges, the hypothesis is all the more likely to be correct.”[18]

Greenberg traced this work back to “a paper given in 1956,” which kicked off the collection of “a truly massive amount of data.”[19] The numbers here matched those given for the Indo-Pacific hypothesis mentioned above, lending support to the notion that material constraints—in addition to family specific considerations—gave structure to the language groupings under consideration. Greenberg continued:

The materials on Amerind and Na-Dene alone…occupy 23 notebooks…each containing information on approximately 80 languages, and each including, so far as the sources permit, a maximum of 400 items for every language. On a rough estimate, these notebooks encompass well over 2,000 sources and contain perhaps a quarter of a million separate entries.

The ‘items’ he collected roughly conformed to the Swadesh lists of “basic vocabulary,” standardized versions of which were also under development during the early years of Greenberg’s extensive note-taking.[20]

As sweeping as it was, the classification presented in Language in the Americas was less ambitious than originally intended. Etymological treatment of the Eurasiatic family, which Greenberg believed was linked to the Eskimo-Aleut languages of North America, was reserved for a later volume, and occupied him until his death. The foundation of this project, a smooth extension of his earlier work on African, Indo-Pacific, and Amerind comparisons, was laid—again—in a series of manuscript notebooks, adapted for the purposes of surveying basic vocabulary for as many as eighty languages at once.

Fig. 3: Opening of Eurasiatic Comparative Notebook. Joseph H. Greenberg Papers, Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries: SC 0615, Accn. # 2001-126, Box 2.

This opening shows a selection of Eurasiatic languages grouped by proximity (belonging, in order of appearance (top to bottom and left to right), to Uralic, Turkic, Tungusic, Mongolic, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Eskimo-Aleut, Korean, Ainu, and Japanese). By working in pencil, Greenberg was able to erase and revise entries (as seen under the second Uralic group in the left-hand column). Across the top, are the vocabulary items “morning,” “mosquito,” “mother,” “mountain,” “mouse,” and “mouth.” Significantly, these words exceed both the 100- and 200-item Swadesh lists (“morning,” “mosquito,” and “mouse” not appearing on either one), nor do they entirely overlap with entries in the Amerind etymological dictionary (“morning,” “mother,” and “mountain” absent here), suggesting that genetic and/or areal specificity superseded global comparability in Greenberg’s collection priorities to at least some degree. By manipulating the material affordances of standard narrow-ruled notebooks, Greenberg realized a key concept of multilateral comparison, to look at “many languages across a few words,” rather than “looking at few languages across many words.”[21]

Greenberg’s notebooks were intimately bound up with his controversial method of multilateral comparison, and they imposed certain physical limits on its design and development (“storage” in this case having to do with the size and spacing of a sheet of ruled paper). Though decidedly manual and papery, they anticipate several issues currently facing the digital curation and archiving of descriptive language data—how to commensurate sources through a transparent data structure, how to facilitate broad and exploratory comparisons, and how to make sources open and available to peer review.

Notes:

[1] Holger Pedersen, The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century, trans. John Spargo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1931), 13.

[2] William Croft, “Joseph Harold Greenberg,” Language 77 (2001): 816.

[3] Joseph Greenberg, Essays in Linguistics (New York: Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology, Vol. 24, 1957), v.

[4] Martin Haspelmath, “Preface to the reprinted edition,” in Language Universals: With Special Reference to Feature Hierarchies” (Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005 [1966]), vii.

[5] The latter initially appeared serially in seven papers published in the Southwestern Journal of Anthropology during 1949 and 1950.

[6] This and subsequent comments were aired on the PBS program Nova, part of a show titled, “In search of the First Language.” A full transcript is available at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2120glang.html (accessed 10 April 2017).

[7] Joseph Greenberg, Language in the Americas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987).

[8] Joseph Greenberg, “Historical Linguistics and Unwritten Languages,” in Anthropology Today, ed. A. L. Kroeber (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 282.

[9] Greenberg, Essays, 40.

[10] Boris Jardine has written an excellent essay on these concepts, “State of the Field: Paper Tools,” forthcoming in Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, C. In it, he explores the concept of material affordances, derived from the work of James Gibson (1979) and Tim Ingold (2007). The term and literature on “paper tools” stems from Ursula Klein’s work on Berzelian chemical classification (1999, 2001), informed by Bruno Latour’s approach to the study of scientific inscriptions (1986).

[11] Joseph Greenberg, “The Indo-Pacific Hypothesis,” Current Trends in Linguistics 8 (The Hague: Mouton): 808-71.

[12] Ibid, 808.

[13] Lorraine Daston, “On Scientific Observation,” Isis 99 (2008): 101.

[14] Transcript at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/transcripts/2120glang.html (accessed 10 April 2017).

[15] Lewis, Farrar, & Langendoen, “Linguistics in the Internet Age: Tools and Fair Use,” in Proceedings of the EMELD ’06 Workshop on Digital Language Documentation: Tools and Standards: The State of the Art (2006). Available at E-MELD (accessed 12 April 2015).

[16] Greenberg, Language in the Americas, ix.

[17] On open source imperatives in the sciences, see e.g. Sabina Leonelli et al, “Sticks and Carrots: Encouraging Open Science at its Source,” Geo: Geography and Environment 2 (2015): 12-16. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/geo2.2/full (accessed 10 April 2017).

[18] Greenberg, Language in the Americas, 29. On “data-driven science,” see e.g. Bruno Strasser, “Collecting Nature: Practices, Styles, and Narratives,” Osiris 27 (2012): 303-340.

[19] This was published as “The General Classification of Central and South American Languages,” Selected Papers of the Fifth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, A. Wallace, ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 791-794.

[20] Morris Swadesh, “Lexicostatistic Dating of Prehistoric Ethnic Contacts: With Special Reference to North American Indians and Eskimos,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 96 (1952): 452-463; Idem, “Towards Greater Accuracy in Lexicostatistic Dating,” International Journal of American Linguistics 21 (1955): 121-137.

[21] Greenberg, Language in the Americas, 23.

How to cite this post

Kaplan, Judtih. 2017. Joseph Greenberg’s comparative notebooks. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2017/04/10/joseph-greenbergs-comparative-notebooks

Daniel W. Hieber
University of California, Santa Barbara
danielhieber.com

Introduction

Since the formulation and elaboration of speech act theory by Grice (1957; 1969), Austin (1962) and Searle (1962) as part of the ordinary language movement in philosophy,[1] the linguistics community has by and large adopted the consensus that speech is a variety of action.[2] Speakers use language to accomplish goals in the social world. Linguists of course differ on what precisely this means, what its implications are, and the extent to which they believe it is relevant to their particular subfield. However, even linguists who focus very little on the social or pragmatic dimensions of language acknowledge this essential fact (cf. Chomsky’s view that the use of language is “an exercise of free will” [McGilvray 2009:2]). This observation is the foundational principle of the fields of pragmatics and sociocultural linguistics, and has contributed significantly to linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, discourse, and conversation analysis, among others.

Yet linguistics and the philosophy of language are not the only fields to take interest in the notion of language as action, nor are they even the first.[3] In the decades before the ordinary language philosophers, it was the economists of the Austrian school (known for its subjective value theory [Menger 1976], formulating the problem of economic calculation [von Mises 1990], and for initiating the marginalist revolution in economics [von Böhm-Bawerk 1890]) who wrote about the nature of language as a system driven by individuals acting at various social ends. Though they did not write about language and action with the kind of systematicity that the ordinary language philosophers or early sociocultural linguists such as Hymes (1962) did, the collected body of works in the Austrian school show a consistent appreciation for and exposition of the nature of language as action, with Mises himself noting that “[a] language is not simply a collection of phonetic signs. It is an instrument of thinking and acting” (von Mises 1957:232). To the Austrians, as we shall see, the study of language is simply one subfield within a broader field of study that encompasses all the social sciences: praxeology, or the science of human action. What unites the disparate fields of economics, linguistics, sociology, and history is that they share as their object of study the actions of individuals aiming at various ends within the context of society. The enduring contribution of the Austrian economists to other social sciences is their systematic treatment of this broader science of human action, in which they construct the theoretical and methodological foundation for the entirety of social science.

Naturally, the immediate concern of the Austrian economists was to apply this new praxeological science to the problems of economics, leaving the other social sciences largely unexplored (though Mises’ [1957] later work concerning praxeological approaches to history, and more recent scholarship by Cantor & Cox [2009] concerning literature, Hieber [2013] concerning language, and Reid [2012a; 2012b] concerning anthropology). This article is therefore a first attempt to apply the insights of praxeology to the field of linguistics. In some cases, praxeological analysis yields new insight into the problems of linguistics. In others, it merely affirms our existing understanding of linguistic phenomena. Yet the fact that praxeological findings accord with the body of knowledge in linguistics not only lends greater credence and support to the findings of both fields, but also allows us to connect our understanding of language to broader principles pertaining to the social sciences as a whole, thereby relating phenomena previously thought to be disparate and unrelated into a more cohesive, encompassing framework, both within linguistics and across the social sciences.

The Scope of Praxeology

In 1949, the Austrian economist and political philosopher Ludwig von Mises published his magnum opus, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (von Mises 1998). Though little-known outside the field of economics, this book is arguably one of the most significant works of the 20^th Century. Mises meticulously rederived the entire body of economic knowledge starting from praxeological principles, producing a masterful treatise that served as a counterpoint to Keynes’ General Theory (which had recently become popular) and firmly grounded economics within the social sciences. Mises’ students and those his writing influenced constituted the original core of the modern libertarian movement in the United States, including such prominent thinkers and writers as Murray N. Rothbard, Nobel laureate Friedrich A. Hayek, Leonard A. Read (founder of the Foundation for Economic Education), journalist Henry Hazlitt, Lew Rockwell (founder of the Ludwig von Mises Institute), popular writer Ayn Rand, and politician Ron Paul.

As indicated by its title, Human Action is concerned first and foremost with undergirding economics and the social sciences with a cogent theory of human action. Mises devotes the first seven chapters of Human Action to the explication of praxeology and its implications for the social sciences. As such, only a superficial summary can be given here. (The reader is encouraged to read these chapters, as well as Mises’ [1962] Ultimate Foundation of Economic Science, for a detailed treatment.) Praxeology is defined as the general theory of human action, where human action is in turn defined as “purposeful behavior” (von Mises 1998:11), i.e. goal-directed or teleological behavior. Mises is quick to distinguish praxeology from sciences of the mind such as psychology and neuroscience:

The field of our science is human action, not the psychological events which result in action. It is precisely this which distinguishes the general theory of human action, praxeology, from psychology. The theme of psychology is the internal events that result or can result in definite action. The theme of praxeology is action as such. (von Mises 1998:12)

This clarification yields the first important implication of praxeology: Economists, and other social scientists, are interested in describing human action, and the goals that people have, as they are, not as the social scientists themselves believe they should be. In other words, the social sciences are fundamentally descriptive rather than prescriptive or normative. Mises himself makes this position clear in the following passages:

It is true that economics is a theoretical science and as such abstains from any judgment of value. It is not its task to tell people what ends they should aim at. It is a science of the means to be applied for the attainment of the ends chosen, not, to be sure, a science of the choosing of ends. Ultimate decisions, the valuations and the choosing of ends, are beyond the scope of any science. Science never tells a man how he should act; it merely shows how a man must act if he wants to attain definite ends. (von Mises 1998:10)[4]

In this sense we speak of the subjectivism of the general science of human action. It takes the ultimate ends chosen by acting man as data, it is entirely neutral with regard to them, and it refrains from passing any value judgments. The only standard which it applies is whether or not the means chosen are fit for the attainment of the ends aimed at. (von Mises 1998:21)

The claim that science is value-free is often met with criticism, whether in linguistics, economics, or the physical sciences. Within linguistics, for example, Bolinger (1979) suggests that linguistics and science in general are always necessarily value-laden, while Charity (2008) espouses the view that linguists ought to be agents for social change. These and other writers point out that science comes with attendant social and moral obligations. For example, if linguistic research discovers that multilingualism bestows many cognitive benefits on children (Adesope et al. 2010), are not linguists perhaps morally obligated to oppose policies that actively discourage multilingualism? In the same vein, if an economist discovers that increasing the minimum wage causes unemployment among low-skilled, low-education workers (Rothbard 2009:1114), are not they perhaps morally obligated to oppose minimum wage legislation? These are difficult ethical questions that should not be treated lightly. However, they are ethical questions rather than scientific ones. Science cannot make our value judgements for us; it can only inform them with the relevant data and sound theory. This does not make science and ethics incommensurable – quite the opposite. It merely helps clarify the scope and role for each in an ethically informed approach to science. It is often the case that scientists undertake the investigations they do for moral reasons, under the assumption or hope that the results of their investigations will lend support to their moral position. But they do a disservice to their own moral ideology, the scientific method, and society at large if they do not take every reasonable precaution to prevent those ideologies from coloring their research.

Having hopefully clarified what is meant by value-free theory in the social sciences, we can see that what Mises means by subjectivism is precisely what we linguists intend when we speak of linguistics as a descriptive as opposed to prescriptive science. We do not judge the way people act in regard to their speech or how they choose to communicate; we merely take these choices as given and seek to find regularities among them. And in the same way that economists, insofar as they are acting as scientists and not ethicists, can only state whether the means chosen are appropriate for bringing about the ends aimed at, so too linguists weigh the grammaticality of an utterance solely on the basis of whether it accomplishes its communicative goal in a way appropriate to the conventions of the relevant speech community; in other words, did the speaker choose the effective means (words and constructions) for their particular communicative end.

Thus in this first implication of praxeology, we see one way in which the praxeological approach unites the social sciences within a common framework: All social science deals with the subjective goals and values of individuals, and the actions those individuals undertake in pursuit of those goals and values. In order to study these actions scientifically, the social sciences must take those underlying motivations as given, and adopt a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to human behavior.

Scarcity & the Economization of Speech

In order to bring about change in the world, actors use the various resources in their environment (including their own person) as means to accomplishing their goals. Naturally, language and the manipulation of one’s vocal organs (or hands/body in the case of sign language) is one means that speakers utilize. Anticipating Grice’s theory of speech acts, Mises states:

Action means the employment of means for the attainment of ends. As a rule one of the means employed is the acting man’s labor. But this is not always the case. Under special conditions a word is all that is needed. He who gives orders or interdictions may act without any expenditure of labor. (von Mises 1998:13)

Like Grice, Mises believes that only certain types of speech are action. Modern linguistics has improved on this idea by noting that it does not require “special conditions” for speech to function as action. All speech is action. Whenever it is used, speech functions as a means to the actor’s (almost always social) ends.

However, given the nature of the world in which we live, Mises notes that “[m]eans are necessarily always limited, i.e., scarce with regard to the services for which man wants to use them” (von Mises 1998:93). This is as much true for language as it is for material means like lumber. Lambrecht (1996:31) points out that “[s]ince the morphosyntactic resources of a language are limited, and since the number of communicative distinctions is potentially infinite, economy of form is a logical necessity in the expression of functional differences in natural language.” Speech is furthermore subject to scarcity with regard to time. A person cannot physically produce more than one utterance at once. They must always choose which of the things they wish to say first. They must in the most literal sense economize on their speech, thereby making the act of speaking subject to various laws of praxeology and economics.

One universal fact that results from the need to economize on one’s time is the fact of time preference: other things being equal, a person generally prefers their goal to be accomplished in the shortest possible time (Rothbard 2009:15). This is because, as noted by Mises above, accomplishing one’s goals typically involves a person’s labor, however leisurely that labor may be (such as speaking). The sooner one can bring about their intended goal, the less labor they have to expend. Accordingly, speakers always try to accomplish their communicative goals using the fewest expressions, articulatory gestures, and cognitive resources possible. In linguistics, this is known as the principle of economy or principle of least effort, (Brown & Miller 2013:148), and widely acknowledged as being an important motivating factor in linguistic structure (Haiman 1983), phonetics (Laver 2001:153–154), and typological markedness (Croft 2002), among other areas.[5] Economization of speech is also central to discourse and information structure. Flashner (1987:132), for example, posits a principle of textual economy, which states that “in texts reference to continuous themes is marked by zero pronoun anaphora and to interrupted themes by full nouns for subthemes and pronouns for theme.” Kibrik (2011) devotes an entire monograph to studying the structural and discourse-level effects of this principle, wherein referential choice (i.e. the choice between zero, pronoun, or full noun) is motivated by cognitive economy. In terms of information structure, the typological tendency for topics to be the first item in a clause (Lambrecht 1996) also appears to result from the temporal economization of speech: other things being equal, speakers generally place the most newsworthy information first, thereby conveying the maximal amount of information in the shortest possible time (Mithun 1987). This tendency in turn impacts the grammar of language at every level (Mithun 2015). Thus some of the most crucial functional factors in language stem directly from the basic praxeological principles of economization and time preference.

Because both time and the range of linguistic expressions is always scarce, speech must also be economized in terms of choice of words and constructions. Other things being equal, a speaker will select the words and constructions which most directly and efficiently convey their intended meaning, and omit anything which does not need saying. Put differently, speakers choose words and constructions that are as expressive as possible. When an expression is still novel, this is relatively easy. Somewhat inconveniently for speakers, however, anything that is the object of economization is subject to the law of diminishing marginal utility. Simply put, this means that as the supply of a good increases, the utility of each additional unit of the good decreases (Rothbard 2009:25).[6] The praxeological reason for this is that, because time is scarce, humans generally satisfy their most strongly-felt wants first. The first unit of an available good goes to satisfy those core wants, but each unit of the good after that satisfies desires that are less and less important, thereby making those successive units less and less valuable to the actor.

The particular realization of the law of diminishing utility in linguistics is that words lose their pragmatic utility with increased use over time. The very utility of a novel construction is exactly what incentivizes speakers to use it more frequently. As its frequency increases, it becomes routinized, losing some of its original utility and semantic distinctiveness in a process that is often (somewhat erroneously) referred to as semantic bleaching (Hopper & Traugott 2003:94–98). Additionally, its increased frequency makes it a more likely target for linguistic economization, since a shortening or omission of a more frequent form produces greater gains in terms of a reduction of the average number of words/phonemes used to express an idea than does the shortening or omission of a less frequent form (Croft 2001:348). Both of these processes contribute to the more general process of grammaticalization. So we see that praxeology also has a central role to play in understanding the nature of expressiveness in diachronic change as well.

To say that speech is expressive and economical does not mean that speakers always speak with the utmost concision and terseness, just that speakers say what is relevant and necessary for conveying their meaning, and no more. To hedge or to speak indirectly is every bit as purposeful and motivated as speaking in simple, terse, declarative sentences, for the simple fact that hedging and indirectness are means that speakers have of conveying epistemic uncertainty, or of attending to politeness norms, or various other functions. Speech that may seem superficially superfluous is in fact maximally efficient in that it conveys the precise nuances of semantic, pragmatic, and social meaning intended by the speaker. The principle of economy can therefore be viewed as partly motivating the Gricean maxims of quantity: “Make your contribution as informative as required (for the current purposes of exchange)” and “Do not make your contribution more informative than is required” (Grice 1989:26–27).

In sum, the fact that humans must economize their speech in accordance with the laws of praxeology directly motivates several of the crucial processes at work in discourse and language change.

Speech as Exchange

Action is fundamentally a type of exchange. Every time we act, we choose between the action we ultimately decide to pursue and the infinite number of actions we did not. We exchange one possible state of affairs for another:

Action is an attempt to substitute a more satisfactory state of affairs for a less satisfactory one. We call such a willfully induced alteration an exchange. That which is abandoned is called the price paid for the attainment of the end sought. The value of the price paid is called costs. Costs are equal to the value attached to the satisfaction which one must forego in order to attain the end aimed at. (von Mises 1998:97)

Rephrasing slightly, every action comes at a cost, i.e. all those actions we chose not to pursue. In praxeology and economics, this is frequently called the opportunity cost of an action, and refers to the value of the next-best alternative to the actor. (It is also the motivation behind the infamous quip among economists that there is no such thing as a free lunch, since the opportunity cost of attending that free lunch is the various other activities you could have been doing.)

In speech, the opportunity cost of what is said is everything that is not said. The reason some things are left unsaid relates in part to economy. Doyle (1951:382) points out in a tongue-in-cheek yet insightful way that “[w]hat can be understood without being said is usually, in the interest of economy, not said.” This simple praxeological point is a central pillar in the field of pragmatics. For instance, the need for speakers to choose among available alternatives motivates what are known as scalar implicatures, wherein by choosing to describe something in terms of one value on a scale, the speaker implicates that all the stronger alternative values on the scale do not hold (Horn 1972). For instance, the utterance I’m pretty sure that’s part of it [7] implicates that the speaker is not very sure or absolutely sure. The alternative stronger values are the opportunity cost of the value that was actually said. The speaker intentionally foregoes the opportunity to use those values on the scale, a choice which is salient to the listener in interpreting the speaker’s intended meaning.

The fact that action and therefore speech is a type of exchange brings us to perhaps the most important insight of praxeology for linguistics. Up until this point, we have to the extent possible focused on the actions of isolated individuals, and the internal motivations that structure speech. But not all action is isolated. The exchanges that actors make between states of affairs frequently require coordination with others:

The major form of voluntary interaction is voluntary interpersonal exchange. A gives up a good to B in exchange for a good that B gives up to A. The essence of the exchange is that both people make it because they expect that it will benefit them; otherwise they would not have agreed to the exchange. (Rothbard 2009:85, original emphasis)

For Mises and the Austrians, “[t]he exchange relation is the fundamental social relation” (von Mises 1998:195). The willingness to interact with others for mutual benefit is the essential fabric of society. For Mises it is definitional: “Society is concerted action, cooperation” (von Mises 1998:143). Society for the Austrians is definitionally coordinative and cooperative rather than violent and hegemonic; violence and the threat of violence are types of interpersonal exchange, but they are antisocial ones rather than social ones.

If interpersonal exchange is the fundamental social relation, then linguistic exchange is the social relation par excellence, a point frequently noted in the Austrian literature: “Both economics and linguistics can plausibly claim to be prototypical social sciences. Both investigate how people cooperate with one another and coordinate their activities” (Yeager 1998:16). Since interpersonal exchange is concerted action for mutual benefit, and discourse is a type of interpersonal exchange, discourse is generally coordinative in the sense that discourse participants willingly engage in that discourse with the aim of accomplishing their particular social ends. It is no surprise, therefore, that Grice subsumes his various conversational maximus under a single Cooperative Principle:

Cooperative Principle: Make your conversational contribution such as is required, at the stage at which it occurs, by the accepted purpose or direction of the talk exchange. (Grice 1989:26–27)

What makes speech cooperative, and thereby facilitates all the semantic, pragmatic, and social work that speakers do in conversation, is its status as a kind of voluntary exchange for mutual benefit. Participants in discourse choose to give their time to engaging in that discourse in lieu of the various other activities they could be doing. As anyone who has had to transcribe naturally-occurring speech knows, much of people’s discourse is, on its surface at least, an utter mess, replete with repairs, potentially ambiguous references, metaphors, and responses to things unspoken. As I have pointed out elsewhere:

Much of our everyday speech is like this – riddled with implications and things left unsaid. What makes it possible for listeners to pierce this linguistic fog is the simple fact that we interpret other people’s utterances as targeted actions on the part of conscious actors aiming at certain communicative or social goals. Every utterance is interpreted through this lens. It is the implicit recognition on the part of every listener that we are all actors aiming at ends that makes communication possible at all. (Hieber 2013, original emphasis)

Discourse and conversation are coordinative and cooperative rather than violent and hegemonic. Even the most vitriolic and hateful speech, speech meant to anger and incite, is at its core an attempt to accomplish a communicative exchange. The opposite of a cooperative speech exchange is not uncooperative speech exchange, it is physical violence or the threat thereof.

Largely due to the influence of Pierre Bourdieu (1977; 1991), there is a trend in modern anthropology and sociocultural linguistics to view all interaction – linguistic or otherwise – through the lens of hegemonic power relations rather than voluntary exchange. Says Bourdieu:

The structure of the linguistic production relation depends on the symbolic power relation between the two speakers, i.e. on the size of their respective capitals of authority (which is not reducible to specifically linguistic capital). Thus, competence is also the capacity to command a listener. Language is not only an instrument of communication or even of knowledge, but also an instrument of power. A person speaks not only to be understood but also to be believed, obeyed, respected, distinguished. Hence the full definition of competence as the right to speech, i.e. to the legitimate language, the authorized language which is also the language of authority. Competence implies the power to impose reception. Here again one sees the abstractness of the linguistic definition of competence: the linguist regards the conditions for the establishment of communication as already secured, whereas, in real situations, that is the essential question. He takes for granted the crucial point, namely that people talk and talk to each other, are “on speaking terms”, that those who speak regard those who listen as worthy to listen and those who listen regard those who speak as worthy to speak. (Bourdieu 1977:648)

What the hegemonic perspective on speech overlooks is that, in order for a speaker to be believed, obeyed, respected, or distinguished successfully, that speaker must be willing to engage with their interlocutor using a mutually accessible set of linguistic conventions, while abiding by at least some of the Gricean maxims in adherence to the Cooperative Principle, in a context where other discourse participants may at any time choose to disengage from the linguistic exchange entirely. In order to be understood, in order to have a social effect, a speaker must place themselves at the whim of their audience. The greater the degree of social imposition that the speaker is trying to make, or less pleasant or unwelcome the message, the more the speaker must cater to the communicative preferences of their audience if they are to be persuasive, accomplish their social goal, or even to be rudimentarily understood. Those who fail to make these accommodations in their attempt at ideological imposition do not gain authority but merely weaken their authority. To co-opt Bourdieu’s own metaphor: just as in other areas of the market, the linguistic producer is ever at the whim of the linguistic consumer. As long as participants in discourse continue to engage in that discourse rather than resort to other means of interaction such as violence, no power imposition by the speaker occurs. It is only when a speaker intimidates or threatens violence that such a linguistic imposition becomes possible, and one’s audience is forced to privilege the linguistic preferences of the speaker over their own.

Contra Bourdieu, competence is not the power to impose reception – that imposition stems from the power of violence or the threat thereof; competence, rather, is the ability to earn reception through attentiveness to the communicative preferences of one’s audiences, as part of a system of voluntary interaction and exchange. As long as discourse is freely entered and maintained, the conditions for the establishment of communication have indeed been secured. Speech freely given – or more colloquially, free speech – is what social individuals engage in as an alternative to violence and hegemonic relations, and is therefore one of the most crucial tenets upon which a just society rests.

Sadly, we have seen in recent months exactly what happens when this point is not appreciated.[8] When one views speech as an exercise of hegemonic power and thus as an act of violence, then a violent response seems justified. A proper understanding of the nature of discourse as exchange recognizes instead that even distasteful speech is still a social act, and thus an opportunity for coordination and engagement rather than violence.

Conclusion

This article aimed to show what can be gained from adopting a praxeological approach to the study of language. For starters, it situates linguistics within the larger project of the social sciences, helping to clarify their common object of study: humans aiming at ends within the context of society. We have seen that, as a matter of necessity, the methodology of linguistics and the social sciences is descriptive rather than normative, due to the fact that human motivations and valuations are subjective and must therefore be taken as given if they are to become an object of scientific study. Next we examined several implications of the fact of scarcity, and the existence of time preference. It was shown that these two features of action directly motivate linguistic structure and use in a variety of ways, including linguistic economy, information structure, and semantic change. Next, it was shown that conversation and discourse is a type of coordinative interpersonal exchange, giving rise to the Cooperative Principle of conversation and serving as the basis for all the shared conversational work that participants undertake in order to communicate successfully. Lastly, exemplifying the complementarity of science and ethics, I argued that a praxeological approach to language can reframe the free speech debate in a way that reduces the ideological proclivity towards violence.

A great many other topics concerning the praxeology of language could not be touched on here for reasons of space, and I leave these to future investigations. But there exists great potential for praxeology to contribute plentiful insights in other areas of linguistics as well, most especially in understanding the nature of language as a spontaneous order, “the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design” (Ferguson 1782), and in research on language ideology, language choice, and language ecology (Mufwene 2004). In short, praxeology helps move linguistics towards a model which explains the complex tapestry of grammatical structure and language use in terms of the real, everyday choices that humans make.

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Notes

[1] Grice is not typically considered an ordinary language philosopher, but his work on meaning and implicature laid an important foundation for later philosophers of language working from the ordinary language perspective.

[2] Throughout this article, I intend such terms as speech, utterance, and speaker to encompass both signed and spoken discourse.

[3] Much earlier, however, Sapir (1929:214) did encourage linguists to integrate the field of linguistics with the other social sciences: “Better than any social science, linguistics shows by its data and methods, necessarily more easily defined than the data and methods of any other type of discipline dealing with socialized behavior, the possibility of a truly scientific study of society which does not ape the methods nor attempt to adopt unrevised the concepts of the natural sciences. It is peculiarly important that linguists, who are often accused, and accused justly, of failure to look beyond the pretty patterns of their subject matter, should become aware of what their science may mean for the interpretation of human conduct in general. Whether they like it or not, they must become increasingly concerned with the many anthropological, sociological, and psychological problems which invade the field of language.”

[4] In the quotations provided throughout this article, the terms man and he should be understood as gender-neutral. My decision to retain these uses within quotations should not be taken as an endorsement of this practice, but rather as stemming from a desire to most accurately represent the source material.

[5] Note that this use of the term economy is not the same as its use within generativist syntax, where it refers to descriptive or theoretical economy rather than speaker economy (Crystal 2008:162), although some within the generativist tradition hold them to be essentially the same thing.

[6] There is a great deal more to understanding the law of diminishing marginal utility than this, and so the reader is encouraged to consult Rothbard (2009) for a very accessible overview of the topic.

[7] Data from Du Bois et al. (2000), section 036, Judgmental on People, 72.112 seconds.

[8] Here I am referring to the recent series of violent clashes between students of differing ideologies on various university campuses within the United States.

How to cite this post

Hieber, Daniel W. Praxeology and language: Social science as the study of human action. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2017/05/04/praxeology-and-language-social-science-as-the-study-of-human-action

Nick Thieberger
University of Melbourne

Can a missionary make a change to a language so that an existing construction is replaced by one based on English? This is what appears to have happened in Nafsan, Efate, in Vanuatu, which has independently innovated a conditional or ‘if’ construction, of the form –f, occurring in the verbal complex. The earliest witnesses of the use of the ‘if’ construction are in Christian translations, so we have no sources that express what must have been an earlier way of expressing conditionals (given that all languages in the region have conditionals of other forms). Another innovation is the term kano ‘to be unable to’. I am concerned here to discuss the methods used by missionaries in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu) in the mid- to late 1800s in order to understand if they could have chosen to use a new form which was then taken up by speakers to be the only conditional construction in the language.

James Cosh

Vanuatu, formerly the New Hebrides, was first occupied around 3,500 years ago and the 130 or so languages spoken there are all from the Oceanic group of Austronesian. Europeans began visiting in the late 1500s, as explorers, whalers, sandalwood traders, missionaries, and blackbirders (also known as slave traders) and eventually, in 1906, it became jointly ruled by both French and British authorities in a condominium that lasted until 1980. Disease introduced by these early contacts led to a huge loss of life, estimated as being a decimation of the population (Durand 1922), so that the population of the island of Erromango, for example, was reduced to only 400 inhabitants (Crowley 1997).

The earliest European missionary to Efate (central Vanuatu) arrived in 1863 and was a Presbyterian, and, like those who followed him, was from Scotland, either directly or via Nova Scotia. The London Missionary Society had placed missionaries elsewhere in the New Hebrides since 1839, and Samoan ‘teachers’ had been on Efate since the 1840s, many more of them than European missionaries, but with very little recorded of their experience except the fact that they were there.

An important part of their work was to translate Christian material, the first of which, a hymnal and small set of Bible translations, were printed in 1864, followed by a revised hymnal (1868), Genesis (1874), Bible texts (1875 & 1877), Apostles (1880), and John (1885). I have prepared a textual corpus of this material that is described here. I want to  explore the way in which the earliest three missionaries to Erakor and Pango villages in Efate approached the task of translation, what we can glean about how they worked with speakers, and what impact this work may have had on the use of the language Nafsan (also known as South Efate).

I have worked with speakers of Nafsan since the mid-1990s when I lived on Efate island in Vanuatu and regularly visited Eratap and Erakor villages. My PhD was a grammatical description of the language and I have continued to record stories and to work on a dictionary. I have also built a searchable corpus of early translations in text form that has been the basis of the present analysis of the work of the missionaries. There are two innovated forms in Nafsan that seem to have come from the missionaries, a condtional and the verb kano ‘to be unable’. The features of each of these are discussed in more detail elsewhere (Thieberger 2017a and 2017b), but here I want to explore how the missionaries conducted their translation work, and how much they knew of the language. While there is a substantial literature on translation theory and significant effort put into Bible translation (see e.g. Leenhardt 1951 for a Melanesianist translator’s perspective, or the more detailed work by Wycliffe/SIL), I am here concerned with how the project was conceived of in Melanesia from the mid-1800s to 1900.

Missionary-introduced innovations?

As mentioned earlier, the f ‘conditional’ appears in a pre-verbal position and is translatable as ‘if’. This form is apparent in the earliest written texts so it is either an accidental coincidence with English or was introduced by missionaries as will be suggested here. It is currently the only morphologically marked way of expressing the conditional in present-day Nafsan. More details about the conditional and arguments for its introduction can be found in Thieberger (2017b).

In the following examples from the 1868 hymnal, (1a) shows the use of the –f conditional and (1b) shows a paratactic conditional from the same source (which could indicate that the use of ‘if’ was not yet fully established in the language). The fact that the earliest sources have no –f conditionals is suggestive of it having been introduced later.

The form kano acts as a verb as can be seen in (2).

I suggest in Thieberger (2017a) that kano ‘to be unable’ comes from a Scots English pronunciation of ‘cannot’. As with the conditional, it is a form that is not shared with neighbouring languages and also appears in the early translations.

Here I want to explore the extent to which new ideologies represented by the missionaries have supported linguistic innovation in a Pacific language. Mühlhäusler (1996: 172) controversially claimed that all Pacific languages have been damaged by missionary efforts: “Indirectly, many missions appear to have contributed to the ultimate decline in traditional languages, and if such languages survive it was probably more because of the lack of mission funds and time invested than deliberate mission policies to keep the linguistic ideology of the Pacific area intact.”  Schiefflein (2007: 140), in a study of the Bosavi in PNG, notes that, “[e]ven when there is relatively brief contact between a mission using a proselytizing language and a monolingual society with an otherwise robust vernacular, intensive evangelizing can result in hybridized, translocated, and dislocated language forms and practices.” Hanks (2010) in a study of Catholicism in Maya cultures of Central America shows how language may be greatly influenced by the missionaries, but it is then adapted by speakers and indigenized.

How could a small group of outsiders entering into small Vanuatu villages change local ideologies so significantly that it led to the abandoning in part or completely of traditional religious practices? As Burt (1994: 1) notes, there is a “longstanding curiosity as to why so many colonised peoples in areas such as the Pacific have apparently jettisoned their traditional culture and religion of their own accord, to adopt that of their European colonisers”. In a similar vein, Monberg (1967: 570) asks, “Why did the 430 inhabitants on the island so readily accept a new religion about which they had received such scant information?” His work on Bellona island suggests that conversion involves a “set of complex external innovations” (ibid: 565) that he outlines. Missionaries had been able to convince the locals that the Christian god had proven to be more powerful than the old gods. He concludes that the “Bellonese obviously believed that they gained more than they lost” (ibid: 588). Closer to Efate, Flexner (2017) gives a detailed account of the changes in material culture in Erromango and Tanna when the missionaries arrived, which he says indicate that “new economic opportunities offered by the mission drew people in at least initially” (ibid: 5).

But, from a linguistic point of view, how can new terms like, in this case, the conditional and ‘be unable’ be introduced by an outside missionary, usually the only non-local in the community, and become accepted by a speech community? To begin with, it needs to be kept in mind that the number of speakers of Nafsan in Erakor and Pango in the late 1800s was much lower than the 6000 or so today. McArthur (1981: 22) estimates the population of the whole of Efate in 1874 as 2000. In 1853 there were 250 Pango people in church (Steel 1880: 223). So it is a relatively small population and one that, with the force of conversion to a new faith, could have brought with it prestige language forms that would be taken up by the converts. It is undoubtedly the case that the early translations are regarded as authorities that are still deferred to, even today, for example in dictionary workshops.

The late nineteenth century was also a time of rapid change, with visits of ships for blackbirding and the first sale of land to outsiders. Records in the Western Pacific archives of the New Hebrides British Service (NHBS) show a number of land sales, particularly in north Efate, from 1872 onwards. Often the purchase price included weapons (axes, knives, guns, ammunition) that could have helped change power relations in Efate.

Table 1. Presbyterian Missionaries to South Efate until 1900, those in italics are Scottish/Nova Scotians

It was not uncommon for the first missionaries to be driven out of villages or to be killed, so the strategy used by the earliest missions was to place ‘teachers’ – who were often Samoan converts – rather than European missionaries, in villages for periods of time before the Europeans would venture to stay. ‘Teachers’ were the hardier frontrunners placed to make it easier for the later arrival of European missionaries. In a number of examples in the New Hebrides, the teachers were killed by locals, but their role was to “live among the people and acquire a knowledge of their language” (Inglis 1890: 231). Patteson notes that teachers were also “taken from new islands merely to teach us some of their languages and to frank us, so that we may have access in safety to their islands” (in Yonge 1874a: 473).

Murray (1863: 236) records that they had “placed the four teachers, Mose, Sipi, Taavili, and Setefano, whom we had designed for Eramanga, two and two at these places [Pango and Erakor]. The teachers were all Samoans; the chiefs and people gave them an encouraging reception, and we left the island much pleased with the result of our visit, and thankful to Him who had so far prospered our way. After about sixteen months, the island was again visited.”

I have found no more information about the early Samoan teachers in Efate than their names, and, similarly, I have been unable to find records about or by Morrison (except for his published translations), whose time on Efate resulted in several translations and who must have written wordlists and other material, perhaps even accounts of local traditional practices. As it is his translation of the hymnal in 1868 that is the first published use of the conditional (his earlier translations of 1864 and 1866 do not include it), then I am assuming that he introduced it via his translation work. He died shortly after leaving Efate and so may have had no later opportunity to write on his experience there. Of the other two Scottish missionaries there is some correspondence, but no ethnographic material or wordlists in the language they worked so hard to translate into.

Cosh was only in the New Hebrides for four years, but he wrote letters, some of which have been preserved (in the Mitchell Library and edited by Denne 1991). Similarly, some of MacKenzie’s letters survive and are available from his descendants and from the Public Archives of Nova Scotia.

These three missionaries produced a  significant amount of translated material in their time as can be seen in Table 2.

Table 2: Translations produced before 1900 in Nafsan

One puzzle is the lack of information about local folklore, language and customary knowledge recorded by these men and their families over the period they lived on Efate, especially in contrast with the volume produced by Rev. Macdonald on the other side of the same island (e.g., Macdonald 1898, 1907). Living as the only Europeans among the Melanesian villagers of Pango or Erakor, missionaries must have learned a great deal about the lives and customs of their hosts, but virtually none of this is reflected in the few records that exist. It is perhaps understandable that they saw their mission as being to replace cutomary beliefs with Christianity and so had no need to keep records of heathen practices. A possible explanation is found in a story I recorded from Kalsarap Namaf, which indicates that Rev. MacKenzie told Chief Samuel to pile papers (presumably containing information about local customary knowledge) into his canoe and then take them to the middle of the lagoon where he was to throw them over the side, this signifying the end of “darkness” (customary knowledge). The story is presented below.

Language skills of the missionaries

We can infer the level of language skills attained by the missionaries at various points in time. For example, the following letter by Mrs Cosh from Pango village, dated December 1866, indicates that the more recent arrival, James Cosh, who had arrived that year, was still learning the language, but that Morrison, who had arrived in 1863, was already able to communicate well:

Matthew, the teacher from Emungalin came to Pango wishing medecine for his boy who was sick. In vain James (Cosh) told him there were a great many sicknesses and advised him to go to Mr. Morrison who would be able to speak and understand what troubles his boy had.
(Letter from Ebag 13/12/1866)

And, a year later, a report in the Christian Review (September 1867: 19) says: “Mr Cosh has succeeded remarkably in learning the languages of Fate [Efate].”

Schooling in the 1880s was delivered in the Erakor dialect of Efatese in which Christian material was available (Miller 1987: 11). In 1884 the children’s day school at Erakor was held from Monday to Friday from 7.30 to 10.00 am and Mrs Amanda MacKenzie ran a class for 5-10 year olds (ibid). All of this suggests that the missionaries were speaking the language and able to use it in the classroom.

Attitudes of missionaries to local languages

While there is little recorded of the three European missionaries to Efate before 1900, there are more detailed recollections of some of their contemporaries, near contemporaries, and colleagues that shed light on the attitudes of the times.

In 1918 Alexander Don (1918), writing about the missions in Melanesia, noted that:

All living languages must grow, for new things and new ideas must have names. To the heathen people of the islands Christianity comes as a revelation of new truth, so new words must be coined, or old words picked out of the mire of pagan use and baptised into a new life. Rev. Joseph King says that ‘in every Island language equivalents can be found for every word in the Old and New Testaments.’
(ibid : 39)

What Mr Milne says is this: ‘The greatest difficulty in translating is always and everywhere the want of an adequate knowledge of the language. When a missionary has difficulty in finding a word for a certain thing, the reason usually is, not that it is not in the language, but that he does not yet sufficiently know the language. Language is one of the things that heathen natives have not degenerated in.’
(ibid : 114)

Bishop John Coleridge Patteson travelled through Melanesia in the 1850s and 1860s and his reflections on language also give us some insight into the views of the time, even if through the writings of a gifted linguist. We know that he corresponded with the linguist Prof. Max Mueller at Oxford (Yonge 1874b: 580) and that Patteson had a strong interest in languages and their relationships. He talked of languages of New Caledonia and the Solomons as being ‘cognate dialects’ (Yonge 1874a: 187) undergoing rapid change, and he cites Grimm and Bopp (Yonge 1874a: 487). From his writing we see that language is a key to conversion, so that the analysis of language becomes, in itself, a worthwhile goal in his eyes, and one for which he feels he has a special vocation, as the following quote indicates:

But you can easily understand what it is to feel God has given to me only of all Christian men the power of speaking to this or that nation, and, moreover, that is the work He has sent me to do. […] I feel that it is a part of my special work, for each grammar and dictionary that I can write opens out the language to some other than myself.
(Yonge 1874b: 188)

Patteson then has this advice for his fellow translators, of particular interest given the present topic: “Don’t be in any hurry to translate, and don’t attempt to use words as (assumed) equivalents of abstract ideas. Don’t devise modes of expression unknown to the language as at present in use” (Yonge 1874b: 191). He does not mention devising new terms for modes of expression already known to the language, as appears to be the case for the conditional construction in Erakor.

The missionary Geddie’s initial work was on Futuna, then he took “chief Kotiama from Futuna to act as our interpreter” on Aneityum (Inglis 1890: 244). Samoans were first placed as ‘teachers’ on Aneityum in 1841 (Inglis 1890 : 304-305).

Wumra assisted Mr. Geddie in acquiring a knowledge of the native language, and Singonga was for a long time Mrs. Geddie’s right hand woman. It was from Wumra that Mr. Geddie first got the correct word for sin, and possibly, though I am not quite sure of this, also the correct word for soul. During all the seven years that the teachers were on the island before the arrival of the missionaries the nearest word for soul that they had got was shadow, and they were daily exhorting the natives to seek the salvation, not of their souls, but of their shadows. Mr. Geddie got also other important words, such as unbelief, faith, salvation, &c. To acquire a knowledge of a foreign language in such circumstances as they were in involved a great amount of groping in the dark. It was not till Mr. and Mrs. Geddie had been five years on Aneityum, and we had been one, that he found out the native word for perhaps; and I think the missionaries were ten or a dozen years on Tahiti before they discovered some word that was equally common and equally important.
(ibid : 244)

The fact that it took Geddie five years to learn the term for ‘perhaps’ is particularly relevant to the present investigation of the origin of the conditional in Nafsan. Inglis goes on to point out how important it was to understand that Aneityum speakers were responding to questions using the conditional (kit) rather than a statement.

It was therefore a great and important discovery when kit was found out and its correct meaning established; it was an acquisition that was highly prized, a discovery that was greatly valued, and could scarcely be overrated.
(ibid : 252-253)

An example of the influence of the missionaries on local interactional style can be seen in the introduction by Geddie of the salutation “Kaiheug vai eug”, “My love to thee”. “[I]n imitation of the missionaries, the Christian natives saluted each other; and as Christianity spread, so did the salutation … till the minor virtue of politeness, as far as the salutations went, had permeated the whole community” (ibid: 100).

The missionary John Inglis arrived in Aneityum in 1852 and stayed for 24 years. The foundations established there were an important influence on the Efate mission. He wrote extensively (Inglis 1890) about the nature of translation and, from the following examples, it is clear that he spoke the Aneityum language. He notes that, on a trip to Futuna, the language there being “totally different from the Aneityum” (1890 : 54), he did not understand what they were saying, indicating a high level of comprehension on his part of the Aneityum language. In another anecdote, he records a woman called Morana berating her white husband, saying, “Why cannot you learn the Aneityumese as fast as Misi [Missionary]?” (ibid: 216).

Prior to and in addition to learning the language themselves, the missionaries relied on local people, who Inglis called ‘pundits’. Lasarus was one of the Aneityumese ‘pundits’: “For some years before he died he was my chief pundit when I was translating or correcting translations” (ibid: 284). In more detail about how the relationship between missionary and pundit worked, Inglis says, “it was, however, as a pundit, in assisting me in revising and editing the Aneityumese New Testament, that Williamu rendered the most valuable and abiding services to the mission. Many natives, otherwise active and intelligent, can render very little help to the translator; they fail to see what you want, or, if they see your difficulty, they are unable to tell you how it can be met. But Williamu was quick to perceive the idea you wished to express, and equally ready to supply the word or the idiom that was wanted” (ibid: 316).

Mrs Inglis, who ran the Girls’ Industrial Boarding School in Aneityum, also learned the language: “as soon as Mrs Inglis could speak to her intelligibly in her own tongue, and bring the truths of Scripture to bear on her [her assistant, Ester’s] conscience, an improvement began” (ibid: 287).

Central to the work of the Protestant missionary was translation and making the text available in the language. The work needed to be printed, and new technologies were enlisted to allow printing in the New Hebrides (on Aneityum) but also in Sydney, if funds could be raised to allow it. The first books in Nafsan were printed on the Aneityum press. In some missions a printing press was a money-making venture according to Huber’s (1988) work on Catholic missions in the Sepik. Missionising was an expensive undertaking (which included maintaining mission headquarters in the home countries). Talking of the period from the 1870s, she notes that “[t]he very best equipment available was used and, for the magazines, the brothers developed highly efficient (and controversial) sales and distribution techniques” (Huber 1988: 61).

In Efate, the cost of the printing was provided by selling arrowroot. In 1911 MacKenzie wrote: “They [the different villages] have defrayed the expense of all of the books printed in their language which are: a primer, catechism, hymnal, translation of the Peep of Day… and their share of the Bible (in Efatese)” (Miller 1987: 16). No money came from the Nova Scotia mission base, rather, in 1905, 10 pounds were sent from South Efate to Canada (see Miller 1987: 57).

There is a clear effort involving both the missionaries and their ‘pundits’ or teachers in producing these translations, and great labour of the converts in paying for their printing. This, together with the ongoing veneration for the language represented in these early written works could be part of the explanation for the adoption of forms introduced by missionaries in these texts.

Conclusion

The missionaries arrived during a period of great change in the New Hebrides. The prestige of their new religion is clearly an important factor in their ability to convince locals to abandon large parts of their traditional belief system and adopt Christianity. As for the two words that I claim are introduced by the missionary effort, we may never know if they were introduced by the missionaries, but the evidence is good that they were. The Scots English canna/kano makes sense as a source for kano in Nafsan. Inglis’s note about the difficulty the missionaries had in finding a conditional in Aneityum is informative, as is the fact that no ‘if’ forms occur in the earliest Efate translations, perhaps showing that it took some time for the translators to decide on using the new form. From the point of view of comparative linguistics, it is useful to understand the role of contact in innovation, and, in particular, the kind of contact outlined here of a single outsider family armed with an apparently attractive ideology spending time in the village, and introducing terms that go on to become part of normal everyday language.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Janet Denne, Alex MacKenzie, and Bridget MacKenzie for additional information about their missionary forebears.

References

Burt, Ben. 1994. Tradition and Christianity: The Colonial Transformation of a Solomon Islands Society. Studies in Anthropology and History, v. 10. Chur, Switzerland ; Langhorne, Pa., USA: Harwood Academic Publishers.

Crowley, Terry. 1997. “What Happened to Erromango’s Languages?” The Journal of the Polynesian Society 106 (1): 33–63.

Denne, Janet. 1991. Rev. James Cosh M.A., D.D., 1838-1900: Minister, Missionary and Academic. Killara, N.S.W.: Denne Design.

Durand, Rev W. J. 1922. “The Depopulation of Melanesia.” In Essays on the Depopulation of Melanesia, edited by W. H. R. Rivers, 3–24. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Don, Alexander. 1918. Light in Dark Isles. Dunedin: Foreign Missions Committee.

Flexner, James L. 2017. An Archaeology of Early Christianity in Vanuatu (Terra Australis 44). Canberra: ANU Press.

Hanks, William F. 2010. Converting Words: Maya in the Age of the Cross. The Anthropology of Christianity 6. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Huber, Mary Taylor. 1988. The Bishops’ Progress : A Historical Ethnography of Catholic Missionary Experience on the Sepik Frontier / by Mary Taylor Huber. Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry. Washington, D.C: Smithsonian Institution Press.

Inglis, John. 1890. Bible Illustrations from the New Hebrides. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons.

Leenhardt, Maurice. 1951. “Notes on Translating the New Testament into New Caledonian.” The Bible Translator Periodical for the Assistance of Bible Translators 2 (3): 97-105.

Macdonald, D. D. 1898. “The Mythology of the Efatese.” Report of the Seventh Meeting of the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science, 759–68.

Macdonald, D. D. 1907. The Oceanic Languages, Their Grammatical Structure, Vocabulary, and Origin. Oxford: Henry Frowde.

McArthur, Nora. 1981. “New Hebrides Population 1840-1967: A Reinterpretation.” Noumea: South Pacific Commission, occasional paper no.18.

Miller, J. Graham. 1987. Live, Book Five. Vila: Presbyterian Church of Vanuatu.

Monberg, Torben. 1967. “An Island Changes Its Religion : Some Social Implications of the Conversion to Christianity on Bellona Island.” In Polynesian Culture History : Essays in Honor of Kenneth P. Emory, edited by (Genevieve) Highland, Alan Howard, and Yosihiko Sinoto, 565–89. Honolulu: Bishop Museum, Honolulu.

Mühlhäusler, Peter. 1996. Linguistic ecology: Language change and linguistic imperialism in the Pacific Region. London: Routledge.

Murray, A. W. 1863. Missions in Western Polynesia. London: John Snow.

Paton, Maggie Whitecross. 1894. Letters and Sketches from the New Hebrides. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Schieffelin, Bambi B. 2007. “Found in Translating.” In Consequences of Contact: Language Ideologies and Sociocultural Transformations in Pacific Societies, edited by Miki Makihara and Bambi B. Shieffelin, 140–65. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press.

Steel, R. 1880. The New Hebrides and Christian Missions with a Sketch of the Labour Traffic and Notes of a Cruise through the Group in the Mission Vessel. London: James Nisbet & Co.

Thieberger, Nick. 2017a. “Unable to say too much about kano in Nafsan (South Efate)”. Wellington Working Papers in Linguistics 23.

Thieberger, Nick. 2017b. Missionary-induced innovation in Efate. Paper to be presented at the Conference on Oceanic Linguistics, Honiara, July 2017.

Thieberger, Nick, and Chris Ballard. 2008. “Daniel Macdonald and the ‘Compromise Literary Dialect’ in Efate, Central Vanuatu”. Oceanic Linguistics 47: 365–82.

Yonge, Charlotte Mary. 1874a. Life of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands. Vol. I.  London : Macmillan and co.

Yonge, Charlotte Mary. 1874b. Life of John Coleridge Patteson, Missionary Bishop of the Melanesian Islands. Vol. II.  London: Macmillan and co.

How to cite this post

Thieberger, Nick. 2017. Missionary-induced language change, on the trail of the conditional in Nafsan, central Vanuatu. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2017/05/30/missionary-induced-language-change/

Sven Staffeldt
University of Würzburg

1. The modernity of the ancestors

Georg von der Gabelentz
(Ezawa & Vogel 2013, 28)

There is a trend in linguistics – or maybe even in general – to reclaim the works of older authors. Older authors are sometimes used as sources of information for finding the origin of certain schools of thinking or the origin of particular assumptions. For example, feminist linguistics sees its origin in repeatedly cited parts of Fritz Mauthner’s (esp. Mauthner: ³1923, 56-61) and Otto Jespersen’s (esp. Jespersen: 1925, 220-238) works (cf. Samel: ²2000, 27). In phonetics and phonology reference is sometimes made to Sievers (⁵1901) to explain tenseness as a phonetic feature (cf. Chomsky/Halle: 1968, 324 f.).

Sometimes older authors are rediscovered in their own right. The slogan that would sum up such rediscoveries is: “That has been said (or written) before (by the ancestors).” For example, Hermann Paul plays a major role in recent developments in cognitive semantics, as described by Dirk Geeraerts:

Paul’s usage-based model of semantic change fits seamless in any contemporary view on the dialectic relationship between semantics and pragmatics; and the regular patterns of metaphor and metonymy investigated in cognitive semantics may sometimes be found almost literally in the older literature.
(Geeraerts: 2010, 277)

Speech act theory can also be traced back to older authors. A major candidate for being a predecessor is Karl Bühler (Bühler: 1934), who is one of the most important sources of information for pragmatics as a whole. Besides Bühler, there are other potential candidates: Cloeren (1988) identifies 19^th century German language critics as the predecessors of speech act theory. According to Burkhardt, legal philosopher Reinach (1921) developed a theory of social acts, anticipating speech act theory:

Zunächst soll jedoch die in ihren Umrissen skizzierte Geschichte der Sprechakttheorie um eine Position ergänzt werden, die wesentliche Aspekte der sprechakttheoretischen Betrachtung bereits vorwegnimmt und bisher fast völlig unbeachtet geblieben ist. Es handelt sich um die ‚Theorie der sozialen Akte‘ des Rechtsphilosophen und Husserl-Schülers Adolf Reinach, die – neben ihrer philologischen Bedeutung – geeignet ist, einige Probleme der Sprechakttheorie in neuem Lichte anzugehen.
(Burkhardt: 1986, 10)

(First of all, the history of speech act theory sketched here should be completed by a position that anticipates major aspects of speech act theory and that has gone more or less unnoticed. It is the ‘theory of social acts’ of Adolf Reinach, legal philosopher and disciple of Husserl, which, alongside its philological importance, can be applied to see some of the problems of speech act theory in a new light.)

In this post, we do not intend to rediscover Georg von Gabelentz as yet another predecessor of the speech act theory of J.L. Austin and J.R. Searle. Nevertheless, it is interesting to see if and to what degree speech act theory is foreshadowed in Gabelentz (2016/1891). The higher the degree of foreshadowing, the less clearly we can speak of a sudden pragmatic shift, coming out of nowhere, radically breaking with long-standing positions. Rather, pragmatic ideas, descriptions and claims had been in the wind for a long time and the pragmatic shift did not come out of nowhere.

2. Resonances of speech act theory in Georg von der Gabelentz

2.1 The conception of language: the purpose of language

Gabelentz – just like Bühler – understands language as functional. Just like Bühler in his ‘organon’ model, Gabelentz sees language primarily as a means of communication. In various places, he undertakes a description of the nature of language that examines functional features. Along with identifying language as “the most direct outpouring of the soul” (umittelbarster Ausfluss der Seele, Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 41) or as “a means of communication, a means of transporting thoughts” (Verständigungsmittel, Mittel des Gedankenverkehr, ibid, 58), he directly and primarily sets it into relation to thought:

Menschliche Sprache ist der gegliederte Ausdruck des Gedankens durch Laute.
(Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 3)

(Human language is the articulated expression of thoughts by means of sounds.)

Sprache ist gegliederter Ausdruck des Gedankens, und Gedanke ist Verbindung von Begriffen.
(Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 85)

(Language is a articulated expression of thoughts, and a thought is the combination of terms.)

For Gabelentz, the characteristic purpose of language is a means of expressing thoughts:

Der Zweck der Sprache ist der Ausdruck des Gedankens. Der Gedanke und seine Theile müssen mit einem ausreichenden Grade von Energie in’s Bewusstsein treten, um zum sprachlichen Ausdruck zu drängen. Energie heißt in diesem Falle soviel als Klarheit. Sich einen Gedanken klar machen heisst ihn zergliedern. Dem Ergebnisse dieser Zergliederung soll der sprachliche Ausdruck entsprechen, mithin muss er selbst gegliedert, d. h. articuliert sein.
(Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 6)[1]

(The purpose of language is the expression of thoughts. The thought and its single parts must become conscious with a sufficient degree of energy to push itself into verbal expression. Energy in this case means clarity. To become clear of a thought means to divide the thought up. The result of dividing up a thought correlates to a verbal expression, that means that a verbal expression itself must be divided up, i.e. articulated.)

The position Gabelentz takes on the relation between language and thought is not uncommon: thinking takes place before speaking, and speaking reflects the result of thinking. But in Gabelentz’ times alternative positions emerged in psychology and linguistics. Freud as well as Saussure offered a different thesis. For Freud, the connection of ‘object representations’ (Objektvorstellungen, Freud 1891, later in Freud 1915: ‘thing representation’, Sachvorstellung) and word representations (Wortvorstellungen) is “the prerequisite to become aware of an idea” (die Bedingung dafür, dass eine Vorstellung bewusst werden kann. Staffeldt: 2004, 35). Saussure also sees the location of thought as an undefined region of vague ideas, as long as it is not ruled by the defined domain of sounds:

Prise en elle-même, la pensée est comme une nébuleuse où rien n’est nécessairement délimité. Il n’y a pas d’idées préétablies, et rien n’est distinct avant l’apparition de la langue.
(Saussure in Wunderli: 2013, 244)

(Taken by itself, thinking is like a cloud of fog, in which nothing is necessarily delimited. There are no pre-established ideas, and nothing is distinct before language appears.)

While the process of articulating a thought that Gabelenz describes requires a process of bringing a thought into consciousness, he still assumes that conscious thinking and language are independent of one other. Even though this is a rather traditional view on the relation of language and thinking, his view on the relation of what he is calling a thought (as a “combination of ideas”, Verbindung von Begriffen; Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 85) and verbal actions is very interesting:

Der regelmäßige Zweck der Rede ist Mittheilung. […] Ein He! oder St! ist ein Befehl, ein Pfui! der völlig zureichende Ausdruck eines sittlichen oder ästhetischen Urtheils.
(Gablentz: 2016/1891, 380)

(The usual purpose of language is communication. […] Hey! or Hush! are orders, Ugh! a completely sufficient expression of a moral or aesthetic judgment.)

Sprache ist Ausdruck des Gedankens. Dieser Ausdruck dient vorwiegend der Mittheilung im weiteren Sinne des Wortes; denn gleich der aussagenden Rede ist auch die fragende, befehlende, bittende eine Gedankenmittheilung.
(Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 476)

(Language is the expression of thoughts. This expression mainly serves communication in the wider sense of the word, because, along with declarative speech, interrogative, imperative, requesting speech is also a communication of thoughts.)

The clear, i.e. articulated, thought is not by any means found only in declarative speech. Orders, questions, requests etc. also serve to communicate thoughts. This fact often serves as the point of departure when explaining the features of speech act theory. It can be shown, for example, that one and the same content can appear in different acts of speech. This is Searle’s approach in showing that the proposition “Sam (=reference) smokes habitually (=predication)” can be the identical content of different speech acts (assertion, question, order etc.). This is precisely the core of the speech act model: a content is uttered with a certain purpose. The utterance itself does not have to include the proposition to be understood as a speech act, as shown by Gabelentz’ examples (e.g. Ugh!, ‘Pfui!’). Using the terminology of speech act theory, one would say: an illocutionary act is executed (pronouncing an aesthetic or moral judgment) by means of a mere utterance (uttering an interjection) without executing a propositional act.

Gabelentz has a similar view on the relation of thinking and language to Searle. Searle sees speech as a derived intentionality. Language acquires meaningfulness by the mind’s ability to represent. Finally, Searle structures speech acts basically in the same way as he structures intentional states. A speech act can be symbolized as F(p)³ (F = agentive function; p = proposition); the same structure can be assumed for intentional states: Z(r)⁴ (Z = psychological mode, r = representative content). Gabelentz and orthodox speech act theory as proposed by Searle seem to share the same basis, the same conception of language: speech is the expression of thoughts.

2.2 Psychological modality: actions, states, effects

Gabelentz’ psychological modality (in contrast to logical modality) shares some similarities with speech act theory:

Als psychologisch im engeren Sinne möchte ich diejenigen grammatischen Formungsmittel bezeichnen, in denen sich das seelische Verhältniss des Redenden zur Rede oder seine Absicht, auf den Angeredeten einzuwirken, kundgiebt.
(Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 100)

(I will call those grammatical means psychological (in the narrower sense of the word) in which the speaker communicates his or her mental relationship to the things being said or his or her aim to affect the person spoken to.)

… die Lehre von der psychologischen Modalität, das heißt von der Beziehung des Redenden zur Rede, ob er mittheilt, fragt, ausruft, befiehlt oder bittet, ob er mit Entschiedenheit oder mit bescheidener Zurückhaltung, vermuthend, fürchtend, hoffend, zweifelnd spricht.
(Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 108)

(… the model of psychological modality, i.e. of the relationship of the speaker to the things being said, whether he informs, asks, exclaims, orders or pleads, whether he speaks with decidedness or with humble reservation, assumingly, fearfully, with hope or with doubt.)

In short, to put it in simple speech act theoretical terms, Gabelentz’ psychological modality more or less covers the illocution, the intentional state being expressed, and the perlocution of a speech act.[2] Here we have the main parallel between Gabelentz’ conceptions and the basic assumptions of speech act theory. Let’s have a closer look at Gabelentz’ conception of psychological modality.

Gabelentz distinguishes exclamatory forms of speech from – in the broadest sense – communicatory forms of speech. We have already seen that thoughts are the things to be communicated. Gabelentz divides communicatory forms of speech by the kinds of thoughts to be communicated: a judgment or a request.

If a judgment is complete, Gabelentz sees in it a communication in the narrower sense, correlating to the class of assertive speech acts. Here, something is said about the state of the world. The sincerity conditions of assertive speech acts are intentional states of the epistemic kind (a belief, an assumption, a certainty, a supposition etc.). In performing an assertive act, speakers commit themselves to believing, assuming, knowing, supposing etc. that the world is in a certain state.

If a judgment is incomplete, Gabelentz calls it a question. Here, he sees an overlapping region with requests as the thoughts to be communicated: by asking a genuine question, the asker requests an answer from the addressee. In Gabelentz’ view, a question communicates an incomplete judgment as well as a request. In speech act theory, the discussion of questions falls within the same area. Searle sees questions as directive speech acts, communicating the request for the addressee to provide missing knowledge. Gabelentz shares this point of view: “It seems that a question is just a subcategory of commands” (Also könnte es scheinen, als wäre die Frage nur eine Unterart des Befehls. Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 335). To Wunderlich, questions belong to their own class of speech acts, the ‘erotetic’ class (erotetische, cf. Wunderlich: 1976, 77), but its purpose is described in a similar way (cf. Wunderlich: 1976, 82 f.).

If the thought to be communicated is a request that is not related to acquiring knowledge, Gabelentz speaks of the ‘demanding’ (gebietend) form of speech, including orders, pleas, bans etc., comprising the class of directive speech acts. By performing a directive speech act, speakers communicate the request that the listener should do or not do something.

Gabelentz summarises the three types of communicatory forms of speech in the following figure:

Fig. 1: Summary of the communicatory forms of speech (Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 336)

Furthermore, for Gabelentz speaking also serves the function of expressing oneself:

In solchen Stimmungen befindet sich der Mensch unter dem Einflusse mächtiger Erregungen, die nach Entladung drängen. […] Solche Reden nun nennen wir ausrufende.
(Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 334-335)

(In these moods, human beings are under the influence of powerful agitations pushing to be released. […] We will call this form of speech exclamatory.)

On the one hand, Gabelentz includes in this category expressive speech acts, in which speakers express emotional states:

Im Ausrufe äussert sich eine lebhafte Erregung, entweder nur die Art dieser Erregung oder […].
(Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 339)

(An exclamation expresses an animated agitation, whether the kind of this agitation or […].)

On the other hand, he includes other states accompanied by or causing agitation, e.g. a desire or a fact. For Gabelentz, the psychological foundation of releasing agitation is an important reason for the emergence of language itself. Joy, fear, physical or mental pain, fright, surprise: all of them urge us to immediately express our moods (Freude, Angst, körperlicher oder seelischer Schmerz, Schreck, Erstaunen: sie alle drängen unmittelbar zu Stimmungsäußerungen. Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 327).[3]

In summary, the classes of assertive, directive and expressive speech acts can be recognized in Gabelentz‘ works. Furthermore, he already recognizes the problem that speech acts are not always performed in a direct way; that is, the problem of indirect speech acts:

Endlich kleidet die Sprache oft ihre Gedanken in geborgte Gewänder. Die mittheilende Redeform mag jetzt eine Frage enthalten: ‚Ich wüsste gern ob …‘, – jetzt mag sie einen Befehl, eine Bitte, ein Verbot in sich schliessen: ‚Du musst…, Du darfst nicht …, Du würdest mir einen Gefallen thun, wenn Du …‘ usw. Die fragende Form mag ein fertiges Urteil verhüllen. Es ist dies der Fall der rhetorischen Frage, die besagen will: ‚Gieb die Antwort nicht mir, sondern Dir, stelle Dir die Frage, so wirst Du urtheilen wie ich!‘. Oder es mag eine Aufforderung in fragender Form ausgesprochen werden: ‚Wirst du gleich kommen?! Wärest du wohl so freundlich …?‘ Es scheint naturgemäss, dass auch der Ausruf gern die Form einer Frage annehme: ‚Wie schön ist das!‘ […] Endlich kann der Ausruf jetzt eine thatsächliche Mittheilung bezwecken: ‚Ein schönes Bild!‘, – jetzt eine Frage: ‚Wüsste ich doch …!‘ – jetzt wohl auch eine Aufforderung: ‚Wenn du mir doch hülfest!‘
(Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 335)

(Language often dresses its thoughts in borrowed clothes. The communicatory form of speech may contain a question: ‘I would like to know, if…’, – it may contain an order, a plea, a ban: ‘You must…, You must not…, You would do me a favour if…’ etc. The interrogative form might disguise a rendered judgment. This is the case with rhetoric questions that say: ‘Don’t give the answer to me, but to yourself, if you pose yourself the question, you will judge just like me!’. Or an order might be given in interrogative form: ‘Won’t you come? Would you be so kind…?’ It seems natural that an exclamation also takes the interrogative form: ‘How beautiful is that!’ […] Finally, an exclamation’s purpose can be a communication: ‘A nice picture!’, – or a question: ‘If I only knew…!’ – or an order: ‘If you just helped me!’)

Gabelentz not only outlines the illocutionary side; the perlocutionary side also receives exposition. In Gabelentz, the perlocutionary side also is a part of psychological modality as “the intention to influence the addressee” (Absicht, auf den Angeredeten einzuwirken, Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 100). Gabelentz very clearly sees that the complete description of language must contain the aspect of impact:

Der Redende will einen Gedanken, vielleicht auch eine Stimmung ausdrücken, er will im Hörer jedenfalls Verständniss, vielleicht auch eine gewisse Stimmung oder Willensneigung erregen.
(Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 99)

(The speaker wants to express a thought or maybe a mood. In any case, he wants to arouse the addressee’s understanding, or maybe a certain mood or attitude.)

Understanding can have two meanings: on the one hand – indicated above by ‘in any case’ – quite generally, its meaning could be the illocutionary effect of understanding what the speaker wants from the listener. On the other hand – indicated by contrasting it with ‘mood or attitude’ – its meaning could be a certain cognitive effect related to assertive speech acts. If this is the case, then Gabelentz has covered the three major perlocutionary classes, namely the class of epistemic (understanding),[4] emotional (mood) and motivational perlocution (attitude).[5]

3. Conclusion

Gabelentz has a functional approach to language. For him, language is the means to express thoughts. These thoughts correlate approximately with propositions in speech act theory. They are not only to be assumed in communicatory forms of speech, but also in imperative and exclamatory forms. With these three forms of speech, described by Gabelentz not only in form, but also in content, he approximately captures the three illocutionary classes conceived in Bühler’s organon model and described in speech act theory: assertives, directives and expressives. Gabelentz describes the purpose of the individual forms of speech not only as the expression of thoughts to be determined in detail, but he also points out their effect and thereby also captures the perlocutionary aspect.

What is missing in Gabelentz – besides the missing classes of declarative and commissive speech acts – is the relation to rule-based speaking which is essential to speech act theory. Austin’s great merit is to have shown that speech acts can fail, while Searle’s great merit lies in deducing rules for describing speech acts based on their felicity conditions. This cornerstone of orthodox speech act theory has not been set by Gabelentz. But he has already recognized that speaking is doing, that there are speech acts with different purposes, and that language is used to express inner states. Gabelentz made this possible by anticipating Saussure’s discrimination of langue (language) and parole (speech) (vs. langage, the ability to use a language):

Menschliche Sprache ist der gegliederte Ausdruck des Gedankens durch Laute. [Absatz] Es sei hier schon bemerkt, dass diese Definition ein Mehreres in sich fasst. Zunächst gilt die Sprache als Erscheinung, als jeweiliges Ausdrucksmittel für den jeweiligen Gedanken, d. h. als Rede. Zweitens gilt die Sprache als eine einheitliche Gesammtheit solcher Ausdrucksmittel für jeden beliebigen Gedanken. In diesem Sinne reden wir von der Sprache eines Volkes, einer Berufsklasse, eines Schriftstellers u. s. w. Sprache in diesem Sinne ist nicht sowohl die Gesammtheit aller Reden des Volkes, der Classe oder des Einzelnen, – als vielmehr die Gesammtheit derjenigen Fähigkeiten und Neigungen, welche die Form derjenigen sachlichen Vorstellungen, welche den Stoff der Rede bestimmen. Endlich, drittens, nennt man die Sprache, ebenso wie das Recht und die Religion, ein Gemeingut der Menschen. Gemeint ist damit das Sprachvermögen, d. h. die allen Völkern innewohnende Gabe des Gedankenausdruckes durch Sprache. (Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 3)[6]

(Human language is the articulate expression of thoughts by means of sounds. It may already be noted here that this definition comprises different aspects. First, language counts as an occurrence, as a particular means for expressing the respective thought, e.g. as speech. Second, language counts as a consistent whole of means of expression for each and every thought. In this sense, we are dealing with the language of a people, of a profession or of an author etc. Language in this sense is not the totality of utterances of a people, of a class or of an individual, it rather is the totality of those abilities and predispositions which determine the form of images we have of things and which also determine the content of speech. At last, third, just like law and religion, language is a common property of human beings, i.e. the ability to use a language, i.e. the ability to express thoughts by means of language, which is inherent to all people.)

This distinction enables him to understand speaking as doing. Linguistics analyses speech to be able to say something about the structure of an individual language. Later, linguistics will describe the form and subject matter (see the quotation above) of that language. This is the only way to understand language as an expression of thought, with the proviso that thoughts always have something to do with the purposes of the speech. It is these purposes that transform speech into an act.

Notes

Original text: Sven Staffeldt, “Die Sprechakttheorie und Georg von der Gabelentz”, Beiträge zur Gabelentz-Forschung, ed. by Kennosuke Ezawa, Franz Hundsnurscher & Annemete von Vogel, 229-238. Tübingen: Narr Verlag. English translation by Claudia Zimmermann.

[1] This is a metonymic contraction, of course. Expressing thoughts is not the purpose of speech, rather speech is the means to fulfil this purpose. But contractions like these are far from uncommon. Nevertheless, Gabelentz’ statement is stressing the tool-like character of speech. It can be concluded that analyses of discrete languages are always cultural analyses: if speech is the most direct outpouring of the soul and its purpose is therefore the expression of thoughts, analysing a discrete language will automatically unsheathe the thought patterns of its speech community.

[2] I dispense with an explanation of the basics of speech act theory, instead I refer to the following introductions: Hindelang: ⁵2010 and Staffeldt: ²2009

[3] A theory of the development of language that is similar is that of Rousseau, his so-called interjectional theory. Cf. Rousseau: ²1996 [first published 1781].

[4] The following quotation shows that Gabelentz is postulating an epistemic effect, whether “understanding” has the corresponding meaning or not: “I articulate my thought and expect the addressee to think the same: ‘Believe me!’. The corresponding form of speech is the communicatory in the narrower sense: I communicate my thought to you, so that it will henceforth become your thought” (Ich spreche meinen Gedanken aus und verlange dass der Angeredete nun ebenso denke: ‘Glaube mir!’. Die entsprechende Form der Rede ist die mittheilende im engeren Sinne: ich theile dir meinen Gedanken mit, damit er hinfort auch Dein Gedanke werde. Gabelentz: 2016/1891, 334).

[5] For a classification of perlocutions, see Staffeldt: 2007, 97-135, 171 f., Staffeldt: ²2009, 146-157, and Staffeldt: 2010.

[6] The fact that Gabelentz anticipates Sausure’s distinction of langue and parole (vs. langage) is stressed by Coseriu (³1984, 6–13).

References

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Gabelentz, Georg von der (2016/1891), Die Sprachwissenschaft, ihre Aufgaben, Methoden und bisherigen Ergebnisse, ed. by Manfred Ringmacher and James McElvenny. Berlin: Language Science Press.

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How to cite this post

Staffeldt, Sven. Speech act theory and Georg von der Gabelentz. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2017/09/06/speech-act-theory-and-georg-von-der-gabelentz

Yukun Zeng
University of Chicago

Li Fang-Kuei and Edward Sapir (Sources: Li & Sapir)

1. The Problem of Scaling in Language Classification

Language classification is a matter of scale and scaling. Most basically, it assigns languages into mutually exclusive categories. The scale underpins the categorization but does not come from nowhere. It displays an historical configuration and is invariably centered on the authoritative voice of science (Gal 2016:95). Both linguistics and anthropology are essentially Western disciplines that scale themselves up from provincial to universal sciences (Chakrabarty 2008). For instance, comparative linguistics depends on the expandability of the colonial project, which is best exemplified by the British colonialization of India and the discovery of Indo-European linguistics (Trautmann 1997). To understand the dialectical relationship between language classification and political agenda, it is useful to follow the recent conceptualization of scaling as pragmatics (Carr and Lempert 2016). Language classification is necessarily political in terms of both pragmatic presupposition (colonial exploration) and entailment (governing colonized territory).

It is reasonable to question the absence of intellectual agency in such an account and to reconsider one of the most intellectually triumphant moments in the development of linguistics, Bloomfield and Sapir’s adoption of the originally Indo-European comparative method to study Native American languages. As Sapir famously commented on Bloomfield’s reconstruction of Primitive Central Algonkian, their applications of neogrammarian comparative method brought “postulates of exceptionless […] autonomous phonological change” (Silverstein 2014) from mere assumptions to “proved truth.”

On Sapir’s side, most eminently, the application of the comparative method to Native American languages simplified its language classification from John Wesley Powell’s clumsy 58 families to Sapir’s six “superstocks” (Goddard 1996:312). These superstocks or phyla, in the most neutral term, are not only instrumental for historical linguistic studies on Native American languages but also, in Sapir’s hope, serve as a “stimulus to more profound investigations and as a first attempt to shape the historical problem” (Sapir 1921a :408).

Nevertheless, what Sapir did is not just re-arrange splitters into lumpers. What makes lumpers different from splitters is neither that the former contains more languages nor that it explains more similarities. What is crucial for him is the historical “thickness” implicated in the genetic relationship that “inject[s] chronology into descriptive cultural data” (Darnell and Hymes 1986:228) and gives history to people without written languages.

Also, the scaling-up of the Powellian family into superstocks hinged upon methodological interscaling, the emergent “connections between disparate scalable qualities” (Carr and Fisher 2016:134). Heuristically, Sapirian superstocks mobilize comparativists to nail down phonological and morphological details among different languages in a stock, which is the same ground that splitter-oriented scholars contest. Superstocks, however, enable the observation of more general linguistic features, propping a stock comparable with not just other stocks in North America but language families in other continents. The intra-stock discussions are scaled up to inter-stock ones.

One inter-stock comparison is Sapir’s famous Sino-Dene (or Indo-Chinese, see Darnell 1990:126) hypothesis, a generic connection drawn between Sino-Tibetan and Na-Dene language families across the Pacific Ocean. This idea was formulated around the time of Sapir’s six superstock proposal. It was first entextualized in a letter to Kroeber on Oct 4, 1920 (Golla 1984:347) as “godly true”:

if the morphological and lexical accord which I find on every hand between Nadene and Indo-Chinese is “accidental,” then every analogy on God’s earth is an accident.

Sapir paid particular interest to Na-Dene for a long time. And the particularity of Na-Dene interscalarly was sharpened via comparing it with Sino-Tibetan. Most saliently, tone was identified by Sapir as the trait that distinguishes Na-Dene from other superstocks (Darnell 1990: 240). At that time, tone was widely regarded as the characteristic linguistic trait of Sino-Tibetan. Although in a 1921 letter to Kroeber, Sapir gave several examples of morphemes that are comparatively connected in Tlingit, Navajo, Naida, Old Chinese, Tibetan, Karen, Miao, etc (Golla 1984), the heuristics of comparison rather than systematic morphological and phonological correspondence finally seduced Sapir into relying on the similarity of suprasegmental features.

2. Tone and Tongue

Tone is essentialized as a feature of certain language families, so are those whose mother tongue is tonal. In 1926, Fang-Kuei Li (1902-1987), a Chinese student and recent graduate of the University of Michigan, arrived in Chicago hoping to continue his studies in linguistics. He came across Sapir on his first day at the registration table and signed up for Sapir’s introduction to linguistics (Li 1984:381).

From Li’s account, his interest in working with Sapir “was to learn the field method of studying living languages—the analysis of their phonological systems, their grammatical systems and so forth” (1984:381). But Sapir’s interaction with Li was hardly arbitrary. Sapir was “especially pleased at the arrival of Fang-Kuei Li, an ‘able Chinese student’ (Sapir 1927), who could be expected to hear tone especially well” (Krauss 2005:57). And Sapir then “turned over his Sarcee materials to Li, whose study on Sarcee verb stems was in fact his master’s thesis,” including an analysis of the condition of tone (Krauss 2005:57).

Sapir’s plan to use a native tonal tongue to perfect his Sino-Dene project nevertheless fell apart. In 1927, Sapir asked Li if he “wanted to do some field work in American Indian languages” (Li 1984:382), which later became a series of fieldwork on Mattole, which resulted in Li’s dissertation on Chipewyan and Hare. But Li merely found “high tone, not low, before old glottal stop, basically the reverse of the Navajo-Sarcee-Kutchin” (Krauss 2005:60). The inability to find tone in Mattole complicated the reconstruction of a proto-Athabaskan tone, let alone the up-scaled reconstruction of Na-Dene and Sino-Dene.

Sapir’s failure is described by Athabaskanist Michael Krauss:

His inability to deal with evidence contradictory to his original conceptions of Athabaskan tone, especially in the context of his relations with the immeasurably lower-ranked “intelligent Chinaman” Li, set back the development of comparative Athabaskan syllable nuclei by four decades.
(Krauss 2005:61)

What led Krauss to conclude that there was an unequal relationship between Sapir and Li is partially that Li never published anything challenging Sapir (Krauss 2005:60). What Krauss fails to engage is Li’s expertise on the other side of the Pacific: his fieldwork and comparison of Sino-Tibetan and especially Thai (Li 1977). When Krauss’s portrayal is complemented with Chinese sources, Li’s intellectual personality is much more complicated than a reticent, passive Chinese student pictured here. Tone plays a pivotal role in his foundational piece Languages and Dialects of China, published in 1937 as the defining element of “Indo-Chinese,” namely Sino-Tibetan family:

The tendency to develop a system of tones is another characteristic of this family. We do not know whether tones existed in early Indo-Chinese speech, and it is doubtful whether tones existed in classical Tibetan, however, modern Chinese, the Kam-Tai languages, the Miao-Yao languages as well as varieties of modern Tibetan all possess tones.
(Li 1973[1937]: 2)

So, although skeptical of transpacific comparisons and cautioning against the use of tone to draw genetic relationships, Li rescaled tone for the sake of language classification in China.

3. From US to China: Fang-Kuei Li’s Re-scaling at the Institute of History and Philology

Li returned to China in 1928 after finishing the prolonged Athabaskan fieldwork. He immediately devoted himself to the burgeoning field of modern linguistics in China as a senior researcher in the Department of Linguistics at the Institute of History and Philology in the Academia Sinica, the most important institute of humanities and social science at that time.

The name Institute of History and Philology sounds archaic and alien for contemporary scholars, but the Institute aimed to revolutionize and modernize humanities and social sciences in China and, later, to a large degree fulfilled this aim. Led by its director Fu Ssu-nien (1896-1950), the Institute has been “viewed as the embodiment of China’s Rankean school,” demanding solid and new evidence from primary sources for historical and social inquiries (Wang 2000). In the famous foreword of the journal Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology (1928a), Fu contrasts his new history with the old paradigm of Chinese philology, or jing xue (经学), the study of Chinese classics. Studying in Germany from 1923-26, Fu had not only been acquainted with Rankean historiography but also neo-grammarian comparative linguistics and the emerging linguistic emphasis on field methods (Wang 2000:59). Given this context, Li’s arrival with training from Sapir and Bloomfield was a perfect match for the linguistic patch in Fu’s blueprint of new history and philology.

So Li transformed and transcaled his scholarship from an Athabaskan linguistics to a Chinese one. But which Chinese one? Choosing not to repeat the dialectology work of Chao Yuen-Ren, his colleague at the Institute, and the father of modern Chinese linguistics in China, Li chose to study non-Han languages (Xu 2010:41), for which he became known as the father of non-Han Chinese linguistics in China (Wang 2003). So, which Non-Han language groups?

Let us look at the other manifesto in the first issue of the Bulletin of the Institute of History and Philology. In the last article, “The Scope and Interest of the Linguistic Work of Our Institute,” Fu Ssu-nien explicated his plan to solve the inaccuracy of the traditional rime-table philology. Fu introduced two solutions, experimental phonetics and synchronously investigating Chinese dialects and other languages relevant to Chinese language or history. Like other comparative projects, the one Fu envisaged was not politically neutral. Fu’s plan to expand the scope or scale from merely Chinese dialects to include “other languages” like Tibetan, Miao-Yao, Mon-Khmer, Mongolian, and Turkic was clearly in accord with the “unified multinational” politics (Mullaney 2011) promoted by the Republic of China.

What Fu really invested his comparatist ambition in was “Southwest Languages,” which were believed to be in the same language family as Chinese. Especially interesting is his urgent call to study “Southwest Languages”:

When these languages are well studied, not only knowledge in Indo-Chinese language advances, but also studies in Chinese benefit a lot. Since our mother tongue is in this language family, we Chinese, by nature or by mentality, are more capable of studying these languages. If the field of Indo-Sino linguistics is occupied by Europeans, that would be a tremendous shame on the Chinese.
(Fu 1928b: 116)

We do not know how much shame or other nationalist emotion experientially affected Li, but he devoted much of his career on the study of “Southwest Languages,” especially Kam-Tai and Miao-Yao.

Indeed, in Languages and Dialects of China, which was originally written in 1937, Li classified languages of China in four groups, which were a somewhat more sophisticated version of Fu’s dichotomy of “Southwest Languages” relevant to Chinese and irrelevant “Central Asian Languages”:

1. Indo-Chinese: a) Chinese, b) Kam-Tai, c) Miao-Yao, d) Tibeto-Burman
2. Austro-Asiatic: Mon-Khmer
3. Altaic: a) Turkish, b) Mongolian, c) Tungus
4. Indo-European: Tokharian (extinct)

(Note that Li used the term “Turkish” here, which does not mean Anatolian Turkish but Turkic languages in our contemporary usage.)

The most fine-grained lumper is the Indo-Chinese or Sino-Tibetan, for which he developed further detailed sub-classifications (e.g., Li 1977) via substantial learning and investigation of multiple dialects of Thai, Kam-Sui, Miao-Yao, etc. For Li, unleashed from Sapir’s transpacific comparative project, was soon enrolled in another comparative project in China whose scale was different but no less ambitious. Ironically, the linguistic solidarity in Southwest China recalls Sapir’s linguistic utopia where “Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam” (Sapir 1921b:234).

4. Conclusion: Principles of Sino-Tibetan Comparison and the Poetics of Scaling

The reception of Li’s classification of Chinese languages is also divided by different scales. Although still well respected in China, there has been quite a harsh attack in the United States. Using the term “’The ‘Indo-Chinese’ Pseudo-Stock,” Matisoff was especially dissatisfied that “Li lumps Chinese and Tibeto-Burman together with Kam-Tai and Miao-Yao, largely based on monosyllabicity and tone” (1973:471). What Matisoff attempted to back was the massive lexical comparison done by his colleague Paul Benedict, who aligns “Tai not with Chinese, but rather with Austronesian (=Malayo-Polynesian)” (1973:472). Herein, Tai is inter-scaly rescaled via replacing tone with lexicon as the measuring unit.

Rebutting Matisoff’s and Benedict’s principle for comparison, Li identified his approach as “splitter first, lumper second,” different from the Sapirean heuristic to first lump. In his biographic oral history, Li attributes this attitude to his other teacher Bloomfield (Li 1986:69-70): “You want to study some languages, but you know one language well.” Paul Benedict’s dictionary-based Sino-Tibetan Conspectus was soon disqualified since “Benedict never studied any language” (ibid 69) and Matisoffian megalocomparison is just nonsense.

The contested principles of comparison, however, should be understood across both geopolitical scales and the individual labor of scaling. The possibility of doing fieldwork, to collect synchronic data, hinges upon not just the aforementioned colonial expansion but traditional or modern hegemonic modes of establishing fieldworkable geographic contiguities and projecting historical or potential unifiability, between different preservations across North America, between East Asian metropolises and Southeast Asian, and not so successfully across the Pacific Ocean. Scaling up, scaling down or just preserving a given scale are always individuals’ intellectual adventures that make the geopolitical agenda explicit, popularize-able, falsifiable and sometimes ridiculous. And for itself, classificatory scaling is not always given truth but highly affective heuristics, as we see in Sapir’s acclamatory Sino-Dene letter to Kroeber. And affective scaling is sometimes indicative of geographical scale, as a last snapshot of Fang-Kuei Li would illustrate. After the Chinese Civil War, Li chose to neither stay in mainland China nor go to Taiwan with his colleagues from the Institute of History and Philology. After a series of teaching positions, he ended up teaching Chinese at the newly-founded Far East Department at the University of Washington. And after decades of teaching, Li eventually commented on Sino-Dene that Sino and Dene are “distant like floating clouds” (Yue-Hashimoto 1987), a metaphor common in traditional Chinese poetics to describe a nostalgia for homeland.

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How to cite this post

Zeng, Yukun, 2017. From godly analogy to “distant like floating clouds”: the inevitability of the Sino-Dene hypothesis and the scalability of comparative linguistics. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2017/10/04/from-godly-analogy/

Diego Stefanelli
University of Pavia

Benvenuto Terracini (1886–1968) Source: Atlante Linguistico Italiano

Benvenuto Terracini (1886–1968) was a notable Italian linguist who lived through all the most important methodological innovations that characterize linguistics in the first half of the 20^th century. In the Italian context, he played a fundamental transitional role in two crucial periods: during the crisis of positivism and the emergence of new methods and approaches at the beginning of the 20^th century, and at the time of the discussions between structuralism and historicism in the 60s. Moreover, he experienced the sadly common trauma of many European scholars of Jewish origin: because of the Fascist Italian Race Laws, he was forced to leave Italy in 1938, going into exile in Argentina, where he taught Lingüística románica and Lingüística general at the University of Tucumán (1941-1946). Terracini is a typical – and nowadays quite unknown outside Italy – example of a European linguist, deeply connected to the historical, theoretical and cultural context of the first decades of the century.

A good starting point to rediscover Terracini is his activity as a historian of European linguistics at a key point in its history: the crisis of the positivistic paradigm and the rise of new approaches in the first decades of the 20^th century.

As a young scholar at the University of Turin, Terracini was educated in the positivist Italian school, the so-called scuola storica, which was widely recognized for its contributions to European positivistic linguistics (Lucchini ²2008). One of the most prestigious journals of the time was the Archivio Glottologico Italiano, founded in 1873 by the great Italian linguist Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (1829–1907). In the Archivio, Terracini published his first linguistic work, Il parlare di Usseglio, a study of the dialect of a Piedmontese Alpine village, Usseglio (Terracini 1914–1922). A typical positivistic linguistic inquiry – based on interviews with native speakers and accurate descriptions of the phonetic, morphological, lexical and syntactical system of a language – the theoretical basis of the study was Jules Gilliéron’s linguistique géographique, which had a great methodological importance at the beginning of the 20^th century. In fact, the Atlas Linguistique de la France (1902–1910), realized by Gilliéron and Edmond Edmont (1849–1926), as well as Gilliéron’s studies based on that monumental work (such as, for example, Gilliéron-Roques 1912) represented a surprising discovery for many positivist scholars of the time. As the Italian linguist Carlo Tagliavini (1903–1982) wrote:

I lavori di Gilliéron, scritti generalmente in collaborazione con allievi e colleghi, aprirono una nuova via nella linguistica moderna e rivelarono un’infinità di problemi che prima erano assolutamente ignorati. (Tagliavini ⁶1982: 27)

(Gilliéron’s works, generally written in collaboration with colleagues and pupils, opened a new way in modern linguistics and revealed a whole host of problems that were completey ignored before.)

One of the leading Italian representatives of the linguistica spaziale was Terracini’s teacher, Matteo Giulio Bartoli (1873–1946; see Bartoli 1945), who founded in 1924 the Atlante Linguistico Italiano. Terracini’s first work clearly reflected Bartoli’s approach but with specific attention to some issues that he would develop in the following years, mainly the role of individual in linguistic change and the historical basis of linguistics. Like Gilliéron and the geographic linguistics, Terracini was mostly interested in how a linguistic innovation was born and how it entered the common language of a community of speakers: geography could be a relevant factor in etymological explanations. Usseglio presented a particularly interesting case study. None of its five main hamlets (borgate) had sufficient cultural or political prestige to be able to impose its own linguistic innovation on the others: the struggle was open. Already in this first study, Terracini gave great importance to the concept of struggle (lotta) between words, which he would significantly deepen in his later works, especially during his Argentinian exile.

In 1951, he published an entire volume dedicated to linguistic conflicts: Conflictos de lenguas y cultura, which first appeared in Spanish (Buenos Aires, 1951), and was translated into Italian (and considerably revised) six years later. The conflict was no longer between the borgate of a small village, but between complex linguistic (and cultural) systems – such as the Gaulish language and Latin in Provence during the Roman domination or Spanish and Quichua in the Argentinian province of Santiago del Estero in the 40s – whose contact determined the death or the gradual extinction of one of these systems. In this case, Terracini’s focus was no longer on winners, but on losers.

In the opening chapter of the book – Come muore una lingua – Terracini studied several historical examples of dead (or dying) languages. In this case as well, he found an important antecedent in Bartoli’s study of the extinct Romance language spoken until the end of the 19^th century in Dalmatia (the dalmatico; Bartoli 1906). However, in the 40s and 50s, Terracini’s perspective was quite different: even if he continued to use, as a methodological basis, the geographical linguistics of Bartoli (and Gilliéron), his main interests were the struggle between individual and language, the interaction between language and culture, as well as the historical nature of language.

Like many other linguists of the time, Terracini was deeply influenced by the Romance linguist Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927): the centrality of the individual activity (Tätigkeit) as the main source of linguistic change (Sprachwandel), as well as his idea of linguistic contact and language mixing (Sprachmischung) were crucial for Terracini’s concept of linguistic conflict (conflitto). At the same time, the aesthetics (estetica) of Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) had a great impact on Terracini, as it did on the majority of Italian linguists and literary scholars of the first decades of the 20^th century. Even if he did not agree with Croce’s identification between linguistics (linguistica) and aesthetics (estetica), Terracini shared the conviction that it is necessary to consider linguistic facts in conjunction with culture and history.

Another key reference point for Terracini was the Romance scholar Karl Vossler (1872–1949): a great friend of Croce, he wrote influential works on the interaction between language and the individual, linguistics and cultural history (Kulturgeschichte). Even though he was not an idealist, Terracini derived from Croce and Vossler’s (neo-)idealistic linguistics the belief in the strict bonds between language and other human activities, particularly literature. Terracini admired Vossler’s great study of the connection between French culture and the development of French language: in fact, language (Sprache) as a mirror of culture (Kultur), and consequently the direct interaction between language, culture, history and literature, was the fundamental principle of Vossler’s Frankreichs Kultur im Spiegel seiner Sprachentwicklung (Vossler ²1921). Moreover, Vossler (like Leo Spitzer [1887–1960], another scholar who was of great importance for Terracini) provided concrete examples of the connections between linguistics and style, which was at the basis of modern stylistics (Stefanelli 2017). We should not be surprised at the fact that Terracini was also one of the leading representatives of Italian stylistics after World War II: his Analisi stilistica (Terracini ²1975) is one of the most significant works of European stylistics in this period.

The various reference points of Terracini’s thought found a common source in Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835): the Humboldtian dialectic between language as an objective fact (ergon) and language as a subjective activity (Energeia) was at the basis of the complex theoretical reflection of Terracini. His historicism (storicismo) was strictly connected to his focus on individual activity: only in a diachronic, historical perspective could we hope to understand the individual and “spiritual” roots of linguistic change. Terracini considered language as unavoidably connected to historical (and cultural) events, and insisted on investigating linguistic change from a historicist perspective. As he wrote in the first chapter of his Guida allo studio della linguistica storica, Schuchardt’s main role in the history of the linguistics was having put at the centre of linguistic research the historical and cultural individuality of each word. This was part of a general “return to Humboldt” (ritorno a Humboldt), which at the end of the 19^th century characterized not only linguistics, but also many other disciplines (aesthetics, literary studies, psychology; Trabant 1990; Venier 2012).

What is most interesting in Terracini’s case is the fact that his theoretical interests strictly and constantly interacted with an awareness of the history of modern linguistics: Terracini was simultaneously a great theoretician and a great historian. The subtitle of Analisi stilistica shows the coexistence of theory, history and practical examples in Terracini’s perspective on stylistics: Teoria, storia, problemi. The structure of the book similarly reveals this alliance of theory and history; the book is divided into a historical-theoretical part and a practical one. After three chapters dealing with the history and theory of stylistics in the first half of the 20^th century in its relation with linguistics and aesthetics, we read four concrete stylistic analyses applied to Italian literary texts (the canto XXVII of Dante’s Inferno and Dante’s Vita nova; Manzoni’s poem Il Cinque Maggio; Pirandello’s tales).

However, the most interesting example of Terracini’s historiography is the Guida allo studio della linguistica storica (1946). It represents not only a remarkable historiographical work, but also a peculiar mix between two periods of Terracini’s life (before and after the exile in Argentina), as well as two worlds (Italy and South America). His composite structure reflects this cultural and geographical complexity. The first chapter (Che cosa è la linguistica?) was originally published in Spanish, in Argentina, at the beginning of the 40s (Qué es la lingüística?, Tucumán, 1942). Conceived as an introduction to the main theoretical problems of linguistics in the first half of the 20^th century, it was a concise and conceptually thick history of linguistics from the beginning of the 19^th century to the first decades of the 20^th century:

1. La linguistica empirica;
   Empirical linguistics;
2. Le origini della linguistica scientifica;
   The origins of scientific linguistics;
3. Primo periodo: il metodo comparativo;
   First period: the comparative method;
4. Periodo storico-evolutivo;
   Historical-evolutionary period;
5. I problemi della linguistica contemporanea.
   The problems of contemporary linguistics.

Terracini’s Guida does not simply follow the structure of a classical handbook. After the first chapter, the structure of the book changes: rather than offering a description of each historical period, Terracini focussed on the activity of some leading linguists: Franz Bopp (1781–1867), William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894), Ascoli, Wilhelm Meyer-Lübke (1861–1936), Antoine Meillet (1866–1936), Gilliéron and Schuchardt became the “heroes” of a complex history, based on continuities and interruptions, crises and methodological revolutions. Some of these critical and biographical sketches of important linguists had already appeared in the 20s and 30s and had already been collected by Terracini in another Argentinian book, the Perfiles de lingüístas (Tucumán, 1946). Once again, the Guida summed up various periods (and places) of Terracini’s activity, as a sort of summary of his linguistic thought, strictly connected with the historical and cultural context of the first decades of the century.

The most intriguing feature of Terracini’s Guida is its deep awareness of the inevitably contemporary motivations of all historiographical activity. Terracini seemed to follow the famous and always valid motto of Croce: “all true history is contemporary history” (ogni vera storia è storia contemporanea). If he chose to become a historian of his own discipline, it was because he felt that something surprisingly new and potentially puzzling had happened at the beginning of the 20^th century: the positivistic methods were in crisis and one could not exactly understand what had replaced them. Using a botanic analogy, Terracini depicted the relation between the “old trunk” of the comparative grammar and the “sprouts of a younger linguistics”, which he called “linguistics 900”, in order to define the methodological and theoretical innovations of the discipline in the first decades of the 20^th century:

Mentre questo antico tronco continua a gettare i suoi rami, vi si inseriscono i germogli di una linguistica più giovane che vorrei chiamare linguistica 900: quella con cui cerchiamo di operare noi oggi, quando la dialettica della nostra ricerca ci conduce a renderci conto che i nostri espedienti metodici – e quindi le nostre esigenze teoriche – non sono più gli stessi che potevano accontentare la maggioranza dei nostri maestri. Di questa linguistica, come di qualunque scienza in azione, è meno facile fissare i risultati che indicare i problemi che la caratterizzano. (Terracini 1949: 32-3)

(While this old trunk continues to sprout its branches, the sprouts of a younger linguistics, which I would call linguistics 900, grow on it: the linguistics with which we try to work today, when the dialectics of our research leads us to realize that our methodological devices – and therefore our theoretical necessities – are no more those that could satisfy the majority of our masters. It is less easy fixing the results of this linguistics (as well as of every science in action) than showing the problems that characterize it.)

The main purpose of Terracini’s Guida was to understand the problems characterizing linguistica 900. To do so, he traced the origins of German comparative linguistics, the creation of the comparative method and the new approaches between the 19^th and the 20^th centuries. The last chapter of the book was dedicated to Schuchardt, a central figure in Terracini’s fascinating narration of the history of modern linguistics: linguistica 900 started with Schuchardt, who was the ideal father of a new era of linguistic studies.

To sum up, Terracini’s Guida was not only a remarkable example of non-canonical and structurally original historiography, but it was also a sort of summary of the most important theoretical and methodological issues of the linguistics of the 19^th century and the first half of the 20^th. The fruitful interaction between history and theory, the great historical (and historiographical) awareness of the most important theoretical problems of linguistics, together with a conceptually complex but extremely clear style, make Terracini’s Guida a still valuable example of historiography.

References

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How to cite this post

Stefanelli, Diego. 2017. Benvenuto Terracini and the history of linguistics between the 19th and 20th century. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2017/10/31/terracini/

David Moore
University of Western Australia

Strehlow Research Centre, Alice Springs. Photo by Alex Nelson.

Introduction

The view that Australian Aboriginal languages are primitive endured into the twentieth century and is still widespread throughout the Australian community. ‘Primitive languages’ were a means of using linguistic evidence from a language to prove the primitiveness of the associated culture. The assumption was made that primitive languages were spoken by those who belonged to primitive cultures (Henson 1974:9). A number of deficiencies were found with them: a lack of abstract nouns, grammatical categories, numerals and colour terms. One of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century who was ‘steeped in Social Darwinism’ was Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), who claimed that ‘the aborigines of Tasmania had no words representing abstract ideas’ (Errington 2008:130). There were very few actual descriptions of ‘primitive languages’ and ethnographic accounts were lacking in linguistic data, as Sommerfelt (1938:17) noted. It was these sparse accounts of Australian languages which enabled speculative views about ‘primitive languages’ to become widespread. The Aranda language of Central Australia appears to have been that most frequently identified as a ‘primitive language’.

In this post I explore an incident which occurred following the publication, nearly eighty years ago, of an armchair study of Aranda, a language which was primitive in the opinion of a leading intermational scholar. This episode in Australian linguistic history shows how intensive fieldwork, deep understanding of languages and the use of linguistic records could be used to counteract false ideas about Aboriginal languages which persisted even in scholarly publications.

The Aranda (a designation covering speakers of a number of varieties, including Western Arrarnta, Central and Eastern Arrernte) were a ‘scientifically important people’ (Basedow 1925:xiv). Evolutionary anthropology sought information about humans at an earlier stage of development (e.g. Tylor 1889). The research of ethnographers Baldwin Spencer (1860-1929), Frank Gillen (1855-1912) and the missionary linguist Carl Strehlow (1871-1922) informed the armchair theories of J.G. Frazer (1854-1941) in Britain and Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), Marcel Mauss (1872-1950) and Lucien Levy-Bruhl (1857-1939) among many others in Europe.

Alf Sommerfelt (1892–1965) introduced structuralist linguistics to the Scandinavian countries, and was described by Malkiel (1972:89) as ‘a prominent Norwegian academician who felt very much at home in Paris’. A student of Antoine Meillet (1866–1936), he appears to have been regarded as an exemplary figure within linguistics (Malmberg 1972:232). He made a number of studies of the Celtic languages Welsh, Breton and Irish based upon fieldwork in those languages (Oftedal 1972:1229). Sommerfelt was somewhat isolated in Scandinavia as his orientation toward French linguistics ‘meant that he always remained to some degree in opposition to the prevailingly neogrammarian climate of Scandinavian linguistics’ (Haugen 1966:613). Sommerfelt had a significant influence within linguistics with, for example, seventy citations throughout the multi-volume Current Trends in Linguistics (Sebeok 1976:808). He was described as a ‘defender of structural methods’ (Malmberg 1972:233) and familiar with the writings of American Structuralism which were becoming more widely known in Europe (see, for example, Sommerfelt 1952). However, his evaluative approach to Aboriginal languages showed that his views were based upon the theoretical biases of a pre-structuralist past.

Sommerfelt’s (1938) armchair study of a ‘primitive language’ La langue et la société: caractères sociaux d’une langue de type archaïque is based upon the work of Kempe and Strehlow, Spencer and Gillen (Wilkins 1989:18). He sought to establish a connection between language and society to prove that there were clear differences between Aranda and modern languages. In an attempt to demonstrate that Aranda was a primitive language, Sommerfelt supported his points with false etymologies and claimed that Aranda lacked categories found in Indo-European languages (Alpher 1994:115; McGregor 2008:6). The need to counter these claims was recognised by Donald Laycock (1936–1988), then a Research Assistant in Australian Linguistics at the University of Adelaide. Over two decades after the publication of Sommerfelt’s book, Laycock published his critique. He had access to written sources of Aranda and the advice of T.G.H. Strehlow (1908–1978), Reader in Australian Linguistics at Adelaide and a fluent speaker of Western Aranda, and also a speaker of other Aboriginal languages and dialects. Laycock was able to refer to Strehlow’s Aranda Phonetics and Grammar (Strehlow 1944), henceforth: APG. It was completed in July 1937 (Elkin 1944:1, footnote 4), just before Sommerfelt published his monograph. Capell (1970:676) considered APG to be ‘the first full scale grammatical account of an Australian language’.

While Sommerfelt only read early pre-phonetic sources, Laycock had access to Strehlow’s Aranda phonetics. After learning spoken Aranda as a child and learning a written form of the language at school, Strehlow had been improving his analysis of the language through continual field trips to Central Australia since the 1930s. By the 1950s he distinguished the majority, if not all, of the consonant sounds of the language. His narrow phonetic transcription was used in his Field Diaries of the 1950s and the Aranda New Testament (1956), based upon a state of the art version of the International Phonetic Alphabet. The orthography was developed at Adelaide University (Monaghan 2008). Laycock also had access to other published sources on the Aranda language, particularly those of missionary linguists at Hermannsburg in the Northern Territory who had studied the language since the establishment of the Hermannsburg Mission in 1877. Laycock acknowledged Strehlow ‘for the use of unpublished material and for personal help and criticism’ (Laycock 1960:17). With Strehlow’s support, Laycock would have had substantial insight into the working of the language.

APG was not only a description of Aranda, but an effort to counteract the idea that Aboriginal languages were primitive (Moore 2008:287). In his introduction, A.P. Elkin (1944:2), promised that ‘[i]t will provide a final answer to those questioners who timidly or even cynically ask: “Have Aboriginal languages anything like a grammar or rules?”’ At the very time that the question was posed, it was being answered, mostly in the negative by a linguist who had never heard the language being spoken.

False etymologies

The errors in Sommerfelt 1938 were based upon phonemic under-differentiation in the Mission Orthography (Moore, forthcoming). As noticed by Capell (1939:108), one such etymology involved nama, supposedly meaning both ‘sit’ and ‘grass’. Strehlow distinguished [a] and [ᾳ] ‘a back unrounded vowel’. In APG he distinguished 22 vowel phones. He discriminated between the two distinct words ꞌna:ma (grass) and ꞌnᾳma (to be), with distinct pronunciations (Strehlow 1944:19). These words are represented as neme ‘sit, be’ and name ‘grass’ respectively in the Institute for Aboriginal Development (IAD) orthography (Henderson and Dobson 1994). Capell (1939:108) went close to articulating the phonemic principle when he stated that ‘the phonetic system is much more complicated than he allows, and some of the complications have semantic value’.

Another false etymology is ‘sun’ (a)linga, supposedly composed of (a)la ‘go’ and nka ‘carry’ (Sommerfelt 1938:178). The interdental sound now represented as <lh> had not been identified by the time that the grammar was written (Moore 2008: 282), but it is evident in Strehlow’s 1956 New Testament and later publications as <ļ> as distinct from alveolar <l>. These words are represented in the IAD orthography as alerrnge ‘sun’ and alhe– ‘go’. The word for ‘carry’ is mis-transcribed. It should be aknge– ‘carry’. Sommerfelt’s relates the two words, citing ‘the myth of the sun-woman who walks about with a stick, which she throws down when approaching the end of her walk’. Capell (1939: 107) notes that ‘this becomes rather fantastic’.

A lack of grammatical categories

On the basis of these spurious etymologies, Sommerfelt (1938:189) claimed that ‘[t]he Aranta do not know real grammatical categories comparable to those of more developed languages.’ Further: ‘we saw that the aranta does not know the difference between the noun, the adjective and the verb’ (Sommerfelt 1938:109). Sommerfelt attempted to find the racines ‘roots’ of words. He thought that ‘higher states’ of language would be preceded by states in which the language consisted of roots in which words expressed a ‘fundamental meaning’ which could be combined together to form more complex words. Semantic content was supposedly based upon these roots. These roots were ‘full words’ but as Laycock correctly pointed out, Sommerfelt’s eleven monosyllabic roots would not be recognised by speakers (Laycock 1960:21, footnote 11). Laycock was able to show that Aranda did indeed distinguish grammatical categories.

Influence and reception of La langue et la société

Laycock made his response after his realisation of the pervasive influence of Sommerfelt’s book and its positive reception. It was taken seriously as ‘sociolinguistics’ by Hartmann and Schmidt (1972:44). The contemporary reviews of Hulley (1939) and Tesniére (1942) were surprisingly uncritical and inadequate.  In his obituary for Sommerfelt Haugen defended his work, claiming that, ‘[a]lthough Sommerfelt was sometimes criticized for his too-ready identification of some linguistic structures as “archaic”, for example in his treatment the Aranta language (La langue et la societe, Oslo, 1938), his views on the problem were considerably more sophisticated than his critics’’ (Haugen 1966: 612). Later, the classical philologist Joshua Whatmough (1956:53) asserted that ‘Aranta structure is much less elaborate than that of the simplest of the Indo-European languages’ (Rigsby 1976:30). It was Sommerfelt’s account of Aranda which led Whatmough to make those assertions (Laycock 1960:16).

Sommerfelt’s writings are characterised by a kind of linguistic essentialism which cannot be characterised as ‘Whorfian’, as Whorf’s writings (Whorf 1956) only became known after Sommerfelt’s 1938 monograph. Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) ‘argued that the Hopi view was embodied in such linguistic patterns as the absence of spatio-temporal metaphors, the impossibility of counting units of time, and the absence of tenses of the verb’ (Hill 1988:17). Sommerfelt (1938:175) had earlier articulated views on ‘Aranda time’: ‘Aranda ignores any real division of time as there are no divisions of years, months and weeks.’

He had adopted Whorfian essentialism by 1962, comparing Aranda with the Hopi language and uncritically endorsing the ‘strong’ version of the Whorfian thesis, that of ‘linguistic determinism’ (Hill 1988:15). This is clear from Sommerfelt’s (1962:123) statement that ‘[i]f we now examine how the Aranta expresses notions of time we find that there are great and fundamental differences from our system of expressions.’ But time expressions were recorded early for Aranda. Kempe (1891:12) lists adverbs of time including tmurka ‘yesterday’ and imanka ‘long ago’.

Twenty years on

It was probably his commitment to linguistic determinism which entrenched Sommerfelt’s views about Aranda, even after meeting Strehlow and having the opportunity to change his views about the language. Strehlow visited Oslo in the early 1950s, depositing material in an archive there: ‘We have recently received in Oslo records of the speech of some Aranda men, taken down by the younger Strehlow with his transcriptions and translations, and hope to study them’ (Sommerfelt 1962:122).

Around the time of Strehlow’s visit Sommerfelt claimed, ‘Recent research has shown conclusively that many languages do not distinguish between the same parts of speech as do, for instance, the European languages, or delimit them otherwise’ (Sommerfelt 1952:70). He was aware of Strehlow’s grammar: ‘I made an analysis of this language some 16–17 years ago on the basis of the material which was available then, the texts of Strehlow compared with the description of the Aranta tribe by Spencer and Gillen. Since then Strehlow’s son has published a grammar of the language as it is spoken by the remnants of the tribe’ (Sommerfelt 1962:122).

After failing to observe the meticulous and careful analysis that Strehlow had made in APG, Sommerfelt used ‘structuralism’ to criticise Strehlow’s work: ‘The younger Strehlow’s description of the language, however, is neither phonemic nor structural, but dominated by the European grammatical categories’ (Sommerfelt 1962:122).

Sommerfelt’s view was that ‘the grammatical notes of those who have studied the language in situ simply represent attempts to force the language into European moulds’ (Laycock 1960: 22). Therefore, APG could be ignored. It is apparent then that with more accurate information, no change was made to Sommerfelt’s earlier views.

Social Anthropology

Sommerfelt was not alone in that the dominant model of anthropology in the first decades of the twentieth century used language data to confirm social evolutionary theory. British anthropologists used words from the languages of Oceania and North America to support the view that cultures were arranged in an evolutionary sequence (Henson 1974:28). There were few connections between British anthropology and comparative linguistics at this time. As Henson (1974:39) concludes, ‘in the period as a whole, there was a general ignorance of all the deeper implications of language for a study of culture’. Totem, mana and taboo were terms which were adopted from Algonquian and Polynesian languages. It is not as though anthropologists could not have known better and were progressing to a more informed understanding of the ‘Other’. There are numerous examples of those who played their part in counteracting notions of ‘primitive languages’; for example, A.M. Hocart (1883-1939), R.H. Codrington (1830-1922) and Sidney Ray. Max Müller was a philologist of this kind (Crick 1976). Henson (1974:38) notes that ‘Müller was the only writer of the period who made use of a specifically anthropological theory of language’.

The Victorian era was not followed by a new era of objectivity (Horton 1973: 284) but was rather a continuation of views about ‘primitive languages’, for example, those expressed by Bronislaw Malinowski (1884-1942) in ‘The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages’, originally published in 1923 (Malinowski 1946). Malinowski had a significant role in the development of British Social Anthropology and the ‘London School’ of British linguistics through his idea of the ‘context of situation’, as in his statement: ‘In a primitive language the meaning of any single word is to a very high degree dependent upon its context’ (Malinowski 1946:306). This resulted in an inadequate and misleading theory of meaning (Crick 1976:5).

His statements in ‘The Problem of Meaning’ show that far from being a radical departure from the previous generation of British anthropologists, his ideas were conditioned by traditional thinking (Henson 1974: 45). While his views about the aims of anthropology changed, he remained committed to the view that there were ‘primitive languages’: ‘In a primitive tongue, the whole grammatical structure lacks the precision and definiteness of our own, though it is extremely telling in certain ways (Malinowski 1946:306). The language would hardly be amenable to linguistic analysis because ‘[i]n native languages the distinction is by no means so clear and the function of grammar and radical meaning respectively are often confused in a remarkable manner’ (Malinowski 1946:303).

He writes of the simplicity of the languages and their lack of capacity for expressing thoughts: ‘It is only in certain very special uses among a civilized community and only in its highest uses that language is employed to frame and express thoughts’ (Malinowski 1946:316).

Malinowski’s views changed with his experience of translation which he identified as a fundamental problem (Henson 1974:60). He was a gifted language learner. But he was not in the field long enough to gain real experience in analysing languages and lacked the mindset and training to make a competent description of a non-Indo-European language, as shown by his ethnocentric comments, and his ‘complete dependency upon Indo-European categories’ (Henson 1974: 59).

In the nineteenth century a division emerged between classical philology, which dealt with languages having written literatures, and anthropology, which concerned cultures without written languages. Malinowski made a distinction between the ‘dead languages’ of classical philology and the incommensurable and truly ‘other’ spoken languages which would be handled by the new positivist science of anthropology. Even though he had read some linguistics, he felt that its lessons were not relevant to the situation that he experienced in Kiriwina. Malinowski (1946:297) claimed to have read Müller, Finck, and Steinthal. These scholars opposed the simplistic comparison of languages based upon their formation in the German philosophy of language. But ‘The Problem of Meaning’ reveals how he was out of touch with philology, which was then being applied to non-Indo-European languages by those authors whom he had purportedly read. Malinowski (1946:300) criticised classical philologists while maintaining a bias against unwritten languages: ‘the whole manner in which a native language is used is different from our own’. Critically, he hadn’t read American sources (Henson 1974:44), as it was American linguistics and anthropology which developed the notion of ‘linguistic relativity’ and most devastatingly challenged the notion of the ‘primitive language’. Boas published his ‘Limitations of the Comparative Method’ in 1896, while in England the notion of unilineal evolutionary development was still a part of anthropological orthodoxy. Unfortunately Australian anthropologists followed British anthropology with the result that they were usually untrained in linguistics.

Conclusions

Although Capell identified some of the faults in Sommerfelt’s analysis, Laycock’s strongly worded review of Sommerfelt went beyond those of the other reviewers. Those trained in the tradition of linguistic anthropology such as Laycock (1960) and Rigsby (1976) were able to diagnose the errors as they were trained in traditions of linguistics which originated with J.G. Herder (1744-1803) and the German philosophy of language which became established in the USA through the linguistic anthropology of Franz Boas (1858-1942). There could hardly be a greater contrast between Sommerfelt’s monograph and Strehlow’s APG, a contrast that illustrates how superficial labels such as ‘structural’ are in this debate. Sommerfelt misused linguistic relativity to argue that Aranda was incommensurable with European languages and presented his claims under the guise of ‘structuralism’. His dismissive attitude towards APG as ‘not structural’ was ironic because he himself failed to understand one of the key tenets of structuralism, the need to evaluate languages in their own terms. Another key feature of structuralism that he avoided was fieldwork. By contrast, Strehlow spent four years researching APG (1932-33 and 1935-36) (Elkin 1944:1), building upon nearly seven decades of previous research by missonary linguists in Central Australia. He was not inclined to etymologise. For example, he gives no explanation for lintera ‘white person’ (Strehlow 1944:42). Rather than being Eurocentric, APG was actually based upon his desire to portray the adequacy of the Aranda language. Laycock’s review shows the relative harmony between Strehlow’s phonetic transcription and Laycock’s phonemic approach to the same data, based upon field methods which had only recently been introduced to Australia by the Summer Institute of Linguistics. Strehlow, unlike Sommerfelt in this case, was able to adapt to new ways of interpreting the data.

Acknowledgements

I acknowledge my colleagues Margaret Smith and Theresa Alice, Arrernte language teachers in Alice Springs, from whom I have learned much of the richness and complexity of Arrernte. I would like to thank Luise Hercus who was a witness to T.G.H. Strehlow’s indignant reaction to Sommerfelt’s writings and made me aware of that episode in Australian linguistic history. Thanks also to Harold Koch who sent me reviews of Sommerfelt (1938). Also to Bruce Rigsby from whom we have learned about the Americanist tradition in Australia. We discussed these topics in Adelaide in August 2016. Australia has been fortunate to have such a tradition of linguistic scholarship. I would also like to thank Olga Radke who has made me aware of the ongoing significance of the Strehlow legacy in the Central Australian community.

References

Alpher, Barry (1994). When non-Aborigines consider Aboriginal languages. In: Diane Bell and Ann J Cahill (eds) Aborigines in Australian society, a resourceful book. Worcester Massachusetts, Centre for Interdisciplinary and Special Studies.

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How to cite this post

Moore, David. 2017. Primitive Languages: linguistic determinism and the description of Aranda eighty years on. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2017/12/06/primitive-languages/

Lia Formigari
Sapienza Università di Roma

Wilhelm Wundt (centre) with his research group, ca. 1880 (source: Wikimedia Commons)

A long-dominant historiographical tradition, culminating in Hugo Schuchardt’s essay Über die Lautgesetze (1885), depicted the Neogrammarians as the irreducible upholders of the unconditioned validity of phonetic laws. It is my view that, if we reconsider the theories of the Neogrammarians today, this representation should be radically revised. Instead of the long review that would be necessary to document the pros and cons of Schuchardt’s interpretation, I will limit myself to citing August Leskien’s Introduction to his Declination im Slawisch-Litauischen und Germanischen (1876), which contains an early and never disputed enunciation of the principle of the exceptionlessness (Ausnahmslosigkeit) of phonetic laws and of the way it must be understood:

I started […] from the principle according to which the form of a case in the way it has been transmitted to us is never the result of an exception to otherwise valid phonetic laws. To avoid any misunderstanding I would add the following: if by exception we mean the cases in which the expected phonetic change has not occurred due to specific and identifiable causes […] – that is, when a rule interferes to some extent with another one – nothing evidently contradicts the principle that phonetic laws have no exceptions. The law is still present and when this or that disturbing factor – that is, the action of other laws – is not present, it continues to operate as expected. If instead we admit to random exceptions, of whatever nature, that can in no way be related among themselves, we are basically saying that the object at hand, that is language, is not accessible to scientific knowledge. (Leskien 1876: xxviii)

Basically, Leskien is enunciating the principle, shared after him by all Neogrammarians, that there are factors that can interfere with the regularity of phonetic laws. When this happens, these factors can in principle be identified. So long as the exceptions can be explained the law in itself has not been invalidated. The point, therefore, is not that there are no exceptions to sound laws. It is rather that there are no exceptions that cannot be explained in terms of some other cause, at least in principle. Based on this interpretation, the Neogrammarian principle of the exceptionlessness of phonetic laws can be summarized as a methodological principle: the exceptions that systematically interfere with the regularity of a law can also be explained on the basis of other causes. This principle is a necessary condition for any scientific study of language phenomena. In other words, it is the prerequisite for a transition from an historico-descriptive linguistics of individual languages or language families to a general linguistics.

This notion of the relation between regularities and exceptions was not enunciated ad hoc for linguistics. Rather, it was a general epistemological principle common to both the empirical psychology of the first half of the century (see, for example, Eduard Beneke, [1832] ⁴1877: 14) and later scientific philosophical trends. John Stuart Mill’s Logic, popular in Germany, and Ernst Mach’s theories, supported this principle. The validity of a law rests on its heuristic value in a given context and does not exclude exceptions, which must be explained as the result of other laws or causes.

Wilhelm Wundt interprets the position of Neogrammarians well when, in his essay Ueber den Begriff des Gesetzes (1886), he attributes to them this notion of “law”. His essay was a response to Hugo Schuchart, who had extended his attack on Neogrammarians to Wundt as one of their supporters. Schuchardt’s essay established the image of the Neogrammarians as the dogmatic asserters of the exceptionlessness of phonetic laws, an image that remained almost undisputed until the first half of the twentieth century and beyond. But if we read today, with the hindsight that is the privilege of historians, the Neogrammarians’ texts, first and foremost Hermann Paul’s Prinzipien, the impression we get is rather that of a collective elaboration of a method for a general linguistics.

The essay Wundt wrote in response to Schuchardt systematically reviews the theoretical background of the sound laws controversy. The argument was taken up again in the third edition of his Logik (vol. 3, ³1908), in the volume specifically dedicated to the method of humanities. This placement in a section dedicated to logic is not surprising when we consider that the term “logic” here unequivocally designates what we would nowadays rather call “epistemology” and that the discussion deals in part with the differences in method between the natural sciences and humanities. This use of the term was not, incidentally, a peculiarity of Wundt. His contemporaries also used the term “logic” in more extensive ways than it was later used, when it became restricted to the formal aspects of reasoning. In the psychology and cognitive philosophy of the time the term has on the contrary an entirely non-formal meaning. It designates the system of rules governing correct argumentation (Herbart’s “morals of thought” [Moral für das Denken: Herbart 1834:127]). But it also designates epistemological logic, the study of inferential mechanisms that are spontaneously adopted in cognitive processes, even when one is not aware of the underlying rules.

Wundt, like most of his contemporaries, viewed August Schleicher’s proposal to assimilate linguistics into the natural sciences as obsolete. Nevertheless, the natural sciences remained a powerful methodological model, considering the crucial need for a more rigorous definition of law in the language sciences and the ongoing debate among contemporary philosophers on the difference between nomothetic and idiographic disciplines, and on the place of historical disciplines in this classification. The search for physical causes, in the case of phonetic laws, was encouraged by the evident dependence of linguistic sounds on the physical organs of speech (Wundt 1886: 195-196). One problem was the basic ambiguity of the term “law” (Wundt 1886: 196-198; ³1908: 124-125), which, being used in various fields, covered (and covers) various degrees of generality, from the absolute generality of axioms to the mere regularity of observable phenomena. This latitude of meaning and the consequent lexical ambiguity of the term were, for Wundt, among the causes of the sound law controversy.

The minimum requirements for a scientific law are: i) the existence of a regularity in phenomena that are in principle independent but ii) connected by common causes and, finally, iii) the fact that these causally connected phenomena have a “general meaning” (Wundt ³1908: 131), that is, an heuristic value. In other words, the law must not simply describe a relation among known phenomena, but also serve to identify and interpret new phenomena and predict future ones (Wundt ³1908: 128-130).

Wundt established the conformity of phonetic laws to these prerequisites by comparing them with natural laws. The general validity (Allgemeingültigkeit) of phonetic laws does not necessarily imply their exceptionlessness (Ausnahmslosigkeit) (1886: 201). But this is also true of natural laws. Each natural law is dependent on a number of conditions that delimit its range of validity. Kepler’s laws on the orbits of planets, for example, apply only under certain conditions, having to do with the mass of planets and their interactions. What’s more, there are in nature elements whose physical and chemical properties are not subject to general laws that hold for almost all elements. “One cannot help noticing”, Wundt comments, “the family resemblance with grammar rules and their exceptions. Physicists have not limited themselves to accepting these exceptions but […] have tried to explain them, that is to better define the conditions of validity of the law” (1886: 202). Linguists must now do the same.

What is common to the empirical laws of the natural sciences and the empirical laws of the humanities is the fact that they both serve i) “to group phenomena characterized by a regularity than depends, albeit indirectly, on a causal relation, thus facilitating the logical classification of all the phenomena characterized by the same regularity,” and ii) to favour “the causal understanding of things […], inviting one to compare them with other similar groupings and considering their likely dependence on general conditions” (Wundt ³1908: 132). In other words, linguistic laws serve to classify language phenomena according to their regularity and to explain, when possible, those regularities in terms of common conditions.

This suffices to assume each phenomenon as an instance of an ascertainable regularity and to derive statistical predictions from it. Language laws too conform to the three requisites of every empirical law because a) “they do not concern individual phenomena but general phenomena”; b) “they are undoubtedly based on causal relations,” and c) “confronted with new experiences they prove in instance after instance their heuristic power” (³1908: 133). One cannot doubt their validity, even though “it is a validity that is limited to a given set of conditions” (1886: 204; cf. ³1908: 133-134). This sectorial and conditioned validity is not restricted on the other hand to language laws. It is a characteristic of all empirical laws: from Grimm’s law on sound shifts to Kepler’s laws on the movement of planets. Just as Newton emended Kepler’s law, further clarifying the causes of the phenomena described by Kepler, nothing forbids us from discovering other psychic motivations of phonetic change. The fact remains that “as it is known today,” a phonetic law “is an empirical law that synthetically expresses a certain amount of phonetic changes, showing, if not the dependence on still unknown causes, its dependence on factors like the historical period and nationality.” Like all other empirical laws, phonetic laws too are not required to express all the causes of the phenomenon under examination. They explain those that depend on the specific geographical and historical coordinates of the phenomenon (³1908: 134; cf. 140). In short, like all empirical laws, phonetic laws are generalizations made on the basis of the known causes of the phenomenon under examination.

By including, although with a series of distinctions, nomothetic disciplines in the humanities, that is in the disciplines capable of reducing phenomena to laws, Wundt rejected the hermeneutic, idiographic model, which reduced the method of humanities to the individual interpretation of unique events. Among the advocates of hermeneutics, Wundt mentions only Dilthey, and only twice, in the third volume of his Logik. But his refusal of that model is unequivocal, as, on the other hand, is his refusal of its opposite: Dilthey is wrong when he postulates the existence of two completely different “logics” for the two domains, but so is Stuart Mill when he reduced the method of the humanities to that of the natural sciences (Wundt ³1908: 81-82). Wundt’s intention is on the one hand to affirm the heuristic value of empirical laws also in the humanities – especially in the more “scientific” ones like economics and linguistics – and on the other hand to justify their tendency to present exceptions. Like all empirical laws, linguistic laws “are valid only under certain conditions, explicitly or tacitly identified. If these conditions are not present, they are no longer valid: in this sense their validity is not exempt from exceptions” (1886: 201; cf. ³1908: 137). But this principle is true of all empirical laws, including those of the natural sciences.

Wundt believes that this suffices to solve the controversy of linguistic laws. The reason being, that nothing forbids

individual laws, in which the general causality of phenomena is expressed, from occasionally interacting in such a way that, in a given group of phenomena, one or the other of two possible laws be activated, or even a complex law that is the result of both. In fact, it is only in this sense that the exceptionlessness of phonetic laws was conceived [italics mine: LF]. The intention was of saying, for example, that a phonetic change in Germanic languages, which, according to Grimm’s law should not have occurred, could have been the causal result of some other law. In fact, this was also the opinion of those who argued against the assimilation of phonetic laws to natural laws. They too were convinced that the so-called “sporadic” changes could be explained by specific, albeit mutable, causes; and even those who allowed for a degree of individual action did not mean by this that the action was psychologically unmotivated. If one agrees on this, then there is no longer any reason to erect barriers between natural sciences and the regular relations that manifest themselves in phonetic changes, for example, or in the construction of verbal forms and syntactic phenomena. For even among natural laws, those that refer to empirical phenomena are not exempt from exceptions, and are valid only insofar as, and to the extent that, the conditions exist by virtue of which they have been inferred from observation or from more general principles. (³1908: 136)

However, an important difference remains. A natural law knows no exception until other natural laws interfere with it. A social law instead is also subject to the interference of “individual events”, albeit events ascribable to causal relations (³1908: 137).

One should note that Wundt often uses the term “motivation” (Motiv), instead of “causes”, when referring to the psychic component of language. Motivations certainly depend on general psychological laws, but in some cases can also depend on the contingent action of the speaker on the language: for example, the action of a writer who introduces a linguistic innovation, later adopted by a community of speakers (Wundt ³1908: 137). In this case we are dealing with yet another important peculiarity of linguistic laws: an individual irregularity can become a shared behavior – the exception can generate the norm.

Furthermore, exceptions have an added heuristic value. For example, a law like Grimm’s law allows us to make hypotheses on etymological relations between apparently different verbal forms or on the different origins of apparently similar verbal forms in similar languages. But Verner’s law, which partially corrects Grimm’s law, specifying exceptions and relating those exceptions to the position of the accent, allows us in turn to make hypotheses on the tonal relations in the early stages of a language (Wundt ³1908: 143).

In the play of regularity versus accidents, of causal processes versus single events and spatial and temporal variables, the apparent exceptions, examined on the basis of a larger collection of observations, can in turn reveal some degree of regularity. In short, “specific empirical laws are not immediately evident in the comparative examination of phenomena, but become so only after a broader statistical examination” (³1908: 138). Wundt had already established the usefulness of statistics in psychology, where it can serve as a method that complements the experiment, at least in regards to the physical aspect of psychological research (1862: xxiv-xvii). Wundt views the use of statistics in linguistics as an extension of the comparative method. By measuring the applicability of a law on the basis of the number of exceptions, one can establish a ranking ranging from proper laws, to generalizations that deserve at best the name of “sporadic” laws, to chance events that cannot or cannot yet be explained by laws. Among these, one can include, for example, the occasional, non-systematic interaction among dialects. In conclusion, if one considers the relevance of statistical data, the virulence of the controversy over phonetic laws can be toned down and the distance between different positions decreases.

One can note in passing that a similar idea had been expressed by a future adversary of the Neogrammarians, Georg Curtius, when faced with the problem of explaining a series of “unessential phonetic transitions and modifications” of Indo-Germanic sounds in Greek:

It is needless to say that we do not regard either the one or the other class of phonetic change as accidental, but rather start with the opinion that laws penetrate this phonetic side of the language, as they do the whole. […] It will not always be possible to discover the reason of the anomaly, but still, by comparison of kindred anomalies, we may discover even in these a certain order, and it is important to determine the extent of that order with statistical exactness. (⁵1879: 90 [Engl. trans., 1886: 103])

The use of a statistical criterion was perceived as a commonsensical approach by all those who worked on comparative linguistics, and not only by the Neogrammarians. This was an obvious consequence of the adoption of an eminently inductive method such as the comparative one, and was valid for all linguistic phenomena, not solely for phonetic ones. In the years immediately before the sound laws controversy, Gabelentz (1875: 336-338), for example, while not explicitly mentioning the statistical method, explained in the same way – that is, as the result of a generalization of the results of an inductive study – the elaboration of the syntactic laws that regulate the succession and saliency of the constituents of a statement in all languages. The laws that are thus elaborated are not free of exceptions. At the same time they have a high degree of certainty.

In what was presumably his last essay, Gabelentz (1894), extended the same principle to linguistic typology. What allows us, starting from certain characteristic traits of the “physiognomy” of a language, to infer with sufficient reason the presence of other traits that are generally associated with them, is a “statistics of conjunctures” (eine Statistik der Konjunkturen). Being obviously based on the assumption of the systemic regularity of phenomena, that method had been an important source both for the notion of language as system as well as of the inductive-reconstructive method, and had legitimated the use of statistical inferences also in the humanities.

Gabelentz explicitly associates the extension of the inductive-statistical method to the establishment of general linguistics:

If only we were able to obtain an unobjectionable statistics, general linguistics (allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft) would have no longer any reason to envy historical linguistics its solid foundations. Then the 20th century would truly be able to achieve what the 19th century has vainly sought to discover: a true general grammar, absolutely philosophical yet absolutely inductive [italics mine: LF]. (1894: 7)

References

Beneke, Eduard. ⁴1877 [1832]. Lehrbuch der Psychologie als Naturwissenschaft. Berlin: Mittler.

Curtius, Georg. ⁵1879 [1858]. Grundzüge der Griechischen Etymologie. Leipzig: Teubner. (Engl. trans.: Principles of Greek Etymology, London: Murray, 1886)

Gabelentz, H. Georg C. von der. 1875. “Weiteres zur eine vergleichenden Syntax. Wort- und Satzstellung”. Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 8/3: 300-338.

Herbart, Johann Friedrich. 1834. Lehrbuch zur Psychologie. In: Sämmtliche Werke, hrsg. von G. Hartenstein. Bd. 5. Schriften zur Psychologie. Leipzig: Voss, 1850: 3-187.

Leskien, August. 1876. Declination im Slawisch-Litauischen und Germanischen. Leipzig: Hirzel.

Paul, Hermann. ⁵1920 [¹1880, ²1886, ³1898, ⁴1909]. Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte. Halle: Niemeyer.

Schuchardt, Hugo. 1885. Über die Lautgesetze: Gegen die Junggrammatiker. Berlin: Oppenheim.

Wundt, Wilhelm. 1862. Beiträge zur Theorie der Sinneswahrnehmung. Leipzig/Heidelberg: C. F. Winter.

Wundt, Wilhelm. 1886. “Ueber den Begriff des Gesetzes, mit Rücksicht auf die Frage der Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze”. Philosophische Studien 3: 195-215.

Wundt, Wilhelm. ³1908 [¹1883, ²1893-1894]. Logik. Eine Untersuchung der Prinzipien der Erkenntniss und der Methoden wissenschafticher Forschung. III. Logik der Geisteswissenschaften. Stuttgart: Enke.

How to cite this post

Formigari, Lia. Wilhelm Wundt and the Lautgesetze Controversy. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2018/01/17/wundt-lautgesetze/

Jan David Braun
Universität Wien & Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften

Wissenschaft, Alfred Kubin, 1901. Quelle

(Bericht aus einer Akademie)[1]

Vorbemerkung

Der vorliegende Text ist ein Bericht aus den bisherigen Arbeiten und eine Erklärung einiger theoretischer Ansätze zu meiner wissenschaftshistorischen Dissertation, die folgenden Arbeitstitel trägt: “Die Verräumlichung der Sprache. Mundarten zwischen Visualisierung, Repräsentation und Expansion in der Dialektologie des Deutschen von 1918 bis 1955″. Diese Arbeit wird durch ein ÖAW-DOC-Stipendium finanziert, das ich am 1.12.2017 angetreten habe und dessen Laufzeit zwei Jahre beträgt. Zudem ist es mir möglich, im Rahmen des Go! Digital-Projektes Austrian Dialect Cartography 1924-1956. Digitalisation, Contextualisation, Visualisation in nunmehr überwiegend organisatorischer und koordinierender Funktion tätig zu sein, wobei ich dabei an der Abteilung “Variation und Wandel des Deutschen in Österreich” (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, ACDH) im angegebenen Projekt seit März 2017 arbeite.

Grundsätzliches: fehlende Selbst-Reflexion der (Sprach-)Wissenschaft, Meta-Theorie & Historische Epistemologie

Nicht wenige wissenschaftliche Disziplinen haben ein besonderes Manko, das paradox erscheint, da es eine wesentliche Tugend des Wissenschaftlichen bedeuten könnte, will man das Denken zum Zentrum von Forschung machen: die Wissenschaft reflektiert sich in vielen Punkten als soziales, politisches, bürokratisches, kurz: gesellschaftliches System nicht selbst. Die ebenso populäre wie provokante Einschätzung “Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht”[2] des Philosophen Martin Heidegger bekommt in diesem Zusammenhang einen großen Wahrheitsgehalt[3], fehlt doch in vielen Disziplinen eine grundsätzliche Beschäftigung mit den epistemologischen, also erkenntnistheoretischen Grundlagen von Wissenschaft in ihrer Zeichenhaftigkeit (Semiotizität), Struktur, Sozialität, Institutionalisierung und politischen Dimension, d.i. die kulturelle Praxis “Wissenschaft” in ihrer umfassenden Gesellschaftlichkeit.

“Und dieser Satz ‛Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht’, der viel Aufsehen erregte, […] bedeutet, die Wissenschaft bewegt sich nicht in der Dimension der Philosophie. Sie ist aber, ohne dass sie es weiß, auf diese Dimension angewiesen. Zum Beispiel die Physik. Bewegt sich im Bereich von Raum und Zeit und Bewegung. Was Bewegung, was Raum, was Zeit ist, kann die Wissenschaft als Wissenschaft nicht entscheiden. Die Wissenschaft denkt also nicht, das heißt sie kann gar nicht denken […] mit ihren Methoden. Ich kann nicht zum Beispiel physikalisch oder mit physikalischen Methoden sagen, was die Physik ist. Sondern was die Physik ist, kann ich nur denken, philosophierend sagen. ‛Die Wissenschaft denkt nicht’ ist kein Vorwurf, sondern ist nur eine Feststellung der inneren Struktur der Wissenschaft.” — Heidegger im Interview.

Paradox an diesem Nicht-Reflektieren ist zudem, dass die Wissenschaft sich im Bereich der Geisteswissenschaften aber gleichzeitig weitgehend mit sich selbst beschäftigt[4], jedoch, da staatlich gefördert, den Schritt in die Ökonomisierung der wissenschaftlichen Inhalte und Ergebnisse selten gehen oder wagen muss und somit ständig auf sich selbst referiert[5], ohne ihr Verhältnis zur Gesellschaft wirklich zum Thema zu machen.[6] Tagungen, Vorträge, Institute sind hauptsächlich für die scientific community und für Studenten bestimmt, selten für andere soziale Gruppen, die die einfache aber unangenehme Frage nach dem “Warum?” der Forschung stellen könnten. In den Fällen, in denen Forschung augenscheinlich auf und in die Gesellschaft wirkt (Medizin, Ingenieurwesen, Biotechnologie und andere naturwissenschaftliche Disziplinen) transzendiert Wissenschaft natürlich den eigenen Bereich. In vielen anderen Fällen “nützt” die Wissenschaft jedoch am meisten der Gesellschaft der Forschenden, womit sich das Paradoxon (zumindest teilweise) auflöst: wissenschaftliche Inhalte dienen als soziale Konvention[7] und Paradigmen in vielerlei Hinsicht besonders dem Erhalt, der Stabilisierung und Perpetuierung der eigenen sozialen Gruppe.[8]

Heideggers oben angeführte Aussage spielt aber auch in anderen Belangen eine Rolle: wenn man sich etwa vor Augen führt, dass durch die Digitalisierung[9] und die damit einhergehende Bestrebung, Geisteswissenschaften technisch (naturwissenschaftlich?) zu fundieren eine Form von technokratischem Empirizismus[10] betrieben wird, der auch in Disziplinen auftaucht, die sich nicht per definitionem dem Paradigma der Repräsentativität (wie es etwa die empirische Sozialforschung darstellt) verschrieben haben. Oder jene, die selbst mit quantitativen Methoden und Forschungssets nur selten tatsächlich repräsentativ sein können, da der Untersuchungsgegenstand dies per se nicht zulässt.[11]

Kurzum: die Tendenz der sogenannten digitalen Geisteswissenschaften zu einer, provokant ausgedrückt, Erotik großer digitaler Datenmengen, drängen (meta-)theoretische, methodologische oder hermeneutisch-interpretative Arbeiten in den Hintergrund und theoretische Komplexität wird nicht selten durch digitale (technische/technisierte) Komplexität ersetzt. Gleichzeitig wird dabei der epistemologische Aspekt der (digitalen) Technik aber nicht entsprechend thematisiert. Entscheidend ist diesbezüglich, dass dabei eben das Bewusstsein um die “Phänomenotechnik”, wie es in der modernen Naturwissenschaft der Fall ist, in den Geisteswissenschaften nicht konsequent aufgenommen wird: dem Bachelardschen Diktum der Phänomenotechnik gemäß ist nämlich festzustellen, dass moderne Naturwissenschaft spätestens seit dem 20. Jahrhundert mit ihren Apparaten (z.B. zur Visualisierung von Nicht-Sichtbarem oder erst zu Übersetzendem) ihre Gegenstände nicht nur findet, sondern auch erfindet.[12] Im Falle der Digitalisierung hat man es alleine schon im Begriff “Digitalisierung” mit einem grundsätzlichen Missverständnis zu tun: “Digitalisierung” verschleiert die epistemologische Komponente am Bereich des Digitalen und suggeriert, dass analoges Material einfach digital gemacht wird, verdeutlicht aber nicht, dass sich die gesamte (auch sprachliche) Wissensproduktion und die epistemologischen Voraussetzungen des Wissens durch das Digitale verändert haben.[13]

Im Gegenteil hat es den Anschein, dass es zum einen darum geht, einer generellen Tendenz der unhinterfragten Affirmation von Digitalisierung und Technizität zu folgen, die die erkenntnistheoretische Dimension des Digitalen nicht begreift und die des Weiteren naiv-positivistische, vermeintlich objektive Forschung einer strengen Reflexion der eigenen Bedingungen, der disziplinären, vorwissenschaftlichen Prägungen und Vorannahmen sowie des eigenen wissenschaftlichen Habitus vorzieht. Man kann mitunter auch beobachten, dass die digitalen “tools” zwar aus der Gegenwart stammen, die Konzepte und epistemologischen Grundlegungen der Visualisierung aber in der Vergangenheit liegen, wie man etwa am Beispiel zeitgenössischer Dialektologie oder moderner Regionalsprachenforschung sieht.[14]

Es haben sich allerdings in den letzten fünf bis sechs Jahrzehnten sukzessive Meta-Disziplinen entwickelt, die die Wissenschaft und ihre produzierten Inhalte in ihrem sozialen und historischen Kontext selbst zum Gegenstand machen: Wissenschaftssoziologie und Wissenschaftsgeschichte sind Beispiele solcher Disziplinen. Aber auch sie reflektieren nur in den seltensten Fällen in offener (selbstbeobachtender) Weise die eigene, unmittelbare Situation und Position in der institutionalisierten Wissenschaft. Zu einer solchen umfangreichen Reflexion könnte das Hinterfragen des Habitus[15] im Wissenschaftlichen ebenso gehören wie die ganz konkrete, reale (und vielleicht auch banale) sozioökonomische Kontextualisierung des eigenen, ausgezahlten Salärs im gesamtgesellschaftlichen Gefüge bzw. im Vergleich mit anderen, nicht-akademischen Berufsgruppen. Zu dieser Reflexion gehört auch die Frage nach den Strukturen der Macht, der Bürokratie, des Autoritarismus in der Wissenschaft (der Gegenwart!) ebenso wie die politische (ideologische) Selbsteinordnung, die Frage nach je unterschiedlichen ideologischen Tendenzen in verschiedenen wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen oder das Hinterfragen der allgemeinen suffizienten/insuffizienten Produktionsbedingungen wissenschaftlicher Arbeit.

All diese aufgezeigten Punkte sollten idealiter in eine konsequente wissenschaftshistorische Arbeit einfließen, da diese Faktoren eben auch den wissenschaftshistorischen Gegenstandsbereich, also die Wissenschaft zu einem spezifischen historischen Zeitpunkt, maßgeblich beeinflusst haben müssen, ganz so, wie sie einen selbst als Wissenschaftler gegenwärtig beeinflussen. Ob und inwiefern mir gelingen wird, diese Reflexion konsequent durchzuziehen, steht noch dahin.

Neben dieser metatheoretischen Perspektivierung meiner Arbeit sollen weitere theoretische Ansätze eine Grundlage der Dissertation bilden: die historische Epistemologie nach Hans Jörg Rheinberger sowie die Idee einer implizit in der wissenschaftlichen Wissensproduktion enthaltenen Politizität im Sinne Volker Roelckes. Der Ansatz der historischen Epistemologie (der oben schon Anklang gefunden hat), bezugnehmend auf die franzöisische Épistémologie nach George Canguilhem und Gaston Bachelard[16] , ist weitgehend auf die Naturwissenschaften angewendet worden, aber noch nie auf die Dialektologie oder gar die Sprachkartographie dialektologischer Prägung.

Für Hans-Jörg Rheinberger bedeutet historische Epistemologie “die Reflexion auf die historischen Bedingungen, unter denen, und die Mittel, mit denen Dinge zu Objekten des Wissens gemacht werden, an denen der Prozess der wissenschaftlichen Erkenntnisgewinnung in Gang gesetzt sowie in Gang gehalten wird.” (Rheinberger 2007, 11. Fett-Setzungen Jan D. Braun) Im Hinblick auf die Dialektologie sind nun die Mittel, mit denen Dinge zu Objekten des Wissens gemacht werden einerseits als Frage nach den realen Fördermitteln und den förderpolitischen Hintergründen zu verstehen, anderseits aber auch als die technischen (Hilfs-)Mittel[17], welche die wissenschaftlichen Artefakte (Sprachkarten) ermöglichen. Bei der Sprachkartographie dialektologischer Façon wird es in meiner Dissertation darum gehen, wie Sprach- und Dialektkarten zu Objekten des Wissens gemacht wurden.

Dieser Prozess lässt sich historisch in Form eines Zwei-Schritt-Vorgangs rekonstruieren: erstens werden wissenschaftliche Gegenstände festgelegt, die als Dinge im weiteren Sinne fungieren. Diese Dinge sind all jene, denen, wie es Rheinberger formuliert, “die Anstrengung des Wissens gilt” (Rheinberger 2001, 24). Diese sogenannten epistemischen Dinge sind u.a. Konzepte und Ideen von etwas, das man untersuchen möchte, wie etwa am Beispiel der Mundartforschung die Konzepte ‘Dialekt’, ‘Sprache im Raum’, oder ‘Bairisch’. Im zweiten Schritt geht es darum, wie diese Dinge durch einen technischen Prozess zu Artefakten und Trägern wissenschaftlichen Wissens (gemacht) werden; nach Rheinberger sind das die sogenannten technischen Dinge.[18] Im Fall der Dialektologie wären dies also die realiter vorgefundenen Sprachkarten.

Der Wissenschaftshistoriker Volker Roelcke nun spricht davon, “dass die […] Reflexion der politischen Dimension bei der Produktion von neuem Wissen in den Wissenschaften für ein angemessenes Verständnis vieler historischer Phänomene unverzichtbar ist.” (Roelcke 2010, 177) Diese Dimension lässt sich auch bei Sprachkarten, die in der ersten Hälfte des 20. Jahrhunderts im Kontext von Multidisziplinarität und Gemeinschaftsforschung entstanden sind, vielfach feststellen, wie ich an anderer Stelle schon gezeigt habe.[19] Es gilt jedoch auch hier, das Politische im weiteren Sinne zu interpretieren und nicht auf staatspolitische “Handlungen” zu reduzieren. Das Politische im Wissenschaftlichen (im Sozialen) interpretiere ich viel eher, in Anlehnung an Joseph Rouse[20], Mitchell G. Ash[21] und Bruno Latour[22] als institutionell gestützte (d.h. systematisiert-strukturierte) Ermöglichungs- oder Verunmöglichungsprozesse in der Durchsetzung oder Ablehnung von Wissen und der Etablierung oder Verhinderung von spezifischen Paradigmen durch die Macht der Sozialität oder besser: durch die Sozialität der Macht.

Forschungsgegenstand & Zielsetzung

Meine wissenschaftshistorische Dissertation ist als qualitative, quellenkritisch-hermeneutische Arbeit ausgelegt, die verschiedene Archivquellen hinzuziehen, das linguistische Wissen rekonstruieren, soziohistorisch kontextualisieren und dabei einen besonderen Fokus auf die Praxis der Sprachkartographie der Dialektologie des 20. Jahrhunderts legen wird; also auf die Visualisierung dieses dialektologischen Wissens im Artefakt der Sprachkarte[23] und der Frage nach den Konzepten von Sprache und/im Raum am Beispiel der Sprachkarte. Es geht bei den letztgenannten Punkten darum, wie und mithilfe welcher Methoden die Dialektologie mit der Frage von Karte und Gebiet, also der Darstellung von sprachlichen Phänomenen einerseits und dem Dargestellten andererseits umging.

Als zentraler Untersuchungsgegenstand der Dissertation gilt Kartenmaterial der außeruniversitären Forschungseinrichtung Wiener Wörterbuchkanzlei, die 1913 an der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien gegründet wurde und die es sich gemeinsam mit der Bayerischen Wörterbuchkanzlei in München zum Ziel gesetzt hatte, als Langzeitprojekt ein Bayerisch-Österreichisches Wörterbuch (später: Wörterbuch der bairischen Mundarten in Österreich) zu schaffen, wobei die Protagonisten, die sich in und um die Kanzlei gruppierten, heute unter dem Namen Wiener dialektologische Schule bekannt sind.

Nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg besaß die Nachfolgeinstitution dieser Einrichtung verschiedene Namen, zuletzt war sie als Institut für Österreichische Dialekt- und Namenlexika (DINAMLEX) bekannt. Die Archivalien der Wiener Kanzlei befinden sich gegenwärtig teilweise im Archiv der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, das Kartenmaterial aber in den Räumen der an der Akademie 2016 gegründeten Abteilung Variation und Wandel des Deutschen in Österreich, die ab 2017 das Projekt WBÖ neu initiiert hat.

Der Untersuchungszeitraum der Dissertation von den Jahren 1918 bis 1955 erklärt sich aus der historischen Zäsur mit dem Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs und dem Zerfall der Donaumonarchie (insbesondere mit den Gegebenheiten in der cisleithanischen Reichshälfe) bis zur Gründung der Zweiten Republik Österreichs.

Die Kanzlei, die zeitgleich mit dem Schwesterunternehmen an der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften eingesetzt wurde, war seit ihrer Gründung zwar primär mit dem Ausbau von Dialektwörterbüchern beschäftigt[24], aber auch mit dem Paradigma der Marburger dialektologischen Schule, welche es sich zur Aufgabe gemacht hatte, die deutschen Dialekte kartographisch zu visualisieren, verbunden.[25] Diese, zu Beginn als Sprachatlas des Deutschen Reiches und danach als Deutscher Sprachatlas (DSA) bezeichnete, bis heute existierende Forschungseinrichtung in Marburg an der Lahn (Hessen) stand zudem personell wie institutionell mit dem 1921 gegründeten Wörterbuchkartell, das alle deutschsprachigen großlandschaftlichen Wörterbuchprojekte unter seiner Schirmherrschaft hatte, in Verbindung.[26]

Die Marburger Dialektgeographie, vom Bibliothekar Georg Wenker in den 1870er Jahren entwickelt[27], setzte sich, zuerst noch skeptisch betrachtet, schließlich auch in der Wiener dialektologischen Schule durch und die Kanzlei in Wien erstellte neben Wörterbüchern nach dem Vorbild des Marburger Modells ebenso Dialektkarten, wobei, und das ist interessant, die Kartenproduktion besonders nach 1918/1919 stark zunahm.[28] Ein langjähriger Wörterbuchkanzleimitarbeiter, Eberhard Kranzmayer, Dissertant bei dem ab 1920 die Kanzlei leitenden Dialektologen Anton Pfalz, etablierte stärker noch als seine Vorgänger das sprachkartographische Vorgehen als einen zentralen epistemischen Grundpfeiler der Wiener bzw. Österreichischen Dialektologie.

Diese dialektkartographischen Praxen bestimmten im 20. Jahrhundert und vielfach bis heute die Dialektforschung und stellen ein zentrales Element in der Visualisierung dialektologischen Sprachwissens dar: die Verräumlichung der Sprache ist in diesem Kontext also seit Ende des 19. Jahrhunderts an eine Kartographie der Sprache gebunden. Diese wiederum hing gerade bei der Wenker’schen Unternehmung eng mit der Gründung des Deutschen Kaiserreiches 1871 und der finanziellen Förderung des Sprachatlas vonseiten der Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zusammen.[29]

Ab den 1920er bis zu den 1940er Jahren, mit der Neuordnung Europas nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg und dem Erstarken deutschnationaler, nationalkonservativer und später auch nationalsozialistischer Kräfte, lässt sich eine eindeutige Zunahme der territorial-expansiven Perspektivierung der sprachlichen Kartierung von (deutscher) Sprache (und Sprachen im mitteleuropäischen Raum) erkennen: sie hing nicht selten mit (geo-)politischen Raumkonzepten zusammen[30], war ideologisch stark aufgeladen und antizipierte völkische, großdeutsche und nationalsozialistische Expertise in Geopolitik, Raumplanung und Propagandakartographie. Auch in Form von geisteswissenschaftlichen, multidisziplinären Gemeinschaftsprojekten arbeiteten Dialektologen mit anderen Disziplinen, zusammen und schufen verschiedenste thematische Karten- und Atlaswerke, wobei die Frage nach den Geschichtskonzepten in diesem Zusammenhang besonders interessant ist.

Denn die Dialektologie des Deutschen besaß seit dem späten 19. Jahrhundert, geprägt durch jungrammatische Forschung und seit dem frühen 20. Jahrhundert ein Konzept von Historizität, das sich auf verschiedenen (Darstellungs- und Analyse-)Ebenen widerspiegelt und besonders augenfällig im Medium/Artefakt der Sprach- bzw. Dialektkarte kulminiert. Dabei entscheidend ist, dass sich dieses Konzept der Historizität von Sprache eben aus der Verbindung mit anderen Geisteswissenschaften (Kulturgeographie, Raumforschung, Volkskunde, Altertumskunde etc.) erklärt: es kann einerseits als eine (kulturell-sprachliche-volkstümlich bis völkische!) Kontinuität im Verlauf der Jahrhunderte[31] und, überspitzt formuliert, als Historizismus[32] im Popperschen Sinne wahrgenommen werden. Andererseits wird aber gemäß dem strukturalistischen Diachronie-Konzept[33] Geschichtlichkeit in der Sprachwissenschaft verstanden als eine lange Zeit-Dauer (ein Fort-Schreiten in der Zeit) die durch Ereignisse, die in Bezug auf die Sprachentwicklung insbesondere Siedlungsbewegungen darstellen, geprägt ist.

Warum etwa Siedlungsbewegungen in der Sprachgeschichte besonders entscheidend sind, erklärt sich am ehesten durch die Idee, dass Sprache und ihre Variation im Raum von den Polen Bewegung/Nicht-Bewegung geprägt sein soll. Durch die Frage der Dynamizität/Nicht-Dynamizität von Sprache wird das dialektologische Konzept von Sprache so ein historizistisch-spatiales, welches im 20. Jahrhundert an Entwicklungen in der historischen Geographie sowie Kultur- und Humangeographie anknüpft. Gleichzeitig werden in dialektologischen Sprachkarten oftmals viele historische Ebenen (Mittelalter, 19. Jahrhundert, 20. Jahrhundert etc.) miteinander vermengt und in gleichsam historizistischen wie atemporalen (zeitlosen) Kumulations-Karten visualisiert.

Für meine Untersuchung besonders relevant ist daher auch der Fokus auf die ineinander übergehenden Ansätze anderer geisteswissenschaftlicher Disziplinen mit der Linguistik, wo sich auch vielfach die Begriffe des Raumes, des Volkstums, der Kultur und der Identität überlappen. Durch den Beginn kulturgeographischer Praxen in den 1920er Jahren und dem geisteswissenschaftlichen Diskurs um den Begriff des Volks- und Kulturraumes, bzw. des Volks- und Kulturbodens intensivierte sich gerade in der Wiener dialektologischen Schule auch die Produktion von Karten in diesem Fahrwasser.

Eine wissenschaftshistorische Kontextualisierung solcher multidimensionalen und multifunktional eingesetzten Sprachkarten benötigt als Grundlage eine umfangreiche Metadatenanreicherung (Autor, dargestellter Bereich, Jahr der Erstellung, Material usw.)[34] und zweitens eine wissenschaftshistorische Karteninterpretation.

Grundlage der interpretatorischen Kartenanalyse bilden dabei zwei Leitfragen: erstens die Frage nach den (sprach-)wissenschaftlichen Konzepten von Geschichte und Geschichtlichkeit (Historizität) von Sprachkarten und zweitens die Frage nach dem Verhältnis von politischem, sprachlichen und kulturellem Raum. So haben wir es insgesamt mit folgenden drei Fragestellungen zu tun:

• WAS sind die historischen Hintergründe der Kartenproduktion selbst, d.h. es geht um die Auswertung der historischen Metadaten: WER hat die Karte WANN in WELCHEM Zusammenhang WIESO produziert?

• WIE wird Geschichtlichkeit mit WELCHEN darstellungstechnischen Mitteln und durch WELCHE Begriffe in der Karte visualisiert?

• WIE sieht das Verhältnis der politischen, kulturellen und sprachlichen “Räume” in den jeweiligen Karten aus?

[1] Vgl. Kafka 2004, 322-337.

[3] Gleichzeitig hat Heidegger seine eigene Position als akademischer Philosoph auch nicht reflektiert. Ihm ging es vor allem um die Frage der Denk-Leistung von Philosophie und Wissenschaft, entkoppelte sich aber von dem historischen Kontext in welchem er als akademischer Philosoph lebte und wirkte. Für eine kritische Behandlung von Heidegger im akademischen Feld vgl. Bourdieu 1988a.

[4] Etwa in der ausschließlichen Diskussion in sogenannten Fachkreisen.

[5] Der Linguist Manfred Glauninger spricht in Bezug auf das sprachwissenschaftlich generierte Wissen von einer “sozialkonstruktivistischen Autopoiesis sui generis”.- Glauninger 2017,150.

[6] Angesichts der Tatsache, dass in den meisten geisteswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen die Metasprache gleichzeitig die natürliche Sprache darstellt (sprachwissenschaftliche Ergebnisse können hauptsächlich sprachlich formuliert werden, in der Geschichtswissenschaft verhält es sich ähnlich), müsste eigentlich zwangsweise eine übergeordnete Reflexion stattfinden.

[7] Vgl. Glauninger 2017,148, Fußn.14

[8] Vgl. Glauninger 2017, passim.

[9] Im Eigentlichen nicht durch die Digitalisierung, sondern mit der Digitalisierung; die digitale Welt trägt keine “Schuld”, sie soll an dieser Stelle nicht kulturpessimistisch denunziert werden.

[10] In diesem Kontext spreche ich bewusst nicht von Empirismus, sondern provokant von Empirizismus in Anlehnung an Poppers “Elend des Historizismus” und seiner Kritik an Ansätzen historischer Vorhersagbarkeit und der Identifikation vermeintlich historischer Gesetzmäßigkeit. Als Analogon gilt für mich der Empirizismus, der das Empirische und “Daten” oder “Datenmaterial” (als Korpus) zu einem epistemologischen Totalhorizont erhebt und ihn zum (verselbstständigten) Leitmotiv von Wissenschaftlichkeit hypostasiert. Vgl.Popper 1987.

[11] Beispiele sind dabei Dialektologie, zeitgenössische Variations- und Areallinguistik oder Regionalsprachenforschung, die oftmals (als solche nicht ausgewiesene) Minderheitenphänomene mithilfe von Forschungssets untersuchen, die  jedoch weder repräsentative Ergebnisse erzeugen noch wiederholbar sind.

[12] Zur Phänomenotechnik vgl. Rheinberger 2006, 37-54.

[13] Bezeichnenderweise kann man sehen, dass dieser Aspekt realiter von jenen angewendet wird, die sich gerade nicht im “gerontokratisch-kollektivistische[n]” System der Wissenschaft (vgl. Glauninger 2017, S.150) befinden. Die Offenbarung der grundsätzlich neuen epistemologischen Struktur des Digitalen zeigt sich anhand der jungen Nutzer von YouTube, Facebook, Twitter und Co, wobei das Bild von Wissen und Wissensverknüpfung dieser Nutzer mit den tradierten (universitären) Wegen mithin nur wenig gemein hat.

[14] Ein gutes Beispiel diesbezüglich ist das sprachdynamische Paradigma Marburger Prägung, das dennoch bis heute im statischen Medium der (nicht-dynamischen, sondern bildhaften, veranschaulichenden) “Sprachkarte” verharrt. Vgl. Schmidt und Herrgen 2011 oder die Art, wie Karten auf http://www.regionalsprache.de verwendet werden.

[15] Gemeint ist der Habitus als soziologische Kategorie nach Pierre Bourdieu, der den Zusammenhang des Habitus mit dem akademischen Feld explizierte. Vgl. Bourdieu 1988b, Bourdieu 1998, 26-31.

[16] Aber auch die französischen Epistemologen verkannten augenscheinlich die Sozialität des wissenschaftlichen Wissens, wenn davon die Rede ist, dass das wissenschaftliche Denken ununterbrochene Revolution sei, vgl. Canguilhem 1979,18. Im Hinblick auf seine Sozialität muss das wissenschaftliche Denken im Gegenteil notgedrungen ununterbrochene Konvention sein.

[17] Diese Frage wird allerdings besonders technikgeschichtlich zu klären sein.

[18] Vgl. Rheinberger 2001, 25. An dieser Stelle müssen wir berücksichtigen, dass die technischen Dinge bei Rheinberger im Rahmen von naturwissenschaftlichen Experimentalsystemen auftauchen und gewissermaßen technische Apparaturen darstellen, wobei Rheinberger abwechselnd von technischen Bedingungen und technischen Objekten spricht. Im Hinblick auf die Dialektologie würde ich die Termini (modifiziert) so verwenden, dass die technischen Bedingungen die (technischen) Mittel sind, wohingegen die realiter produzierten Karten technische Dinge darstellen.

[19] Vgl. Braun 2016.

[20] Auf Rouse beziehe ich mich im Hinblick auf die Sozialität der Macht: Rouse spricht davon, dass Macht immer sozial situiert sei, vgl. Rouse 1991, 659.

[21] Ash wird einerseits herangezogen mit seinem bekannten Ansatz von Wissenschaft und Politik als Ressourcen füreinander, vgl. Ash 2002 sowie für seinen Politikbegriff, den er in dreierlei unterteilt: Staatspolitik, Politik als spezifische Form von Staatspolitik (z.B. Kulturpolitik) und als Politik im Kleinen (Machtverhältnisse in Institutionen etc.), vgl. Ash 2006, 21-23.

[22] Auf Latour beziehe ich mich im Hinblick auf eine kritische Behandlung des Begriffes “sozial”, vgl. Latour 2007. In seiner Theorie sieht Latour den Begriff “sozial” eher als Verknüpfungstyp denn als eigenen abgekapselten Wirkungsbereich und plädiert dafür, nicht zwischen sozial und nicht-sozial zu unterscheiden.

[23] Aufgrund der disziplinären Verbindungen der Dialektologie zu anderen geisteswissenschaftlichen Disziplinen wird es nicht nur darum gehen, dialektologische Karten zu interpretieren, sondern prinzipiell mit Karten umzugehen, die sprachliche Informationen enthalten.

[24] Zur Wörterbuchkanzlei vgl. u.a. Peter Wiesinger 1983, der das Jahr 1913 mit der Gründung der Kanzlei auch als Geburtsstunde der Wiener dialektologischen Schule bezeichnet. An dieser Stelle muss jedoch erwähnt werden, dass bis heute keine befriedigende, umfassende (und/oder) kritische Geschichte der Wiener dialektologischen Schule und der Wörterbuchkanzlei geschrieben wurde. Auch ein Beitrag des Linguisten Ingo Reiffenstein kann nicht mehr als tabellarische Eckdaten liefern und weist große Lücken in der Schilderung der Kanzleigeschichte auf. Vgl. Reiffenstein 2005.

[25] Vgl. Abteilung VaWaDiÖ: Anton Pfalz 1927: XIV. Bericht der von der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien bestellten Kommission für das Bayerisch-Österreichische Wörterbuch für das Jahr 1926, 66

[26] Vgl. Bremer und Hoffmann 1982, 207.

[27] Vgl. Fleischer 2017.

[28] Dies lässt sich hinsichtlich des Datums, an denen die Karten produziert wurden, erkennen.

[29] Vgl. Wilking 2003, 5-14, vgl. auch https://www.uni-marburg.de/de/fb09/dsa/einrichtung/institutsgeschichte

[30] Besonders augenscheinlich im kulturgeographischen Paradigma der Volks- und Kulturbodentheorie. Vgl. Braun 2016, Vgl. Henniges 2011.

[31] Dies erkennt man am populären Stammesbegriff, der in der deutschen Dialektologie lange verwendet wurde. Zu diesem Stammesbegriff in der Dialektologie etwa der Marburger Schule vgl. Wilking 2003, S.70-117.

[32] Vgl. Fußnote 10.

[33] Zu betonen ist an dieser Stelle, dass das aus dem Strukturalismus stammende Konzept der Synchronie und Diachronie erst im 20. Jahrhundert rezipiert wurde und im Eigentlichen mit historizistischen (wie auch allgemein mit historischen) Modellierungen brach!

[34] Die Taxonomie der Metadaten wird auch im Digitalisierungsprojekt verwendet und bildete eine Grundlage für das Erstellen des Datenbankmodells, das in Form einer online-Applikation frei verfügbar gemacht wird.

Literatur

Ash, Mitchell G. 2002. “Wissenschaft und Politik als Ressourcen füreinander”. In Wissenschaften und Wissenschaftspolitik – Bestandaufnahmen zu Formationen, Brüchen und Kontinuitäten im Deuschland des 20. Jahrhunderts, 32-51. Stuttgart: Steiner.

Ash, Mitchell G. 2006. “Wissenschaftswandlungen und politische Umbrüche im 20. Jahrhundert -was hatten sie miteinander zu tun?” In Kontinuitäten und Diskontinuitäten in der Wissenschaftsgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, herausgegeben von Rüdiger Vom Bruch, Uta Gerhard, und Aleksandra Pawlicek, 19-38. Stuttgart: Steiner.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1988a. Die politische Ontologie Martin Heideggers. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1988b. Homo academicus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. Vom Gebrauch der Wissenschaft. Für eine klinische Soziologie des wissenschaftlichen Feldes. Konstanz: UVK.

Braun, Jan David. 2016. “Mapping Language: linguistic cartography as a topic for the history of science”. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2016/11/03/mapping-language/.

Bremer, Ernst, und Walter Hoffmann. 1982. “Wissenschaftsorganisation und Forschungsrichtungen der Dialektologie im deutschen Sprachgebiet”. In Dialektologie: ein Handbuch zur deutschen und allgemeinen Dialektforschung. Erster Halbband, herausgegeben von Werner Besch, 202-231. Berlin ; New York: De Gruyter.

Canguilhem, Georges. 1979. Wissenschaftsgeschichte und Epistemologie. Herausgegeben von Wolf Lepenies. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Fleischer, Jürg. 2017. Geschichte, Anlage und Durchführung der Fragebogen-Erhebungen von Georg Wenkers 20 Sätzen. Dokumentation, Entdeckungen und Neubewertungen. Hildesheim / Zürich / New York: Georg Olms Verlag.

Glauninger, Manfred. 2017. “Zur Bedeutung von Sprache als Zeichen. Aspekte einer Soziologie des linguistischen (Sprach-)Wissens”. In Konstanz und Variation. Die deutsche Sprache in Mittel-,Ost- und Südosteuropa, herausgegeben von Ioan Lazarescu und Doris Sava, 145-53. Berlin: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Berlin.

Henniges, Norman. 2015. “‘Naturgesetze der Kultur’: Die Wiener Geographen und die Anfänge der ‘Volks- und Kulturbodenforschung'”. In ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, Band 14, H. 4, S. 1309-1351.

Kafka, Franz. 2004. Ein Bericht für eine Akademie und andere Texte zum Rotpeter-Thema. In Franz Kafka. Die Erzählungen, 322-337. Frankfurt am Main: S Fischer.

Latour, Bruno. 2007. Eine neue Soziologie für eine neue Gesellschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Popper, Karl R. 1987. Das Elend des Historizismus. Tübingen: Mohr.

Reiffenstein, Ingo. 2005. “Die Geschichte des ‚Wörterbuches der bairischen Mundarten in Österreich’ (WBÖ). Wörter und Sachen im Lichte der Kulturgeschichte”. In Deutsche Wortforschung als Kulturgeschichte, herausgegeben von Isolde Hausner und Peter Wiesinger, 1-13. Wien: ÖAW.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2001. Experimentalsysteme und epistemische Dinge. Göttingen: Wallstein.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2006. Epistemologie des Konkreten. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp.

Rheinberger, Hans-Jörg. 2007. Historische Epistemologie. Zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius.

Roelcke. 2010. “Auf der Suche nach der Politik in der Wissensproduktion: Plädoyer für eine historisch-politische Epistemologie” In Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 33:176-92.

Rouse, Joseph. 1991. “The Dynamics of Power and Knowledge in Science”. In Journal of Philosophy 88:658-67.

Schmidt, Erich, und Joachim Herrgen. 2011. Sprachdynamik: Eine Einführung in die moderne Regionalsprachenforschung. Erich Schmidt Verlag GmbH & Co.

Wiesinger, Peter, Hrsg. 1983. Die Wiener dialektologische Schule: grundsätzliche Studien aus 70 Jahren Forschung. Wien: Halosar.

Wilking, Stefan. 2003. Der Deutsche Sprachatlas im Nationalsozialismus. Studien zu Dialektologie und Sprachwissenschaft zwischen 1933 und 1945. Hildesheim: Georg Olms

Archivalien

Abteilung VaWaDiÖ
Pfalz, Anton 1927. XIV. Bericht der von der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Wien bestellten Kommission für das Bayerisch-Österreichische Wörterbuch für das Jahr 1926.

How to cite this post

Braun, Jan David. ‛Karte und Gebiet’. Die Spatialisierung von Sprache in der Dialektologie des Deutschen von 1918 bis 1955. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2018/01/31/karte-und-gebiet/

Emma Mojet
University of Amsterdam

Newspaper cutting from Leidsch Dagblad, 1928, on the opening of the First International Congress of Linguists in The Hague. On the first row, from left to right, J. Schrijnen, C.C. Uhlenbeck, P. Kretschmer, A. Meillet, and S. Feist.

Why congresses?

The organisation of an international congress of a discipline marks a noteworthy stage in the development of a discipline. Taking a broader perspective, the many first disciplinary congresses held around 1900 also mark a significant stage in the institutionalisation and internationalisation of the disciplinary system in general. Historians have signalled a “wave of congresses” being held in numerous disciplines in both the humanities and the sciences throughout the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth century. [1] Indeed, as Pascale Rabault-Feuerhahn and Wolf Feuerhahn show, the number of congresses in the nineteenth century is dizzying. [2] In another paper, Rabault-Feuerhahn gives an enumeration of reasons for the this phenomenon: improvement of transport and information infrastructure, foundation of intellectual societies on a national level, and rapid specialisations within disciplines. [3] The trend started in 1798 with the Congress on Definitive Metric Standards in Paris and fits in with the processes of modern discipline formation which are commonly attributed to the nineteenth century. [4]

At the congresses of the various disciplines, the scholars of the field from different nationalities would come together and discuss the status, future course and central problems of their discipline. In this way, the congresses were a means to go beyond the national backgrounds of the scholars and start to normalise the methods of the discipline. Certain theories or practices were validated thanks to the gathering of an international community, something which failed in the separate national contexts. The international congress could function as a judge in such cases. [5]

On the other hand, scholars could use the international congresses as a tool to show off not only their scholarship but also their country. Official representatives often honoured the congress with their presence and the hosts organised banquets and excursions to entertain the members of the congress in their country. Unsurprisingly for the prevailing nationalistic tendencies of the nineteenth century, nationalities definitely did play a role at the international congresses. International congresses could become a political tool, to endorse and to advertise national scholarship.

Not only do “the congresses define the discipline by defining who can and who cannot participate”, as Rabault-Feuerhahn and Feuerhahn claim, “but they also have the ambition to bring together once again the various options and subfields of the discipline. The return to an overall perspective is fundamental and studying this gives an insight in processes of professionalisation and discipline formation.” [6] Indeed, the scholars assembling at international congresses came from different backgrounds, both with respect to nationality and disciplinarity. At the congress, scholars from different subfields met and exchanged ideas, research and methods. We can thus see the congress as a site of communication. Even though the congresses played prominent roles in the development of specific disciplines, we need to study the congress from a multidisciplinary point of view to study the influence of cross-disciplinary interactions. As Bart Karstens argued in his post of March 2017, the history of linguistics provides a useful laboratory for this kind of research.

This blog post discusses the first International Congress of Linguists, held in The Hague in 1928. We will look at who organised and who attended the congress, what topics were dealt with, and what the linguists decided as the international organisation of their discipline. This will tell us more about the development of the discipline of general linguistics. As we will see, the scholars gathered from different countries and had different academic backgrounds and interests. These backgrounds ranged from philology to anthropology, and from dialectology to psychology, illustrating the multidisciplinary background of the discipline of general linguistics. Even though the scholars were all working on the study of language, they had different intents for and views of the methods used in the discipline. At the congress, these all came together and were debated.

Organising the Congress

The initial goal of the first International Congress of Linguists was to unite, for the first time, linguists from different parts of the field and to discuss a number of issues together. The congress was organised by professors Jos. Schrijnen (1869-1938) and Christianus Uhlenbeck (1866-1951), who were both working at the newly established Catholic University of Nijmegen at the time. In one of the few articles on this congress, Saskia Daalder claims that it was actually Antoine Meillet’s (1866-1936) idea to organise such a meeting. [7] Meillet’s ideal of internationalism in academia, which was shared by many scholars at the time, adds an extra dimension to the congress. Meillet’s student Alf Sommerfelt notes in a piece commemorating Meillet that Meillet became very interested in the international organisation of linguists. Even after the atrocities of the Great War, when even the academic world was divided into winners and losers, Meillet “maintained his quiet, objective and dispassionate judgment of German scholarship”, Sommerfelt remembers. [8] It therefore seems plausible that Meillet had suggested the organisation of an international congress. The Netherlands had been neutral during the War, and, during the interbellum, Dutch scholars took the task of reuniting the international community upon them. The organisation of this congress can be seen within this role. [9]

Antoine Meillet (1866-1936).
Source picture: Wikimedia Commons (2018).

The Congress of Linguists was held from the 10th to the 15th of April 1928. A year in advance, in March 1927, Schrijnen and Uhlenbeck sent a letter to a large number of linguists from different countries to announce their plan to organise a first international congress. They wrote that the goal of the congress would be to meet each other in order to discuss the interests of their science and hopefully to find solutions for a number of practical questions. [10] In the letter they stated that the questions within the language sciences were becoming more and more general, multiple fields of research were coming together and becoming one general linguistics:

Étant donné que les différents subdivisions de la linguistique, qui est bien une science une et indivisible, ne sauraient être rigoureusement séparées les unes des autres et que, d’ailleurs, pratiquement les recherches dans chacun de ces domaines aboutissent de plus en plus à une linguistique générale. [11]

To structure the congress, Schrijnen and Uhlenbeck sent out six practical problems. The addressees were invited to respond and, by means of an answer, they formulated a series of propositions, 42 in total. The responses and propositions were once again distributed to the participants as preparation for the congress itself. During the days of the congress, there were five plenary sessions and a number of separate sessions. Every session had a president and a secretary. The plenary sessions would determine which groups should get together for separate discussions. The discussions of the separate sessions were subsequently presented again at the plenary session. All notes and reports from the congress were collected and edited by a specially appointed committee. The committee consisted of Cornelis de Boer (1880-1957), Jacobus van Ginneken (1877-1945) and Anton Gerard van Hamel (1886-1945). [12] The Actes du Premier Congrès de Linguistes. Tenu à la Haye du 10-15 Avril 1928 were published in 1930 in Leiden.

Topics

The six problems which were sent to the linguists were: 1) finding a basis for phonetic notations, 2) establishment and delimitation of technical terms, 3) methods of research for linguistic geography, 4) methods for studying a certain grammar, 5) the relation between past and present cultural domains to specific words and phonetics, morphological and syntactic particularities, and 6) research methods when philology is not sufficient. [13] These six practical problems show that the linguists were discussing research methods for their discipline. International congresses of other disciplines adhered to a similar trend. The existence of a central methodological topic, namely chemical nomenclature, also governed the first international congress of chemists in Karlsruhe, 1860. At the first international congress of orientalists in 1873, the participants debated the definition of their research topic, the Orient. First official meetings of international scholars prompted discussions on methodological topics.

The study of language had undergone a shift following the publication of the Cours de Linguistique Générale, a posthumous work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), published from students notes in 1916 by Charles Bally (1865-1947) and Albert Sechehaye (1870-1946). The Cours set out a new theoretical framework which became influential in the discipline of general linguistics. One main point of this framework, the principle of a synchronic study of language, was already a trend among scholars of general linguistics of which Saussure’s work became an important part. The task for the linguists was to look for methods and approaches to adapt the theories to their research. We can place the endeavours of the congress within the context of a turn towards a synchronic study of language.

Participants

As is noted in the Actes, 309 people expressed their interest in the First International Congress of Linguists, but it is unclear whether all these people were present. The Actes‘ list is not an attendance list, but a list of ‘members’: those who supported or were interested in the congress and wanted to be kept up to date. On the basis of the Liste des membres, we can establish that almost all scholars were working in European countries, except for eight scholars in America and one in South Africa. The spread over Europe is not very equal: looking at the top five shows 109 Netherlands based scholars, 47 in Germany, 26 in France, 12 in Italy and 12 in the United Kingdom. The age range at the Congress runs from 18 to 92, where most scholars are in their forties or fifties.

Map of places where members of the First International Congress of Linguists were working in 1928.
Map created using mapsdata.co.uk, May 2017.

Distribution of the ages of the participants.

As for the different backgrounds of the scholars, which we determined from the research they were working on and the chairs they occupied around 1928: most study specific languages or philology. We can also distinguish a group of already distinguished general linguists, like Bally and Sechehaye, but also Meillet and members of the Prague School of linguists, such as Roman Jakobson, Serge Karcevski, Vilém Mathesius, Bohumil Trnka, and Nikolai Troubetzkoy . But not only general linguists were interested in the congress. A number of anthropologists, dialectologists, and ethnologists also joined the list including Franz Boas, Wilhelm Schmidt, Karl Jaberg, Casimir Nitsch, Paul Rivet, Leonard Bloomfield, and Ferdinand Hestermann. These scholars all had an explicit interest in the study of language, but came to the congress with different interests and aims. Some studied the more social aspects of language and linguistic change, where others worked on historical-comparative and philological problems. The assembly of these different views was a main goal of the congress. It shows the multidisciplinarity of the study of language. When debating the use of the questionnaire as a research method, for example, the scholars who were more inclined towards the social sciences shared their experiences with the method with other scholars.

There were also 35 female visitors at the congress. Of these 15 were wives or daughters accompanying another member of the congress, six were nuns who were enrolled at the Catholic University of Nijmegen, and the remaining 14 were scholars. Some notable names are phonetician Louise Kaiser (1891-1973), Africanist Maria Klingenheben-von Tiling (1886-1974), classicist Christine Mohrmann (1903-1988), psychotherapist Marguerite Sechehaye (née Burdet) (1887-1964), and celtologist Maria-Louise Sjöstedt (1900-1940).

Results

Rounding up the congress, the linguists compiled a list of decisions that were made, categorised into four main points. First, the congress established a permanent international committee – now known as CIPL, “Comité International Permanent des Linguistes” – consisting of a general secretary and ten other members. The permanent committee’s task was to organise an international congress every three years and appoint a president for the congress. The first members of the permanent committee were Bally, Boas, Carl Brockelmann, Otto Jespersen, Daniel Jones, Bernhard Karlgren, Paul Kretschmer, Meillet, Jan Rozwadowsky, and Alfredo Trombetti, with Schrijnen as the general secretary. Second, the congress decided to submit a request to several governments and national academic societies. The request pertained to the issue that languages and dialects worldwide were becoming extinct. In order to preserve and map all the current languages, the congress proposed to administer a questionnaire in various countries. An international committee was instituted to oversee this project, of which the members were Boas, Rivet, Matteo Bartoli, Jaberg, Schmidt, Sommerfelt, and Nikolai Jakovlef. Third decision on the list was to start using an international index for books on linguistics which were important in the discipline. To make this as general as possible, the congress suggested to consult linguists and decided that the permanent committee would administer the responses. The fourth decision of the congress was to create a review journal on the subject of phonetics, directed by Hubert Pernot in Paris. The congress also nominated an international committee of editors for this journal.

The four decisions signalled a change within the discipline of linguistics. Linguists were organising their discipline internationally. This included a permanent international committee with subcommittees, a series of congresses, and journals. The increase of international organisation was an important stage in the establishing of an autonomous and professional discipline of general linguistics. As Schrijnen concluded in his closing speech:

La linguistique était devenue depuis longtemps une science autonome, elle s’était créé des organes, des chaires d’université, des sociétés propres ; mais cette semaine-ci, pour la première fois, elle a, au grand jour et devant le forum du monde entier, plaidé ses propres causes, arrangé ses propres affaires, défendu ses propres intérêts, fait signe de sa vie, de son esprit, de sa mentalité propre. [14]

The organisers of the congress entertained their guests with a programme of festivities. This included a visit to Amsterdam, a tour through the tulip bulb fields by car, a reception with various ministers, a car trip to Rotterdam where they visited the harbour, and a banquet. Here we see the ‘informal’ part of the congress. As Rabault-Feuerhahn and Feuerhahn note, scholars at times benefit more from the informal meetings and discussions at congresses than the plenary or topical sessions. [15] These interactions are more difficult to trace than the formal meetings of which we have notes and reports. Even though it would be great to know exactly who sat next to whom during the banquets or who shared a car with whom, we might be able to find only traces of such interactions through personal correspondences.

Subsequent Congresses

The first international congress of linguists was the start of a series of international congresses of linguists, of which the twentieth meeting will be held in Cape Town in July 2018. The second congress was organised in Geneva by the famous Saussurian scholars Bally and Sechehaye in 1931. The main points of the congress were on the one hand of a methodological nature again, namely to discuss the improvement of technical aids to research and publications, such as an agreed terminology, bibliographies, and the classification of material, and the advisability and practicability of an auxiliary international language. The other half of the topics were more on linguistic content, on the new theories in phonetics and phonology and the relations of the Indo-European family of languages with other families of speech. At the second international congress of linguists, the members of the Prague School were the important speakers. While these scholars had tentatively presented themselves as a group at the first congress in The Hague, now the Prague School confidently took the stage with their programme of structuralism.

We see the same phenomenon at the third international congress, in Rome in 1933. Now the main questions are almost only about linguistic content, a lot more than in the previous two congresses, where central attention was on methodological questions. A large part of the congress was devoted to phonetic symbolism, a topic which the Prague School linguists predominantly focussed on. As for the fourth international congress, held in Copenhagen in 1936, the organisers decided to not send out practical problems anymore, but instead divided the submitted topics into categories for the congress itself. As a consequence, very few talks at the fourth congress were explicitly on methodological topics.

Lining up these congresses shows a development of the discipline of general linguistics through some of its crucial stages of international organisation. While at first the topics were mostly methodological, the balance shifted towards sharing the content of newest research projects. This shift can be explained within the context of a discipline which is becoming more professional and institutionalised on an international scale, going beyond large methodological issues and concentrating on content.

Conclusion

In this blog post, we have examined the event of the first international congress of linguists. As part of a wave of scientific congresses in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, the congress touches upon a number of themes which appeal to historians of knowledge. The scholarly ideal of internationalism is clearly present at the congress, since an explicit goal of the congress is to bring about international connections between linguists. The international connections go on to play a role in the organisation of the discipline, in the form of committees and international projects. The wish to preserve and map all of the world’s languages and dialects serves as an example of an international project, which unfortunately seems to have perished after the Second World War.

Apart from the internationalisation of the discipline, the discipline of linguistics also saw some content-related changes thanks to the methodological discussions at the congress. The assembly of scholars not only had an international background, but also came from different academic fields and subfields. This highlights the multidisciplinary foundation and the cross-disciplinary interactions which played an important role in the formation of the discipline of general linguistics. Developments in the discipline – both organisational and content-related – come to the fore through the historical study of the first international congresses.

How to cite this post

Mojet, Emma. 2018. Discussing Disciplinary Development: The role of the First International Congress of Linguists (1928) in the formation of the discipline of general linguistics. History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences.
https://hiphilangsci.net/2018/02/14/first-international-congress-of-linguists

Notes

[1] Fuchs, E. (2001) “The Politics of the Republic of Learning: International Scientific Congresses in Europe, the Pacific Rim, and Latin America” in: Across Cultural Borders: Historiography in Global Perspective. Edited by E. Fuchs & B. Stuchtey. Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 205-244, p. 2; and Feuerhahn, W. & Rabault-Feuerhahn, R. (2010) “Présentation: la science à l’échelle internationale” in : Revue germanique internationale, 12, pp. 5-15, p. 8.

[2] Feuerhahn & Rabault-Feuerhahn (2010), p. 11.

[3] Rabault-Feuerhahn, P. (2016) “Orientalistenkongresse. Mündliche Formen der philologischen Zusammerarbeit – Funktionen, Probleme und historische Entwicklung” in: Symphilogie. Formen der Kooperation in den Geesteswissenschaften. Edited by S. Stockhorst, M. Lepper & V. Hoppe, V&R unipress, pp. 101-121, p. 104.

[4] Crosland, M. (1969) “The Congress on Definitive Metric Standards, 1798-1799: The First International Scientific Conference?” in: Isis, 60(2), pp. 226-231. For mention of congresses in this context, see: Feuerhahn & Rabault-Feuerhahn (2010). On processes of discipline formation, see: Stichweh, R. (1992) “The Sociology of Scientific Disciplines: On the Genesis and Stability of the Disciplinary Structure of Modern Science.” In: Science in Context, 5, pp 3-15; and Cunningham, A. & Williams, P. (1993) “De-centring the ‘big picture’: The Origins of Modern Science and the modern origins of science” in: The British Journal for the History of Science, 26(04), pp 407-432.

[5] Feuerhahn & Rabault-Feuerhahn (2010), p 10-11.

[6] Feuerhahn & Rabault-Feuerhahn (2010), p 11. Own translation.

[7] Daalder, S. (2004) “Achter de schermen van een congress: Het eerste Internationale Linguïstencongres (Den Haag, 1928)” in: Voortgang, Jaargang 22, pp 315-321, p 318.

[8] Sommerfelt, A. (1966) “Antoine Meillet, the Scholar and the Man” in: Portrait of Linguists. A Biographical Source Book of the History of Western Linguistics, 1746-1963. Volume Two: From Eduard Sievers to Benjamin Lee Whorf. Edited by T. A. Sebeok, Indiana University Press, pp. 241-248, p. 247-8.

[9] The Netherlands also hosted the 9^th version of the modern Olympic Games in Amsterdam, which is indicative of the role the Netherlands fulfilled during these years on an international scale. This was already explicitly mentioned in the invitation letter for the Congress of Linguists. Actes du Premier Congrès de Linguistes. Tenu à la Haye du 10-15 Avril, 1928. Published by A.W. Sijthoff (1930), Leiden, p vi.

[10] “que les linguistes des différents pays se réunissent afin de discuter ensemble des intérêts de leur science et d’arriver, si possible, à un accord sur un certain nombre de questions pratiques.” Actes (1930) p v.

[11] Actes (1930), p vii.

[12] Actes (1930), p viii.

[13] 1) “Quelles doivent être les bases d’une notation phonétique ? a. Valeur de la phonétique expérimentale. b. Système de transcription et de signes phoniques.” 2) “Etablissement et délimitation des termes techniques. Quelle est la traduction exacte des termes techniques dans les différentes langues (français, anglais, allemand) ?” 3) “Quelles sont les meilleures méthodes de recherche en géographie linguistique ? a. Valeur des cartes, questionnaires, gramophones et des recherches sur place. b. L’aspect géographique de la lexicographie et de la stylistique.” 4) “Quelles sont les méthodes les mieux appropriées à un exposé complet et pratique de la grammaire d’une langue quelconque ?” 5) “Délimitations des domaines culturels du passé et du temps présent par rapport à des mots déterminés et à des particularités phonétiques, morphologiques et syntactiques. L’influence réciproque de ces domaines culturels.” 6) “Les méthodes de recherche pour les langues qui n’ont pas encore fait l’objet d’un travail philologique satisfaisant.” Actes (1930), own translations.

[14] Actes (1930), p 97.

[15] Feuerhahn & Rabault-Feuerhahn (2010), p 9.