Podcast episode 45: Beijia Chen on Neogrammarian networks

In this interview, we talk to Beijia Chen about the citation networks binding the Neogrammarians as a school.

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References for Episode 45

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Amsterdamska, Olga. 1987. Schools of thought: the development of linguistics from Bopp to Saussure. Dordrecht u.a.: Reidel.

Arens, Hans. 1969. Sprachwissenschaft: der Gang ihrer Entwicklung von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart. 2., durchges. und stark erw. Auflage. Freiburg & München: Alber.

Bartschat, Brigitte. 1996. Methoden der Sprachwissenschaft: von Hermann Paul bis Noam Chomsky. Berlin: Schmidt.

Beveridge, Andrew & Jie Shan. 2015. “Network of Thrones.” Math Horizons 23 (4): 18–22.

Chen, Beijia. 2020. “Der Einfluss der akademischen Interaktionen auf die Auflagen- und Wirkungsgeschichte von Hermann Pauls Prinzipien.” Historiographia LInguistica 47 (2–3): 188–230.

Crane, Diana. 1972. Invisible Colleges: Diffusion of Knowledge in Scientific Communities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Einhauser, Eveline. 1989. Die Junggrammatiker: ein Problem für die Sprachwissenschaftsgeschichtsschreibung. Trier: WVT Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier.

Fangerau, Heiner. 2009. “Der Austausch von Wissen und die rekonstruktive Visualisierung formeller und informeller Denkkollektive.” In Netzwerke: Allgemeine Theorie oder Universalmetapher in den Wissenschaften? Ein transdisziplinärer Überblick, edited by Heiner Fangerau & Thorsten Halling, 215–246. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

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Goldsmith, John A. & Bernard Laks. 2019. Battle in the Mind Fields. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press.

Haas, Stefan. 2014. “Begrenzte Halbwertzeiten.” Indes 3 (3): 36–43.

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Henne, Helmut. 1995. “Germanische und deutsche Philologie im Zeichen der Junggrammatiker.” In Beiträge zur Methodengeschichte der neueren Philologien: zum 125jährigen Bestehen des Max-Niemeyer-Verlags, edited by Robert Harsch-Niemeyer, 1–30. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag.

Hurch, Bernhard. 2009. “Von der Peripherie ins Zentrum: Hugo Schuchardt und die Neuerungen der Sprachwissenschaft.” In Kunst und Wissenschaft aus Graz. Bd. 2. 1. Kunst und Geisteswissenschaft aus Graz, edited by Karl Acham, 493–510. Wien: Böhlau.

Jankowsky, Kurt R. 1972. The Neogrammarians: a re-evaluation of their place in the development of linguistic science. The Hague & Paris: Mouton.

Klausnitzer, Ralf. 2005. “Wissenschaftliche Schule.” In Stil, Schule, Disziplin, edited by Lutz Danneberg, Wolfgang Höppner & Ralf Klausnitzer, 31–64. Frankfurt am Main u. a.: Perter Lang.

Knobloch, Clemens. 2019. “Ludwik Fleck und die deutsche Sprachwissenschaft.” Zeitschrift für germanistische Linguistik 47 (3): 569–596.

Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1976a. “Towards a Historiography of Linguistics. 19^th and 20^th Century Paradigms.” In History of linguistic thought and contemporary linguistics, edited by Herman Parret, 685–718. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter.

Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1981. “The Neogrammarian Doctrine: Breakthrough or Extension of the Schleicherian Paradigm. A Problem in Linguistic Historiography.” Folia Linguistica Historica II (2): 157–178.

Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.

Lakatos, Imre. 1978. The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers, edited by John Worrall & Gregory Currie. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Leroux, Jean. 2007. “An epistemological assessment of the neogrammarian movement.” In History of Linguistics 2005, edited by Douglas A. Kibbee, 262–273. (Studies in the History of the Language Sciences). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Morpurgo Davies, Anna. 1978. “Analogy, segmentation and the early Neogrammarians.” Transactions of the Philological Society 76 (1): 36–60.

Morpurgo Davies, Anna. 1986. “Karl Brugmann and late nineteenth-century linguistics.” In Studies in history of Western linguistics, edited by Theodora Bynon & Frank Robert Palmer, 150–171. Cambridge et.al.: Cambridge University Press.

Morpurgo Davies, Anna & Giulio Lepschy. 2014 [1998]. History of Linguistics. Volume IV: Nineteenth-Century Linguistics. London & New York: Routledge.

Oesterreicher, Wulf. 1977. “Paradigma und Paradigmenwechsel – Thomas S. Kuhn und die Linguistik.” Osnabrücker Beiträge zur Sprachtheorie 3: 241–284.

Pearson, Bruce L. 1977. “Paradigms and revolutions in linguistics.” Lacus Forum IV: 384–390.

Percival, W. Keith. 1976. “The Applicability of Kuhn’s Paradigms to the History of Linguistics.” Language 52: 285–294.

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Putschke, Wolfgang. 1969. “Zur forschungsgeschichtlichen Stellung der junggrammatischen Schule.” Zeitschrift für Dialektologie und Linguistik 36: 19–48.

Robins, Robert H. 1978. “The neogrammarians and their nineteenth-century predecessors.” In Commemorative Volume: The Neogrammarians 1978, edited by Transactions of the Philological Society, 1–16. Oxford: Basil Blackwell for the Society.

Schippan, Thea. 1978. “Theoretische und methodische Positionen von Darstellungen zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft.” Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 31: 476–481.

Storost, Jürgen. 1990. “Sechs maßgebende linguistische Fachzeitschriften in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 11 (3): 303–318.

Weingart, Peter. 2003. Wissenschaftssoziologie. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag.

Zawrel, Sandra. 2015. Funktion und Organisation germanistischer Fachzeitschriften in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Eine Analyse am Beispiel der Germania. Vierteiljahrsschrift für deutsche Altertumskunde (1856-1868) und der Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprache und Literatur (1874-1891). (Alles Buch. Studien der Erlanger Buchwissenschaft LV.) Buchwissenschaft / Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg. ISBN 978-3-940338-39-6.

Transcript by Luca Dinu

JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:16] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:20]

Today we’re talking to Beijia Chen, who’s a historian of linguistics at the Free University of Berlin. [00:28] Beijia has just completed a major project on the Neogrammarians, one of the chief schools of modern linguistics, [00:35] which we’ve heard a bit about already in previous episodes of the podcast. [00:39] Beijia is going to tell us all about her research today. [00:42] So, Beijia, tell us, who were the Neogrammarians, [00:47] and how do they fit into the history of linguistics? [00:51]

BC: Hi James, thank you for having me here. [00:54] Actually, for the question “Who were the Neogrammarians?” there is no simple answer to that, [01:01] and that was exactly one key finding in my dissertation, because they just formed a highly dynamic and open network. [01:11] Well, usually the Neogrammarians are understood as a group of peer linguists who initially emerged at the University of Leipzig during the last decades of the 19th century, [01:23] and they were known for their systematic approach to sound changes, [01:28] emphasizing ideas like the regularity of sound laws without exceptions, [01:34] the neutralized role of analogy, [01:36] and the importance of spoken language and uniformitarianism in language development. [01:41]

However, the question who belonged to this group remains controversial. [01:47] Actually, my research reveals that the only consistently or universally recognized core figures were Karl Brugmann and Hermann Osthoff, [01:59] both Indo-Europeanists, originally from Leipzig University, [02:05] and editors of the periodical Morphologische Untersuchungen, [02:09] where the so-called Neogrammarian Manifesto was published. [02:14] And beyond these two scholars, [02:18] the Neogrammarians formed a highly dynamic network, [02:23] making exact categorization or labeling difficult and maybe not that meaningful. [02:30] Many linguists of that time cannot clearly or wholly be classified as either Neogrammarians or their opponents, [02:39] as their relationships were much complex and fluid. [02:43] Ultimately, my doctoral thesis doesn’t aim to provide a definite answer to the question “Who exactly were the Neogrammarians?”, [02:51] although it was the initial question that guided me during my research. [02:56] Instead, the thesis argues that labelling the members of this group can be misleading due to their dynamic relationships and shifting identities. [03:08] However, this does not imply that we should avoid saying who the Neogrammarians were — [03:15] then we could not start our research at all. [03:18] Rather, my point is that their identities should be understood dynamically, [03:24] and despite these dynamics, [03:27] the Neogrammarians still exhibited a recognizable structure as a scientific school, [03:33] with weak organizational and institutional ties, though, [03:37] but a common interest and relative greater homogeneity in sound laws without exceptions and other related theories, [03:47] and this can be observed in an analysis of the sentiment and the content of their citations in journal articles. [03:57]

How do the Neogrammarians fit into the history of linguistics? [04:01] Well, they have received much attention in the historiography of linguistics due to their long-lasting theoretical influence. [04:11] By making a critical turning point, [04:14] they helped transform linguistics from its historical-comparative roots [04:20] into a modern and empirically grounded scientific discipline, [04:25] and they directly inspired Ferdinand de Saussure as well as later developments in linguistics, [04:32] and they also made scientific contributions to the scientific organization in the linguistic field, [04:38] including the publication of journals and handbooks, [04:44] which began and flourished during the time of the Neogrammarians. [04:49]

I would say the Neogrammarians are also interesting on the meta-level of the historiographical studies. [04:56] They have been frequently analyzed using Thomas Kuhn’s model of scientific revolution because of the revolutionary characters. [05:06] Scholars have debated extensively whether their work represented a paradigm shift in linguistics. [05:15] However, there remains considerable skepticism about applying Kuhn’s paradigm concept to linguistics or other disciplines in humanities, [05:27] and various attempts have been made to adapt Kuhn’s model, for example, [05:32] by introducing concepts like Zeitgeist proposed by Konrad Koerner, [05:37] or transitional phases, Übergangsphase, proposed by Eveline Einhauser. [05:45] Other historians have tried different frameworks, such as Imre Lakatos’ research program, [05:54] but these alternatives still haven’t overcome the limitations of paradigm-based approach. [06:01] So there is a dilemma, lack of a suitable alternative to Kuhn’s paradigm model. [06:08] In this context, the Neogrammarians become particularly relevant [06:14] because they promote historians to rethink how we view scientific development in linguistics, [06:22] motivating a more dynamic and flexible historiographical approach. [06:29]

JMc: What was new about the work of the Neogrammarians [06:32] that could be considered to have brought about a paradigm shift in linguistics? [06:37]

BC: The revolutionary part maybe could be seen in two aspects. [06:45] The first one is, the Neogrammarians distinguished themselves from earlier linguists [06:51] mainly through their systematic and scientific approach to language change, [06:56] and especially in terms of sound laws, [06:59] and unlike their predecessors, they insisted that sound changes were regular and exceptionless, [07:06] emphasizing empirical evidence and rigorous methods, [07:11] and they also gave greater importance to spoken language analogy as explanations for language changes, [07:19] and marking a clear shift from earlier scholars. [07:24]

In my research, there is a part on their contribution in an institutional aspect, [07:34] and like the… they also made significant contributions in regards to publication of journals and handbooks. [07:43] I conducted analysis of cited literature, [07:47] selecting works that explicitly identified themselves as handbooks in their titles, [07:54] and then I performed a quantitative analysis of their works and their authors. [07:59] For example, in 1878, the most frequently cited authoritative works [08:04] were mainly written by Schleicher and Curtius, who represented the older generation of scholars. [08:12] However, we can observe a turning point when the Neogrammarians began to take over the authority positions. [08:20] Interestingly, during this period, book series also emerged, [08:25] most of them structured within a framework of a handbook, [08:30] and the Neogrammarians had played a significant role in this development. [08:36]

And also, academic journals emerged prominently in the 19th century [08:42] and served as crucial media for scholarly exchange, [08:46] yet they really have been studied systematically, [08:49] and their formation, such as why they were founded, [08:55] what types of articles they published, and citation practice, [09:00] and the roles of editors and even publishers, has remained understudied. [09:06] Academic journals actually at that time provided an essential platform for scholarly exchange, [09:14] like something between informal blogs and formal publications nowadays, [09:20] and scholars interacted sometimes immediately with one another within one journal volume, [09:26] and editors played also a crucial role in facilitating these discussions [09:32] and sometimes participated actively themselves. [09:35] For example, Graziadio Ascoli inserted once a footnote commentary that went over four pages, [09:43] and those footnotes were also sometimes cited by the other scholars. [09:50]

The second difference in my study is adapting the network perspective, [09:55] and this approach resolves the traditional dichotomy between individuals and social structures [10:03] by emphasizing the connections between individual scholars. [10:07] My network-based approach contributes to historiographic research mainly in three ways. [10:13] Firstly, it allows an exploratory data-driven analysis without first defining who exactly belonged to this group. [10:25] Instead of first deciding who the Neogrammarians were, as previous research usually did, [10:33] I took a middle way between the data-driven and data-based. [10:38] I compiled a broad list of scholars typically identified as Neogrammarians [10:44] and examined their citation relationships with each other and with other scholars. [10:50] I did find some facts that differ from the list that I compiled at first, [10:59] like Heinrich Hübschmann, often labeled as a Neogrammarian, [11:05] was actually only loosely connected to the core figures, [11:09] and moreover his letter to Georg Curtius reveals a rather distant attitude toward the Neogrammarians. [11:16] Conversely, Alexander Brückner, rarely discussed in the context of the Neogrammarians, [11:22] actively cited the core figures and explicitly praised their methods, [11:28] demonstrating a much stronger connection. [11:32] Secondly, the network perspective allows a scalable reading of the data. [11:37] It allows distant reading, meaning analyzing the general structure of scholarly interactions, [11:45] as well as close reading, meaning exploring the citation context and other related text materials, [11:52] and this approach enabled me to combine a quantitative digital analysis, [11:58] such as measuring network density or average path length of the network, [12:05] to get an overview or some structural information of the research community, [12:11] and together with traditional qualitative analysis of text and archival manuscripts, [12:19] helping me to interpret the statistic results in a meaningful way. [12:25] Thirdly, by adopting the network approach, [12:30] I attempt to move beyond the limitations of Kuhn’s paradigm framework. [12:36] Emphasizing revolutionary shifts and unified scholarly groups [12:41] does not adequately fit the history of linguistics or other disciplines in humanities. [12:49]

JMc: How did you arrive at this approach of applying digital humanities methods [12:54] to construct a network of citations showing how the Neogrammarians hung together as a school? [13:00]

BC: I first came across the network perspective during a course on historical network analysis, [13:07] which I took while attending some general history classes at the beginning of my doctoral studies. [13:14] A particular study that made a strong impression on me [13:17] was a network analysis of characters in a series, Game of Thrones, [13:24] done by Beveridge and Shan in 2016, [13:28] and the study built a network based on character co-occurrence [13:33] and identified the whole structure of the network and the various central roles of its characters. [13:40] What initially impressed me most was the visualization. [13:45] I’m quite a visual person and interested in the interpersonal connections, [13:51] and seeing the relationships between the individuals laid out clearly was fascinating. [13:58] Of course, I quickly learned that visualization, while attractive, should be used carefully. [14:05]

JMc: OK.

BC: Yeah. [14:06] A good visualization needs to provide real insights into the data and not just look appealing. [14:12]

JMc: Why is that? [laughs] [14:15]

BC: Because sometimes we’re just fascinated with visualizations, [14:21] but sometimes actually we don’t really need visualization to get to the point that we want to make. [14:28]

JMc: Yeah, OK.

BC: Then it’s just a waste of time and… [14:33]

JMc: But beauty is truth, and truth beauty, right? [14:35]

BC: [laughs] Yeah.

JMc: Yeah. OK. [14:38]

BC: And the second important thing I learned from that work is [14:43] that a network analysis offers multiple ways to measure someone’s importance, [14:49] not just by counting the number of connections they have. [14:53] For example, betweenness centrality identifies those who bridge different clusters of scholars in a network. [15:01] Like the person with the highest betweenness centrality was Jon Snow in the study I mentioned, [15:09] and he also turned out to be important at the end. [15:12] And for my research, Hermann Paul serves as a good example. [15:18] Although he didn’t receive as many citations as Karl Brugmann, [15:22] they were not at the same level in the time of the Neogrammarians, [15:28] but Paul had a high betwenness centrality because of his interest in general linguistics, [15:36] and he connected scholars from different philological disciplines, [15:43] and Paul also turned out to be more and more important till today. [15:46] And this network perspective clearly shows the importance of such figures, [15:51] highlighting the roles that traditional citation counts alone might overlook. [15:57]

JMc: If Hermann Paul and Karl Brugmann weren’t in the same league in terms of their number of citations, [16:04] what was the difference between them, and did you do sort of statistical tests to demonstrate that the difference was statistically significant? [16:12]

BC: Yeah, I did some quantitative analysis, but I can’t really recall the exact numbers, [16:18] but Karl Brugmann was the absolute central authoritative [figure], [16:25] especially at the end of the Neogrammarians, [16:28] we just see one big node in the middle of the whole network, [16:34] and all other Neogrammarians, I would say they somehow lose their importance. [16:40] At the beginning, there was a cluster with relatively bigger nodes in the middle, [16:47] and at last, there was just Karl Brugmann. [16:51] And I would say maybe it is also influenced by this institutionalization. [16:57] I think I read this in Ludwik Fleck’s book, [17:01] the more the discipline is developed, there will be more homogeneity, [17:08] like now we have the absolute central figure of Karl Brugmann. [17:14] If Brugmann had like 50 citations from a year, [17:18] Hermann Paul would just have like 10 or less, [17:22] but you could see that Hermann Paul just had various connections with different clusters, [17:29] and because I also identified the clusters with different colours, [17:33] the node of Hermann Paul is just connected with lines with different colours, [17:38] so it’s quite visual of the different ways they took. [17:42] Brugmann also did quite a lot of organizational work, [17:46] like publishing handbooks and so on, [17:49] while Paul exerted his influence in a different way, [17:53] not in an organizational way, but maybe in a way that how he formed, [18:02] developed his theories in general linguistics. [18:05]

JMc: So was Brugmann being mainly cited by other linguists, [18:09] and Paul by people outside linguistics, or… [18:13]

BC: I didn’t mention that because all the journal citations I analysed were in the context of linguistics. [18:23]

JMc: OK, they’re all linguists. [18:25]

BC: Yes, all linguistics. [18:26]

JMc: OK. Yeah. Okay. Do you think there’s something perverse about applying this obsession with citations that we live under now as scientists in the 21st century to our forebears in the 19th and early 20th centuries? [18:43] Like do you think that making them live up to our expectations about an h-index is somehow sick? [laughter] [18:53]

BC: Well, it’s interesting for me. [laughs] [18:56]

JMc: Yeah, no, it’s interesting, definitely. [18:58]

BC: It’s interesting for me because I think we’ve already known a lot about the individual scholars, [19:05] and so I’m interested in some structural information, [19:09] and so I applied this citation analysis. [19:12] I think it’s quite interesting to see, actually, because as I mentioned, [19:19] there are different measurements of centralities in the network analysis, [19:26] not just degree centrality, how many citations you receive, [19:30] but also there are some other ways to measure the centralities, [19:35] so I can observe the dynamics through this citation practice, [19:41] like Brugmann and Hermann Paul, those Neogrammarians. [19:46] I’ve observed the period, like from 1878 to 1916 and 1917, [19:54] and at the beginning, the Neogrammarians were… They were also in the middle of the network, [20:01] but they were not cited by their monographs. [20:04] They were, like in the year of 1878, [20:09] they were mainly or almost only cited by their journal publications. [20:14]

JMc: OK. [20:15]

BC: So somehow it implies their role as young scholars, [20:23] while Schleicher and Curtius were cited by their authoritative works. [20:28]

JMc: Yeah. OK. That’s a very interesting thing, yeah. [20:31]

BC: And as time went, we see that Brugmann began to publish authoritative works, [20:39] and he was also cited by those works, [20:42] and sometime after that, he became the new authority. [20:46] Another thing I find quite interesting, [20:48] the different relationship between teacher and student. [20:53] At the beginning, I would say the elder generation didn’t actually facilitate [20:58] the younger generation, the Neogrammarians, not that much, because we didn’t quite see a lot of citations from the elder generation to the Neogrammarians, [21:09] but after the Neogrammarians became the authority, like Brugmann, [21:13] we see that… I don’t know whether he consciously did that or not, [21:20] but he cited the younger generation, like Eduard Hermann, [21:27] and Holger Pedersen, and Meillet, [21:31] and he consciously cited those younger scholars. [21:34]

JMc: OK, that’s fascinating. [21:36]

BC: So these younger scholars would also have a higher eigenvector centrality that implies a tight connection, a close connection of the nodes with great influence in a network. [21:52] And so somehow Brugmann has guided the development of linguistics by supporting the younger generations. [22:03]

JMc: Yeah, OK, and that’s actually really fascinating. [22:06] So were the younger generation doing the same thing that the elder generation were doing? [22:13] So when Brugmann was supporting Meillet, for example, Meillet was just continuing in the same line, [22:18] because, I mean, as you mentioned at the beginning, there was all of this talk with the Neogrammarians that they were bringing about a revolution in linguistics, [22:25] so there was a conscious break between the Neogrammarians and the generation before them, [22:31] so maybe the older generation was reacting against the Neogrammarians because the Neogrammarians were acting like these young punks, [22:39] but maybe the next generation was being very, what’s the word, [22:46] like behaving themselves and being very obedient. [22:49]

BC: That’s a really good question, because I find it was, for me, [22:54] it’s fascinating to see, like in the year of 1907, [23:02] where the Neogrammarians already took over the authoritative positions. [23:08] And in my network, I analysed all the mutual citations, [23:13] because I took mutual citations as kind of special connections between scholars. [23:20] There was a figure that is Karl Brugmann in the middle, [23:25] and around Brugmann there were other scholars, [23:29] and some of them were the younger scholars that we just mentioned. [23:37]

JMc: Yeah. [23:38]

BC: And surprisingly, I also did sentiment analysis of those mutual citations, [23:45] and surprisingly, most… the majority of the negative citations came from the student to Brugmann, [23:54] while Brugmann had made more positive citations to their students. [24:03] I also did some qualitative analysis on the citation, [24:07] and there is an example that impressed me a lot, [24:11] that the student Eduard Hermann had made some suggestions on the theory of Brugmann, [24:19] and Brugmann had, within one journal volume, reacted to his suggestions, [24:26] and just welcomed it and had accepted it in a positive way. [24:33]

JMc: Yeah. OK, wow. [24:35] And so was the sentiment analysis that you did manual? [24:40] Like did you look at all of the passages yourself and decide, “This has a good sentiment or a bad sentiment,” [24:47] or did you have some sort of automatic way of doing it? [24:49]

BC: I did the sentiment analysis manually, but not on all of the citations. [24:56] I just did them when I think… I just did them for some micro-studies, [25:04] like on the mutual citations, and also on the citation relations between the Neogrammarians and their opponents. [25:14]

JMc: So let’s come to the last question, which is, what is the point of studying the Neogrammarians in such detail? [25:20] So, I mean, the school receded from the forefront of linguistics more than 100 years ago. [25:26] How can anything they did be relevant today? [25:29] And I guess, lying behind this question, is a more general query about: what is the point of the history of linguistics? [25:36] You know, why should we do history of linguistics? [25:39]

BC: Actually, I became interested in the Neogrammarians partly out of curiosity and partly by coincidence. [25:48] My first encounter was with Hermann Paul’s work, [25:53] especially due to a project involving translating Paul’s Prinzipien into Chinese, and that was a coincidence. [26:02] But this also addresses your question, why do we still read like the Prinzipien, written over a century ago? [26:11] Aside from the points that we’ve discussed, [26:15] that the Neogrammarians held significant importance for both the history of ideas and institutional development of linguistics, [26:24] and that understanding their contributions and experience [26:28] can offer valuable insights for us today [26:31] due to the continuity in the development of linguistics, [26:35] I think behind this lies a broader question about different ways to see history. [26:42]

One relevant viewpoint is uniformitarianism, the idea that historical processes reoccur in cycles. [26:50] As a famous quote goes, history does not repeat itself, but it rhymes. [26:56] Personally, I believe basic principles in human history remain essentially similar over time, [27:04] which makes historical reflection meaningful, [27:09] yet our context and societies and behaviors are constantly changing and creating new interactions and outcomes, [27:18] and these changes also make historical reflection valuable, [27:22] and as human beings are gifted with the ability to forget, [27:27] it is the task of the historians to bring faded and obscure elements of history back into the light, [27:37] and rediscovering diverse ideas from past periods of our discipline also reminds us to stay open-minded and tolerant [27:47] and see things in a dynamic way, which is quite important for healthy scientific development. [27:55]

And I would like to highlight the network perspective of my research in relation to this question. [28:02] You mentioned that the Neogrammarians lived more than a century ago, which indeed seems distant. [28:09] However, from a network perspective, they are not actually so far away. [28:14] Networks can connect ideas and scholars across different times and places. [28:21] While traditional ways view history as a linear timeline with many steps separating the Neogrammarians from us, [28:31] a network enables direct connections between us and the Neogrammarians. [28:38] In other words, we can still engage directly with their ideas and discussions today. [28:44] It is precisely what makes the history of linguistics and perhaps other disciplines in humanities special. [28:53] Ideas from the past don’t entirely disappear or get replaced, as suggested in the model of paradigm shift. [29:01] They may lose prominence for a while, but they always have the potential, [29:06] and they will sometimes re-emerge and interact with contemporary thought in new ways. [29:14]

JMc: OK, great. That’s really inspiring, actually. [29:17] That’s really inspiring, so thank you very much for answering those questions. [29:21]

BC: And thank you for your questions. [29:23]