Podcast episode 48: A History of Modern Linguistics

In this interview, Randy Harris interviews James McElvenny about his recent book A History of Modern Linguistics.

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References for Episode 48

McElvenny, James. 2024. A History of Modern Linguistics: From the beginnings to World War II. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

McElvenny, James. 2025. Entstehung und Entwicklung der modernen Linguistik: Von den Anfängen bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg. Berlin: De Gruyter.

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. [00:28] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:32] Today we’re going to try something new, and that is that I’m going to become the interviewee, [00:38] so our interviewer today is Randy Harris, and I’ll throw over to him right away, and he can take us from here. [00:45]

RH: Thanks, James. [00:46] Just to dispel the mystery for everybody as to why we’ve switched over, it’s because we’re going to get a chance to talk about your fairly recent book, A History of Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II, and I’m really pleased to have the opportunity. [00:59] It’s a great book. [01:00] It’d be a great textbook because it’s a smooth, efficient read but still quite detailed for students’ needs, but also just a really interesting read for linguists in general. [01:11] I learned a lot, and I’m sure everybody would. [01:15] I also wanted to mention, before we get started, another podcast that most listeners probably know about, Ingrid Piller’s Language on the Move. [01:23] The April 10th episode back in 2024 also was about your book, and I’d recommend people go listen to that. [01:29] There’ll be some overlap obviously, but lots of new stuff as well, so… [01:34] All right, let’s get started. [01:36] We’ll start with the most obvious question: What are the beginnings, and what is it that begins? [01:42] You start with William Jones’ 1786 lecture to the Asiatic Society of Calcutta, which is a familiar starting point for the history of modern linguistics, but then you set it aside fairly quickly, so why don’t you tell us what begins and when it begins? [02:00]

JMc: My book is really about the academic discipline of linguistics, and that starts when linguistics becomes institutionalized in universities. It becomes a subject with professors, students, textbooks, and so on. [02:14] This institutionalization happened in Germany in the early 19th century, when the first professorships for comparative grammar were created. [02:22] I believe Franz Bopp was the first to have this descriptor in his job title when he was called to the University of Berlin in 1821, [02:31] but as your question implies, historical-comparative linguistics has generally, in the received historiography, been cast as the first scientific linguistics. [02:43] This is a narrative you can hear even from the mid-19th century, when comparative linguistics was a young field, but it can be doubted whether comparative linguistics was really something revolutionary that swept away everything that came before. [02:58] Comparative linguistics didn’t come out of nowhere. [03:01] It had predecessors, and the approaches that came before it had their own scholarly and scientific validity. [03:09] My scepticism about the received narrative is not new, I should say. [03:13] Anna Morpurgo Davies, in her history of linguistics in the 19th century, also highlights it. And Anna Morpurgo Davies’ work was a major source for me in writing that book, and an inspiration for me in how to approach the topic. [03:29]

RH: Let’s go to the other end, then — not the end of linguistics, obviously, but the end of the book. [03:34] Why World War II? [03:37]

JMc: Yeah, so the book ends with World War II. [03:39] The reason for that is that, with World War II, the centre of gravity of linguistics, and of the whole scientific world, shifts from Europe to America. [03:48] There’s definitely continuity between pre- and post-World War II scholarship, but I think that the shift is significant enough to mark an end point. [03:58] So that’s the end of the book, but if I have the opportunity, I will continue the narrative. [04:02] My publisher does actually want a sequel, which I guess would go from World War II to the present, although I’m a bit dubious about committing to that project just yet. [04:12] There are two major problems, I think, with writing the history since World War II. [04:17] One is that there was a massive expansion in academia after World War II, even greater than the expansion that happened in the 19th century, [04:26] and as such, there’s just so many different schools and approaches in linguistics and related disciplines that would have to be dealt with in any history from this period after World War II, and it would be very difficult to decide what to include. [04:41] The problem of what to include was already one that I had in the book that I’ve just written, where I had to be very, very selective about whose work I decided to talk about. [04:53] What I wanted to do in writing the book was to provide a coherent narrative, so I tried to confine myself to the most influential figures and their ideas, [05:03] so these would be the scholars who set the tone for the field, the ones everyone talked about, whether that was to cite them favourably or to attack them. [05:13] And then the second problem with treating the history of linguistics after World War II is that it becomes contemporary history, and this is history that is still very much alive. [05:24] I mean, some of the historical figures that you’d be writing about are still alive, and many people are still actively invested in their ideas and in pursuing the research programs that they set up, so there’s no historical distance to the things that have happened since World War II, or not in the same way that there is with things before World War II. [05:46] So, for example, we can look back at things like behaviourism and early 20th-century programs of rational, social, and psychological reform, maybe even with a little condescension, and we can consider them with detachment, but things like the cognitive revolution and generative grammar are active research programs that people are working in right now. [06:10] The context of Cold War science that these programs emerged in may not exist as such right now as it did a few decades ago, but the infrastructure of research and scientific funding that we inhabit at our present moment is a direct descendant of these Cold War structures, even if it’s an increasingly starved and emaciated descendant, [06:34] so any commentary on these topics is inevitably an intervention into present-day active research, [06:42] so any narrative you construct would have a very different character to one about the history of linguistics up to World War II. [06:51]

RH: Of course. [06:52] You’d have to have some kind of stopping point. [06:54] You can’t take it right up to the current moment, to 2025, if things are changing so dynamically, with these pre-trained language models taking over the landscape and so forth. [07:06] You’d have to find some sort of pinch point to end it, and it’d just be almost arbitrary as where you’d stop it. [07:13]

JMc: Yeah, I guess so. Although, having said that, if you think about the sort of… the golden age of modern linguistic historiography [07:22] — so the sort of, the new dawn of the history of linguistics, which was probably in the 1970s, you know, with people like Konrad Koerner and Anna Morpurgo Davies and, you know, that whole gang… [07:35]

RH: Yeah. [07:35]

JMC: When they wrote their histories of linguistics, they often ended with Chomsky and the generative program, which was new. [07:43] You know, that was contemporary at the time. [07:46] So, the previous generation, or the generation of my grandparents perhaps you could call them, they weren’t afraid to write contemporary history. [07:55]

RH: True enough, and for me, as you know, The Linguistics Wars, all the folks were still alive, many of them are still alive, that I was chronicling, and I found that really exhilarating to be able to talk to them. [08:08] It is a bit more problematic to get some distance from people that you’re talking to on a regular basis, but if you talk to enough of them, you can kind of abstract the overall picture from all the individual perspectives. [08:22]

JMc: Yeah, that’s true. [08:24]

RH: So, ending with World War II is significant, not just for the implications it has for linguistics directly as a kind of stopping point you chose, [08:35] but also it’s representative of the way that you deal with the history overall in the sense that you incorporate a lot of major geopolitical events, the revolutions of 1848, the Napoleonic Wars, World War I, and so forth, [08:50] so maybe you can talk a little bit, please, about what those geopolitical events were and what their impacts were on linguistics. [08:57]

JMc: Yeah, sure. In writing this book, I set out to write a social and intellectual history of linguistics, so there’s already plenty of literature tracing the minutiae of the technical developments in different sub-areas of linguistics [09:11] — and don’t get me wrong, that’s a noble pursuit — but I wanted to try to contribute something a little bit new to the field of linguistic historiography by putting it all in context. [09:21] So I make an effort in the book to signpost the main technical developments in linguistics, so things like the comparative method, sound laws, phoneme theory, and as we get closer to the present, many fundamental concepts that continue to have currency, like all the terminology and distinctions introduced by Saussure, and so on, [09:41] but my book is not intended to be an introductory textbook to linguistics, but to show how these basic ideas in the field and these basic methods emerged in their specific intellectual environment. [09:56] So among the political developments that I talk about, I highlight how the Napoleonic Wars spurred on German nationalism, which was a major motivating factor for the Grimm brothers, for example, [10:08] and around 1848, I mentioned how Schleicher’s materialism, his realism in reconstructing historical forms, and his treatment of languages as literal biological organisms, was connected to his liberal democratic politics, [10:24] so this scientistic mindset was coded in that particular social environment as pro-democracy and directed against the traditional aristocratic order, [10:37] and more recently, I look at things like behaviourism in America, which was Bloomfield’s preferred psychology, and which marketed itself as a way of improving the individual in the Progressive Era in America. [10:52]

RH: Thanks, James. You touched on this obviously just a moment ago, but let’s focus a little bit more closely on the intellectual developments rather than the geopolitical ones, [11:03] so biology, philosophy, the relationship of language to the mind, the body, society, you touch upon all of those as well in the book. [11:12] Can you elaborate now on those connections? [11:14]

JMc: Sure, so, you know, biology was, of course, a constant companion of linguistics throughout the 19th century. [11:21] As I mentioned in the book, Friedrich Schlegel coined the term “comparative grammar” on a direct analogy with comparative anatomy, [11:29] and Schleicher’s metaphysics was centred around a literal biological interpretation of the metaphor of languages as organisms, [11:37] and this inspired him to talk about the morphology of languages, a term that still has currency in linguistics today in more or less the same sense, even if the biological link is broken or at least not as apparent to us now. [11:52] Neo-Kantianism is also very important as part of the background to structuralism, [11:57] so the idea that structure imposed on substance is the key to language, human psychology, epistemology, and so on, is one that has very deep neo-Kantian roots. [12:09] And, of course, my treatment of these topics is not exhaustive, neither in terms of covering the full breadth of intellectual currents that interacted with the study of language, nor in terms of going into the full depth of each topic. [12:23] I’ve aimed to provide a concise introduction and to offer directions to the reader into the labyrinth of literature surrounding these topics. [12:32]

RH: Maybe that’s an opportunity to plug another book of yours, the one you edited, Form and Formalism in Linguistics, since that overlaps a fair amount with what you’re just talking about now. [12:42]

JMc: Yeah, yeah. People should definitely go out and read it, and that one is an open access book, so you can just download it completely legally from the publisher’s website, Language Science Press. [12:54]

RH: All right. Again, these themes are weaving in and out of your answers, but I wonder if you could just concentrate now on specific figures that contributed to the development of linguistics in this period. [13:05] Your account isn’t a great man account, but, of course, certain figures coalesce and channel intellectual developments and shape the field. [13:12] Who are the major players in this period? [13:15]

JMc: Yeah, well, as I mentioned a moment ago, I tried to focus on the big names, so the people who everyone talks about or was talking about at the time, and the figures that I picked are fairly standard, so there are names like Bopp, Jacob Grimm, Humboldt, Steinthal, Schleicher, William Dwight Whitney, the Neogrammarians as a group, Saussure, Jakobson, Bloomfield and Sapir. [13:38] But I’ve also discussed a few more peripheral figures if I thought they offered an interesting counterpoint to the mainstream discussion, so that would be people like Philipp Wegener, Michel Bréal, and people who weren’t really linguists at all, like Karl Bühler, Malinowski, and Boas. [13:56] There are, of course, any number of figures who are the favorites of some scholar today who they will have wished turned up in the book. [14:03] I mean, I even have my own pet 19th-century German linguist who does actually appear in the book, but at the periphery, and that’s Georg von der Gabelentz. [14:12] He was a specialist in Chinese and was a continuer of Humboldtian linguistics at the very end of the 19th century, at a time when it was no longer cool to be a Humboldtian, and hadn’t yet become cool again as it did in the 20th century. [14:28] And just on this notion of great man history, yeah, my thinking there is that there are figures who are undoubtedly important for the influence that they had on the field, whether that was because they were geniuses who single-handedly achieved major innovative insights, or whether it’s just because they happened to be in the right place at the right time. [14:52] But one problem with great man history is that it easily degenerates into hagiography, so everything that the great man said and wrote has to be a work of genius, so obvious inconsistencies and incoherence has to be explained away. [15:08] And when the great man said something that is not compatible with present-day values, we turn into contortionists to prove that that’s not what they really meant. [15:18] You can see this problem in the way that some people write about figures like Humboldt and Saussure, and I might just leave that there, [15:26] so on the level of casting aspersions about the hagiographic scholarship of some other historians without giving any specific examples or naming names. [15:36] So yeah, a history of the kleine Mann is perhaps a better way to do a narrative history with characters involved in events. [15:44] What was the life and work of this little figure on the periphery like, as they were buffeted by the cultural and intellectual currents of the time? [15:53] Or if they stepped out, why were they considered old-fashioned, outrageous, or a crackpot? [15:59] That is potentially a much more interesting approach, but yeah, as I said, what I did in the book myself was to follow a fairly standard roster of important figures, but as people who are representative of broader intellectual currents. [16:15]

RH: Why don’t you tell us a little bit about one of those peripheral characters then, Gabelentz, who you clearly have affection for? [16:23] What’s the basis of the affection, and what does he contribute? [16:27]

JMc: Well, I mean, affection, yeah, I wonder. [laughs] I wonder if it’s affection. [16:32] But I mean, so he’s a bit of a weirdo. [16:34] That’s something I like about him, because I think that’s something we’ve got in common, [16:37] so you know, as I said, he was a Humboldtian right at the end of the 19th century, when that was no longer cool. [16:43] He was completely out of date. In fact, one reviewer even said of him, after he died, that with Gabelentz dies a line of scholarship that goes back to Wilhelm von Humboldt, and that Gabelentz’s magnum opus, his book, Die Sprachwissenschaft, [17:00] that it seemed like a monument from a former time. [17:04] And I got interested in Gabelentz because his father, Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, was a gentleman scholar in the sort of early to mid-19th century, and collected a lot of grammars of “exotic,” in inverted commas, languages from around the world, [17:20] so of, you know, languages in the Americas, in the Pacific, in Australia, in East Asia, and so on. [17:27] And Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, the father, did typological work in his spare time along the Humboldtian model. [17:35] In particular… [17:36] So when I first came to Germany, I was in Leipzig, which was actually, back at the end of the 19th century, was the stronghold of the Neogrammarians, and the Gabelentz family comes from Altenburg, which is a little town just down the road from Leipzig. [17:52] It used to be the capital of an independent duchy, back in the period of Kleinstaaterei. [17:59] But Hans Conon von der Gabelentz, his day job was working in the government of the duchy, and he spent his spare time doing these linguistic studies. [18:08] Anyway, there were some Lutheran missionaries who were to be sent out to Australia, you know, which is where I’m from. [18:16] They were to be sent out to South Australia, and due to various political machinations going on in the Kingdom of Saxony and the various other states in Germany at that time, [18:27] they couldn’t get ordained in the Kingdom of Saxony where they had been studying, but they could get ordained in Altenburg, [18:35] and as part of the arrangement, Teichelmann and Schürmann sent back from their field site in South Australia various natural history specimens, so things like stuffed birds and other stuffed animals, [18:48] but they also wrote a grammar of the Kaurna language, which was spoken in the Adelaide Plains area, and various other South Australian languages, [18:57] which Hans Conon von der Gabelentz received very gladly and incorporated into his typological work in the mid-19th century. [19:06] Anyway, the son, Georg von der Gabelentz, who’s my pet 19th-century German, started out also with a legal career and a government career. [19:14] He was a government official in various parts of the German Empire, but then he transitioned into being a professor of Sinology, of Chinese, in Leipzig and then in Berlin, and also general linguistics, [19:28] and so he continued his father’s work, essentially, doing this Humboldtian-style general linguistics and typology right up to the end of the 19th century. [19:37] Yeah, so I like him because he’s an oddball and I have this sort of personal connection that we’ve both, you know, been connected to the same places, namely Australia and Leipzig. [laughs] [19:50]

RH: Thanks, that’s fascinating. [19:52] We all write for personal, social and intellectual reasons. [19:56] It was nice to get that insight into the book. [19:59] Well, one of the main occasions for this discussion is that your book is coming out in a German translation. [20:06] Is it out now or is it about to come out? [20:08]

JMc: Yeah, it came out in May.

RH: Oh, good, good. [20:11] So I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the decisions you had to make through the process, challenges you faced, that kind of thing. [20:19]

JMc: So there were actually a lot of things that were easier in the German edition. [20:23] So a lot of terminology, you know, so the book is very heavily focused on 19th-century German linguistics and philosophy, [20:33] so there’s a whole lot of terminology and also sort of cultural background knowledge, like what it is to be an ordinary professor as opposed to an extraordinary professor or even a Privatdozent and, you know, what a habilitation is and what a Gymnasium is and so on. [20:50] So there’s all that sort of background cultural knowledge that doesn’t need to be explained, because I’ve had to do that, or I felt the need to do that, in parentheses in a couple of places in the English version of the book, [21:01] and there’s also a lot of linguistic and philosophical terminology that can be just be used as is, and you hope that the German readership appreciates the sort of technical nature of the terms. [21:13] But one of the really interesting things, I think, about producing the German version was it gave me the opportunity to engage with the original English text again in detail, and that actually gave me quite a few shocks. [21:29] So I have to say that I completed the English version much faster than I was comfortable with, [21:35] and this represents an interesting aspect of how science is done in our own historical moment, namely the obscene precarity of scientific life. [21:45] We’re basically on the path to returning to the 19th-century conditions where higher education and research were the exclusive domain of well-to-do types or those who could secure aristocratic patronage. [22:00] So anyway, you know, I live, personally, I live the life of an eternal postdoc, and this is, you know, a tormenting cycle of career death and rebirth in which many are trapped today, [22:12] and my previous contract was coming to an end in 2023, [22:16] so I had to get that book finished before I was potentially ejected from science altogether, [22:23] all the while frantically preparing applications for my next job. [22:27] And as it turned out, I did actually get another position, the one that I’m in now, [22:32] but I have to add to that that this position also has an expiry date, [22:36] so that frantic period of writing applications is going to come up again soon. [22:41] But anyway, not to whine too much about the conditions under which that was produced, [22:48] but doing the German edition meant that I was able to reread the original English version of my book, which I finished off in some haste, [22:58] and I came across a few passages that I wasn’t entirely happy with. [23:03] I mean, this is inevitable in any book, and is a symptom of pathological perfectionism, but I do feel that if I’d been able to sit on the original manuscript a little bit longer, I could have improved it in a number of ways, [23:15] and I should emphasize that I think that pretty much all of the broader points I was making are valid, [23:20] but the details of how I described some things I now feel were not ideal, [23:25] and if there’s a future reprinting of the book, or a second edition later on, I’ll revise some passages a bit and adjust them. [23:34] So doing the German version of the book allowed me to go over the text again and really weed out those things, [23:42] and I guess it didn’t have to go via a German translation, [23:46] but doing it via German really helped to sharpen my focus, I think, on those things. [23:53] But actually, just one more thing I might say in defence of my earlier self, the one that hastily dashed off that English version of the book, [24:02] that it is intended to be a concise introductory history that aims to distil complex ideas and historical facts down into a few words for a breezy narrative that’s easy to read, and this is no mean feat, right? [24:18] So now having attempted to do this myself, I have much greater respect for successful popular science writers. [24:25]

RH: I sympathize entirely with you having to revisit something you’ve written and seeing all the flaws in it. [24:33] I did a second edition of Linguistics Wars, as you know, and I was just astonished by how naive and glib I was in the first edition and tried to repair that, [24:45] but now, of course, if I went back to the second edition, I’d probably be finding equal difficulties with it. [24:51] I also sympathize entirely with the precariousness of your position. [24:54] I’m fairly comfortable at the end of a career, and I came through the academic system when it was fairly generous and the funding was fairly abundant and so forth, [25:05] but I see lots of younger colleagues in all the disciplines in the same state that you’re talking about, [25:11] and not just in the professional realm, but purchasing a house and raising a family. [25:18] The difficulties are much greater now than they were for my generation. [25:24] Well, this is the last question. I think it was the last question that you asked me as well when I was on the other side of the mic, and that is, “Why should anyone read The Linguistics Wars?” you asked me. [25:38] What’s the point? Is it relevant at all for what current linguists are doing? [25:42] So why don’t you tell us what the point is of a history of modern linguistics from the beginnings to World War II? [25:48] Why should current linguists read it? What will they learn? What’s the point? [25:53]

JMc: Yeah, right. Well, I mean, I ask myself these questions every day, right? [25:59] But I think there is value in doing this sort of history, and my motivation in getting into the history of linguistics in the first place was that I think that there’s a great deal of value in relativizing our own positions, [26:16] so when we look back and see how strange everything was in the past, [26:22] we can realize how strange a lot of the things that we take for granted, like a lot of the ideas, like a lot of the fundamental concepts in our field or methods that we apply, how strange they might actually be. [26:36] But when we’re immersed in them, like when we’re doing linguistics now, the way that we’ve been taught, we might not necessarily think about the assumptions that our work is built on, [26:47] but when we look back, and we see that, like, for example, that the term “morphology” comes directly out of biology, and that the guy, Schleicher, who popularized it in the field of linguistics, was arguing with a straight face that languages are natural organisms, [27:06] we can begin to see maybe these things that we assume are just simple scientific facts have a story behind them, [27:13] and all sorts of cultural beliefs that may or may not be entirely valid or true, [27:20] or at the very least that are shaped by the broader cultural environment in which they’re embedded. [27:27] So I think it’s the great value in doing this sort of history [27:32] is that we can see how we got here and understand that the history is contingent in some ways, that when we go out there as linguists and do our linguistics, [27:45] we’re not necessarily dealing with the simple truth, but there’s layers of cultural assumptions and historical artefacts. [27:55]

RH: Thanks, you’ve summed it up beautifully. [27:58] That was the main experience I had with your book, enjoying, seeing the themes of familiarity, [28:07] but also the themes of quite alien sorts of intellectual currents. [28:14] Thanks very much for this opportunity, James. [28:17] I really enjoyed the chance to talk about your book and to learn more about your work. [28:22]

JMc: Yeah, well, thanks for interviewing me. [28:26] I mean, this is the first time that I’ve been interviewed on my own podcast. [28:30]