History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences

In this interview, Gerda Haßler discusses her career in Romanistik and the history of linguistics in the DDR and re-united Germany. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 50 Haßler, Gerda. 1984. Sprachtheorien der Aufklärung zur Rolle der Sprache imErkenntnisprozeß. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Haßler, Gerda. 1991. Der semantische Wertbegriff in Sprachtheorien vom 18. bis zum 20.Jahrhundert. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Haßler, Gerda. 2016. Temporalität, Aspektualität und Modalität in romanischen Sprachen.Berlin: De Gruyter. Haßler, Gerda, und Cordula Neis. 2009. Lexikon sprachtheoretischer Grundbegriffe des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. Berlin: De Gruyter. Transcript JMc: Hi, I’m James McElvenny and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. [00:21] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:25] Today we’re talking to Gerda Haßler about her life and career in Romanistik and the history of linguistics. [00:33] As with some of our previous interviews, we’ll do this one in German. [00:39] Ja, also ich begrüße jetzt Gerda Haßler. Willkommen im Podcast. [00:43] GH: Vielen Dank für die Einladung. [00:45] JMc: Ja. Also ich wollte dich fragen, wie bist du zur Romanistik und Linguistik gekommen und was waren die großen Etappen deiner Karriere? [00:55] GH: So richtig weiß ich das selber nicht, wie ich dazu gekommen bin. [01:00] Sprachen haben in meinem Leben schon immer eine große Rolle gespielt. [01:05] Ich habe auch die Dialekte in meiner Umgebung beobachtet. [01:10] In dem Ort, wo ich aufgewachsen bin, wurde ein sächsisch-thüringischer Mischdialekt gesprochen. [01:16] JMc: OK. Wo genau war das? [01:18] GH: In Fraureuth, das ist ein Dorf in der Nähe von Zwickau, also in Sachsen. [01:23] JMc: Ja. [01:24] GH: Und meine Großeltern haben Sudetendeutsch gesprochen, meine Eltern nur Hochdeutsch, mit mir, also mit den Großeltern nicht. [01:32] Und das habe ich beobachtet und das hat mich einfach interessiert. [01:35] Außerdem war das Tschechische immer im Hintergrund. [01:38] Und ich habe immer meinen Vater gebeten, mir Sätze in fremden Sprachen vorzusprechen. [01:46] Und ja, also das hat mich schon als Kind interessiert. [01:52] In der Schule hat mir der Fremdsprachenunterricht überhaupt nicht gefallen. [01:57] Aber ich konnte mich immer mit den Lehrern arrangieren und Französisch habe ich selbst gelernt, nicht in der Schule. [02:04] Ja, und ich wusste nicht so richtig, was ich studieren sollte. [02:10] Ich habe eigentlich am meisten Mathematik und Latein gemocht. [02:16] Das war aber überhaupt nicht kombinierbar zu DDR-Zeiten. [02:21] Und Lehrer wollte ich auch nicht werden, es war schwierig. [02:26] Dann wurden uns Studienführer gegeben, die die Studienmöglichkeiten in den einzelnen Universitäten zeigten. [02:36] Und in Halle stand da ein Fach Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft. [02:41] Das hat mich natürlich interessiert. [02:44] Ich habe da hingeschrieben und wurde auch gleich eingeladen zu einem Professor Ulrich Ricken. [02:51] Das wurde dann auch mein Doktorvater. [02:54] Ja, das Gespräch lief aber nicht so, wie ich mir es gedacht hatte. [02:59] Denn er sagte, diesen Studiengang Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft gibt es gar nicht mehr, weil der Professor, der ihn verantwortet hatte, also Karl Ammer, kurz vorher gestorben sei. [03:14] Ja, da wusste ich auch nicht richtig, was ich sagen sollte. [03:20] Er hat mir aber dann vorgeschlagen, mich für den Lehramtsstudiengang, [03:26] also Französisch und Russisch immatrikulieren zu lassen. [03:31] Da könnte ich auch Linguistik studieren und müsste nicht Lehrer werden. [03:35] Ich könnte dann schon Romanistik und Slavistik studieren, mit dem Schwerpunkt Linguistik. [03:44] Na ja, ich konnte nicht anders, ich habe mich darauf eingelassen. [03:48] Und das ist dann auch so gekommen. [03:52] Also nach einem Jahr eines ziemlich langweiligen Studiums [03:58] habe ich einen Sonderstudienplan bekommen und konnte studieren, wie ich mir das vorgestellt habe. [04:06] Nach drei Jahren habe ich das Studium abgeschlossen [04:10] und wurde Assistentin im Wissenschaftsbereich Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, [04:18] den Ulrich Ricken übernommen hatte kurz vorher. [04:23] Ja, es war aber nicht so, dass ich da gleich an meiner Dissertation arbeiten konnte. [04:34] Ich musste sehr viel Technisches machen. [04:38] Ich musste Bücher bestellen, abholen, Diktate aufnehmen auf Französisch, [04:45] was die Sekretärinnen natürlich nicht konnten. [04:49] Und mit dem Dissertationsthema war es so, [04:54] dass das eigentlich an einem Forschungskollektiv Sprache und Gesellschaftsbild angelagert sein sollte. [05:03] Das war zu DDR-Zeiten so. [05:06] Da musste man etwas gesellschaftlich Relevantes forschen. [05:12] Es liefen mehrere Dissertationen dazu. [05:16] Die untersuchten also Klassenbezeichnungen in literarischen Werken. [05:22] Und ich sollte zu La Bruyère eine Dissertation schreiben. [05:27] Hat mir natürlich nicht besonders gefallen. [05:33] La Bruyère ist auch sehr erforscht von Literaturwissenschaftlern. [05:38] Da hätte ich garantiert nichts Neues finden können. [05:42] Und ich habe gedacht, aber so ein bisschen kann ich das, was mich interessiert, vielleicht doch anwenden. [05:50] Ich war damals wirklich sehr strukturalistisch orientiert. [05:55] Das habe ich mir selber angelesen. [05:57] Also ich erinnere mich noch, als ich mit 20 Jahren die Ausgabe von Engler [06:06] des Cours de linguistique générale gelesen habe [06:10] und darin festgestellt habe, dass der publizierte Cours etwas ganz anderes ist. [06:17] Also ich war sehr von strukturalistischen Werken beeinflusst. [06:24] Ich habe natürlich auch Martinet, Potier, Bierwisch und andere gelesen. [06:30] JMc: Wobei Bierwisch sich mit der generativen Grammatik schon auseinandergesetzt hatte. [06:34] GH: Ja, ja, natürlich. JMc: Ja. [06:37] GH: Ich war auch ein bisschen Generativistin. [06:40] Das habe ich mir auch selbst so angeeignet. [06:44] Ja, aber Ricken kam dann nach kurzer Zeit, als er mir dieses Thema gegeben hatte [06:52] und hat gesagt, ja so ganz habe ich da wohl Ihre Interessen nicht getroffen damit [06:58] und ich könnte doch auch zur Geschichte des sprachlichen Relativitätsprinzips arbeiten. [07:05] Da war ich natürlich sofort einverstanden damit und habe auch begonnen, [07:12] habe die Dissertation eigentlich zügig geschrieben. [07:16] Es kam aber dann dazu, dass ich diesen Bereich verlassen musste, [07:25] weil ich Kritik daran geübt hatte, dass wir praktisch keine inhaltlichen Gespräche hatten, [07:33] dass wir nur über technische Sachen geredet haben. [07:37] Da war ich dann ein Jahr an der Slavistik tätig, habe also Russischunterricht gemacht, nicht mehr. [07:45] Das hat mich aber insofern gerettet, als ich Zeit hatte, meine Dissertation abzuschließen. [07:51] JMc: Und war das Thema gesellschaftlich relevant? Also, sprachliche Relativität. [07:58] GH: Nein, nein, nein, war nicht relevant. [08:02] Ich habe es ja nicht in dem Sinne behandelt, wie etwa der Erhard Albrecht aus Greifswald es gemacht hat. [08:09] Der hat ja immer nur gegen Weißgerber und andere argumentiert und das war alles ziemlich flach. [08:17] Ich habe ja eigentlich im 17. Jahrhundert begonnen mit Locke [08:23] und dann insbesondere das 18. Jahrhundert bearbeitet und schließlich bis Humboldt. [08:29] Also das war eigentlich völlig randständig, das war in der DDR nicht so angesehen. [08:37] War mir auch egal. [08:40] Ja, dann hatte ich eigentlich keine Chance, an einer Universität angestellt zu werden. [08:47] Ich hatte durch diese Kritik also einen Makel und sollte mich in der Schule bewerben, [08:54] wo ich eigentlich keine Chancen sah. [08:57] Ich war keine Lehrerin, [09:00] und ich habe mich an der Pädagogischen Hochschule Zwickau beworben, [09:06] wo es einen Sprachwissenschaftler gab, der die Abteilung Fremdsprachen geleitet hat, [09:14] und der war sofort überzeugt von dem, was ich vorstellte und hat eine Stelle für mich organisiert. [09:23] Dort habe ich dann auch meine Dissertation B, also die Habilschrift, begonnen. [09:32] Und ich war auch ein halbes Jahr in Moskau, wo ich viel in der Bibliothek gearbeitet habe, [09:40] auch mit bekannten Sprachwissenschaftlern Kontakt hatte, die mir auch geholfen haben. [09:48] Und ja, Ulrich Ricken wollte mich ja zurück nach Halle haben. [09:54] Es ging nicht so einfach. Auf eine Stelle konnte er mich nicht einstellen. [10:00] Er hat aber eine B-Aspirantur, also eine Aspirantur, ein Habilitationsstipendium, [10:12] über drei Jahre für mich bekommen. [10:15] Und ich bin dann auch nach Halle. [10:18] Viele haben das nicht verstanden, weshalb ich eine unbefristete Stelle an einer Hochschule aufgegeben habe [10:25] und dann für ein Stipendium nach Halle gegangen bin. [10:30] Ja, die Dissertation B war ja schon so halbfertig in Zwickau. [10:38] Nach anderthalb Jahren konnte ich sie auch einreichen. [10:42] Ich musste trotzdem noch ein Jahr auf dieser Aspirantur bleiben, [10:47] bis ich dann zur Dozentin berufen wurde. [10:51] Dozent ist heute jeder, der an einer Universität lehrt. [10:56] Damals war das so ähnlich wie heute eine W2-Stelle, [11:01] also eine Professur, noch nicht des höchsten Grades, aber man konnte selbstständig arbeiten. [11:09] Ich wurde dann auch gleich Leiterin des Wissenschaftsbereichs Romanistik. [11:16] Ich muss vielleicht noch sagen, wie ich mir die romanischen Sprachen angeeignet habe. [11:22] Eigentlich alles im Selbststudium mit Tonträgern, mit Radio und Büchern. [11:32] Ich war nie ein Kurstyp. [11:36] Das hat mich genervt, in Kursen Sprachen zu lernen. [11:41] Ja, also ich habe dann die Romanistik geleitet, [11:47] habe auch Studiengänge für Spanisch und Italienisch entwickelt. [11:54] Bis dahin war es einfach ein Lehrbereich Französisch. [11:58] Es war kein Habilitierter außer mir da. [12:02] Es gab Habilitierte, die waren aber verschwunden. [12:07] Ulrich Ricken hat die allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft geleitet [12:10] und ein Literaturwissenschaftler war in Paris am Kulturzentrum [12:17] und einer war in der Sektionsleitung. [12:20] Und also… [12:22] Die wissenschaftliche Leitung lag dann nur bei mir. [12:27] Ich habe mich dann auch von meinen Forschungsthemen her eigentlich umgestellt. [12:34] Ich wollte dazu forschen, was ich in der Lehre brauchte [12:38] und Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft war nicht unbedingt so für die Lehre geeignet. [12:45] Ich muss noch dazu sagen, das Thema meiner Dissertation B, [12:50] also der Habilitationsschrift, war ja der semantische Wertbegriff [12:55] vom 18. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. [12:58] Also wieder etwas wissenschaftshistorisches. [13:02] Damals war mir überhaupt nicht klar, dass das eigentlich für eine Karriere tödlich ist. [13:08] JMc: [lacht] [13:09] GH: Zwei Qualifikationsschriften. [13:13] JMc: Ja, ich kann ein Lied davon singen. Ja. [lacht] [13:16] GH: Mir war das völlig egal. [13:19] Es hat mich interessiert. Ich habe dazu gearbeitet. [13:23] Und in der DDR war das auch nicht so. [13:27] Also da konnte man sich das so leisten. [13:30] Und ja, ich wollte also zu etwas forschen, was ich für die Lehre gebrauchen konnte. [13:41] Und da haben mir eigentlich poststrukturalistische Themen gefallen. [13:48] Also ich habe viel zur Intertextualität damals gearbeitet, [13:53] also zu Merkmalen des Zitierens anderer Texte, [13:59] die nicht so vordergründig sind, [14:02] und auf diesem Wege bin ich dann auch zur Evidenzialität gekommen. [14:08] Evidenzialität ist ja die Markierung der Herkunft des Sprecherwissens. [14:15] Das hat mich also schon, ich möchte sagen so, am Ende der 80er-Jahre interessiert. [14:23] Dazu gekommen zu arbeiten, bin ich natürlich erst später. [14:27] Ich hatte in Halle sehr viel administrative Arbeit. [14:34] Man musste ja alles begründen, für alles Anträge stellen. [14:37] Das hat mich Tag und Nacht sozusagen beschäftigt. [14:41] Und dann kam die Wende. Das war noch mal ein Einschnitt. [14:47] Von den am Institut für Romanistik Beschäftigten in Halle ist eine einzige dort geblieben. [14:56] Die meisten wurden aus politischen Gründen entlassen. [15:02] Und diejenigen, die habilitiert waren, also nicht nur Romanisten, [15:07] sondern generell, wurden als Privatdozenten angesehen. [15:14] Also die hatten dann keine Stelle. [15:17] Das war einfach… Das Wort Dozent wurde als Kriterium genommen. [15:27] Die wurden entlassen, sobald Professoren berufen waren. [15:32] Professoren wurden sowieso meistens entlassen, [15:34] es sei denn sie waren kurz vor der Pensionierungsgrenze. [15:39] Da wurden einige übernommen, weil man ja Personal brauchte, [15:43] dass die Universität am Laufen hält. [15:47] Aber nicht aus der Romanistik. [15:48] Da gab es, wie gesagt, nur eine, [15:53] die dann sozusagen die Organisation des Instituts gemacht hat. [15:59] Also so eine Art wissenschaftliche Sekretärin. [16:02] Ja, also ich habe mich damals in Portugal beworben, [16:07] wo ich viele Kontakte hin hatte. [16:10] Da hätte ich auch hingehen können. [16:13] Ich war sozusagen schon auf dem halben Weg. [16:17] Und dann erreichte mich ein Telefonat von meinem Vater. [16:24] Der hat mir gesagt, es ist ein Brief gekommen. [16:29] Da steht drin, dass du einen Ruf nach Dresden hast. [16:34] War ich natürlich sehr froh, aber auch sehr überrascht. [16:38] Denn ich hatte mich beworben. [16:40] Ich hatte auch ein paar Publikationen hingeschickt. [16:42] Ich habe aber nicht vorgetragen. [16:45] Die haben damals das Institut neu aufgebaut [16:49] und sie haben einfach Leute, von denen sie wussten, [16:53] dass sie arbeiten können, berufen. [16:59] Das hing wahrscheinlich damit zusammen, [17:04] dass das Institut in Halle vom damaligen Präsidenten [17:09] der Deutschen Forschungsgemeinschaft, [17:12] Wolfgang Frühwald, evaluiert wurde. [17:16] Und den konnte ich irgendwie überzeugen. [17:22] Er war auch in der Berufungskommission in Dresden. [17:25] Daher stelle ich nach wie vor diese Verbindung her. [17:31] Ja, und dann bin ich nach Dresden gegangen [17:35] und in einem knappen Jahr danach kam dann der Ruf nach Potsdam. [17:41] JMc: Und war Potsdam irgendwie besser als Dresden? [17:45] GH: Naja, Dresden ist eine technische Universität. [17:48] Es war mir von vornherein klar, [17:51] dass die Romanistik randständig würde. [17:55] Und dann kommt hinzu, [17:58] dass in Sachsen Leute aus dem Osten nicht verbeamtet wurden. [18:03] Ich war ja noch nicht so alt, [18:06] dass ich mich hätte verbeamtet werden können. [18:10] Die hätten mich jederzeit rausschmeißen können. [18:12] Das war mir nach den Erfahrungen in Halle [18:17] auch nicht so geheuer. [18:21] An sich war das Klima in Dresden gut. [18:23] Auch der Dekan hat sich sehr dafür eingesetzt, [18:26] auch dass ich dahin komme. [18:28] Er hat es aber dann verstanden, [18:30] dass ich nach Potsdam gegangen bin. [18:33] JMc: Und wann ist Potsdam zu einer Uni geworden? [18:35] Das war damals eine pädagogische Hochschule, oder? [18:38] GH: 1991 ist die Universität gegründet worden. [18:43] Und es wurden eben auch neue Fächer eingerichtet. [18:45] Romanistik gab es vorher nicht. [18:48] Und da gab es eine Gründungsprofessorin. [18:52] Das war eine Literaturwissenschaftlerin. [18:55] Und ich kam dann zwei Jahre später, also 93, dazu. [18:59] Ja, da habe ich erst mal diese Forschungen eigentlich zu Sachen, [19:05] die ich in der Lehre brauchen konnte, fortgesetzt. [19:08] Ich habe damals viel Textlinguistik gemacht. [19:11] Sachen, die ich heute zum Teil kritisch sehe. [19:15] Obwohl es für die Lehre es ganz gut war. [19:18] Und ich habe erst mal so gut wie nicht [19:23] Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft gemacht, [19:25] weil ich ja begriffen habe, [19:27] dass das in Deutschland keine Zukunft hat [19:31] und dass man einen anderen Schwerpunkt haben sollte. [19:38] Ich würde meinen Zugang zur Sprachwissenschaft [19:44] nach wie vor als strukturalistisch geprägt ansehen, [19:50] aber ich habe auch viele poststrukturalistische Elemente aufgenommen, [19:55] und ich würde ihn auch als funktional betrachten. [19:58] Also ich habe zu funktionalen Kategorien gearbeitet. [20:03] Zur Aspektualität, zur Modalität. [20:07] Eben auch zur Evidenzialität. [20:09] Und ja, dazu habe ich dann auch viel publiziert. [20:15] Über Jahre fast ausschließlich. [20:20] Dann habe ich mich auch wieder [20:22] der Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft zugewandt. [20:26] Das hing einfach damit zusammen, [20:28] dass ich eingeladen wurde zu Vorträgen [20:31] und auch zu Publikationen. [20:34] Einladungen, die ich nicht ausschlagen konnte. [20:37] Und dann habe ich gedacht, [20:40] dass man eigentlich zu den Grundbegriffen [20:44] des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts [20:47] auch mal etwas Systematisches schreiben sollte. [20:51] Daraus ist dann das Lexikon sprachtheoretischer Grundbegriffe [20:56] des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts entstanden, [21:00] das ich ja gemeinsam mit Cordula Neis geschrieben habe. [21:05] Das ist kein Wörterbuch. [21:07] Manche denken, es ist ein Wörterbuch. [21:09] Es sind also monografische Artikel zu einzelnen Begriffen. [21:14] Und es ist wirklich begrifflich orientiert, [21:17] geht nicht von Bezeichnungen aus. [21:20] Cordula Neis war eine meiner ersten Doktorandinnen in Potsdam. [21:27] Sie hat sich von vornherein auch für die Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft interessiert, [21:35] hat zu der Berliner Preisfrage zum Ursprung der Sprache [21:39] ihre Dissertation geschrieben. [21:41] Das sah ich erst mal als nicht so problematisch an. [21:47] Sie hätte ja dann noch eine andere Habilschrift schreiben können. [21:53] Aber dann hat sie zwei Kinder gekriegt [21:56] und es blieb dann auch bei der Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, [22:02] hat sich also kumulativ habilitiert, [22:06] was ihr zum Glück nicht zum Schaden wurde, [22:10] denn sie hat trotzdem eine Professur bekommen. [22:13] JMc: Ja, und eine ganz gute. [lacht] [22:16] GH: Aber ich würde es eben niemandem raten, es so zu machen. [22:22] JMc: [lacht] Ja, und die Einladungen, die du bekommen hast, [22:28] zu der Zeit, waren die aus dem Ausland oder aus Deutschland? [22:31] GH: Aus dem Ausland. JMc: OK. [22:33] JMc: Aus Frankreich hauptsächlich? [22:34] GH: Aus Frankreich, Spanien, aus Portugal natürlich. [22:38] JMc: OK. [22:38] GH: Ich habe die Beziehung zu Portugal nie wirklich aufgegeben. [22:43] Ich habe sogar noch drei, vier Jahre lang dort gelehrt. [22:47] Ich wollte mir das offen halten. [22:49] Ich habe Deutschland nicht getraut, [22:52] also ich war immer so mit einem Fuß in Portugal in den 90er-Jahren. [22:57] JMc: Also die Kollegen in Frankreich, [23:01] also das sind hauptsächlich die Leute da in Paris, oder? [23:05] GH: Eigentlich weniger, die die Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft betreiben. [23:15] Ich hatte viele Kontakte nach Paris-Nanterre. [23:20] Und auch nach Grenoble, eine Zeit lang auch zu anderen Universitäten, [23:28] also natürlich auch zu dem Laboratoire in Paris. [23:37] JMc: Ja, OK. [23:39] Und ich wollte dich auch noch fragen, [23:42] du hast Französisch hauptsächlich selbst gelernt, [23:45] aber wie war es mit dem Russischen? [23:48] Also du meintest, Tschechisch war immer so im Hintergrund, [23:51] als du aufgewachsen bist. [23:52] Heißt das, dass du schon Kontakt zu den slawischen Sprachen hattest? [23:56] GH: Zum Tschechischen auf jeden Fall. [23:59] Ich habe es bis ich fünf Jahre alt war auch ein bisschen gesprochen. [24:04] Dann haben meine Eltern gemeint, wenn sie in die Schule kommt, [24:07] darf sie nicht mit Tschechisch anfangen. [24:09] Da wird sie schlecht in der Schule sein. [24:12] Was natürlich aus heutiger Sicht nicht stimmt, aber damals dachte man das so. [24:17] Ja, ich hatte als erstes eine Russischlehrerin, die wirklich sehr gut war. [24:22] Die hat natürlich das Interesse für Sprachen auch gefördert. [24:26] Später dann nicht mehr. [24:28] Da konnte ich nur weghören. [24:30] Die haben ganz schlecht gesprochen und… Ja. Also… [24:33] JMc: Und deine Zeit in Moskau, wie ist das zustande gekommen? [24:38] GH: Naja, ich hatte mich, wie gesagt, [24:41] in Zwickau an der Pädagogischen Hochschule beworben, [24:44] und der Leiter dieser Abteilung konnte mich nicht gleich einstellen, [24:50] weil ich ja die Auflage hatte, an die Schule zu gehen. [24:54] Da war ich ein paar Monate in der Schule. [24:56] Das war furchtbar. [24:58] Und dann hat er diesen Aufenthalt in Moskau für mich organisiert. [25:03] Und da war ich auch an der Universität, [25:08] habe also auch an Lehrveranstaltungen teilgenommen. [25:12] Und konnte aber auch an die Bibliothek gehen [25:18] und mich einfach mit Sprachwissenschaftlern treffen und unterhalten. Ja. [25:24] Das war ein halbes Jahr, das mir wirklich genutzt hat. [25:29] JMc: Ja, also ich frage mich, wie man das sich vorstellen soll damals. [25:33] Also as war in den 80er Jahren schon, oder… [25:37] als du in Moskau warst? [25:39] GH: Das war 1979. [25:42] JMc: 79, OK. [25:44] Also Ende der 70er Jahre. [25:45] GH: Ja. JMC: OK. Ja. [25:48] OK. Und man durfte das einfach so machen, [25:52] nach Moskau reisen. [25:53] Also, als jemand aus dem Westen, in Gänsefüßchen, [25:58] stellt man sich immer vor, dass es ganz schwierig war, [26:01] innerhalb des Ostblocks zu reisen, oder… [26:04] GH: Naja, man konnte auch privat reisen. [26:07] Das war eigentlich gar nicht so schwierig, [26:10] und ich hatte ja eben diesen Grund, [26:13] ich hatte da auch ein Stipendium für diese Zeit. [26:18] JMc: Und wann hast du Kontakt zu den Kollegen [26:20] in der Bundesrepublik aufgenommen? [26:24] Also ich meine zum Beispiel den Studienkreis. [26:27] GH: Eigentlich schon sehr früh. [26:30] Ulrich Ricken hatte ja ganz viele Kontakte. [26:34] JMc: OK. [26:34] GH: Und er hat auch Kontakte zu Klaus Dutz gehabt. [26:39] Und insbesondere zu Hans-Josef Niederehe in Trier. [26:45] Und das war meine erste Kongressreise. [26:50] 1985 war da ein Kongress in Trier, [26:57] zu dem Niederehe mich eingeladen hat. [27:01] Und das wurde genehmigt. [27:03] Und von da an hatte ich eigentlich Kontakte zu ihm [27:08] und zu Leuten, die ich dort getroffen hatte. [27:10] Ich hatte auch vorher schon eine Einladung [27:14] nach West-Berlin zu einem Kolloquium über die französischen Ideologen. [27:21] Von Jürgen Trabant und Herrn Busse organisiert. [27:27] Die durfte ich nicht wahrnehmen. [27:29] Das war noch zu nah an diesem Rausschmiss in Halle. [27:35] Da hat man mir noch nicht so getraut, [27:38] ob ich da wiederkommen würde. [27:40] JMc: OK. Und vielleicht eine letzte Frage, [27:43] und zwar interessierst du dich immer noch für die Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft, [27:48] und meinst du, dass das die einen Wert hat? [27:51] Also dass man immer noch Forschung auf diesem Gebiet machen soll? [27:56] GH: Auf jeden Fall. [27:58] Ich denke an einen Spruch von Odo Marquard. [28:03] Zukunft braucht Herkunft. [28:06] Also ohne Geschichte kann man zumindest [28:10] eine Geisteswissenschaft nicht vernünftig betreiben. [28:14] Also manche denken das ganz anders. [28:18] Ich sehe es aber so. [28:20] Und man muss verstanden haben, [28:24] wie sich eine Wissenschaft entwickelt hat. [28:28] Ich sehe die Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft [28:30] auch nicht nur retrospektiv als wichtig an. [28:34] Was natürlich auch schon wichtig ist. [28:37] Manche haben ja einen Retrospektionshorizont, [28:40] der hört bei fünf Jahren oder weniger auf. [28:44] Und die wissen einiges gar nicht, [28:48] was früher geforscht wurde, [28:50] und denken, sie haben neue Erkenntnisse, [28:52] wenn sie etwas behaupten. [28:56] Ich sehe aber die Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft [28:58] auch prospektiv für wichtig an. [29:01] Man kann Entwicklungen vorhersehen. [29:04] Also zum Beispiel habe ich ja auch zur Informationsstruktur gearbeitet. [29:10] Und da hat es Forschungen gegeben, [29:14] auch in Potsdam, [29:16] die nur mit Experimenten arbeiteten. [29:20] Also den Leuten wurden Sätze vorgegeben, [29:26] und es wurden ihre Reaktionen oder auch die Gehirnströme organisiert. [29:32] Je nachdem, welche Methode da verwendet wurde. [29:38] Und ich habe immer gesagt, das kann letzten Endes nicht funktionieren. [29:44] Sprache funktioniert nicht in einzelnen Sätzen, [29:48] und sie funktioniert nicht unter Laborbedingungen. [29:50] Es sind immer Kontexte gegeben, im weitesten Sinne. [29:57] Und dasselbe hat es eigentlich im 18. Jahrhundert auch schon gegeben. [30:04] Bei der ganzen Diskussion um die Wortfolge [30:10] wurde eine natürliche Wortfolge postuliert, [30:14] zuerst nach rationalistischen Prinzipien, [30:18] also Subjekt, Verb, Objekt. [30:21] Einige haben das dann erkannt, dass das nicht stimmt. [30:25] Sie haben andere Wortfolgen für natürlich erklärt, [30:28] aber immer auf den Satz bezogen, [30:30] nicht auf die kommunikative Funktion des Satzes [30:35] und nicht auf den Kontext bezogen. [30:40] Ja, und diese Forschungen, [30:43] die da so in den 2000er Jahren betrieben wurden, [30:51] die sind letzten Endes genau an diese Grenzen auch gestoßen. [30:54] Also ich würde sagen, das war vorhersehbar. [31:01] JMc: OK. GH: Das ist nur ein Beispiel. [31:03] JMc: Ja, ja, ja. GH: Das könnte man an mehreren Beispielen so sagen. [31:05] JMc: Ja. OK. [31:07] Das ist ein ganz guter Schluss zum Gespräch. [31:11] Also vielen Dank für das Gespräch. [31:13] GH: Ich danke dir. [31:15]

In this interview, Fritz Newmeyer discusses linguistics, history of linguistics, and politics. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 49 Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1986 [1980]. Linguistic Theory in America, 2nd edition. Orlando: Academic Press. Newmeyer, Frederick J. 2022. American Linguistics in Transition: From Post-Bloomfieldian Structuralism to Generative Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 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. [00:13] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:18] Today we’re continuing our series of conversations with living legends in linguistics, this time with a living legend in the history of linguistics, Fritz Newmeyer. [00:29] And I should add, actually, that Fritz has in fact made contributions to several areas of linguistics, [00:35] but given the focus of this podcast, his work in the history of linguistics is perhaps the most interesting for our audience. [00:43] So Fritz has written a number of important books on the history of American linguistics in the 20th century, the first of which is his 1980 Linguistic Theory in America, which has gone on to become the standard history of the generative school, [00:58] and the most recent of which is the 2022 American Linguistics in Transition, which examines the transition from American structuralism to generative grammar. [01:10] So to get us started, maybe we should go back to the very beginning and ask you how you got into linguistics. [01:17] FN: Well, it’s a somewhat interesting story. [01:21] My undergraduate degree was in geology, believe it or not. [01:25] Don’t ask me why. [01:27] By my third year, I was totally uninterested in geology. [01:32] I applied to law school, didn’t really want to be a lawyer at that particular time in my life. [01:38] But my undergraduate roommate was Larry Horn, who is one of the main contributors to linguistic pragmatics. [01:47] He was a French linguistics major at the time and told me [01:51] — I had probably never even heard of linguistics; I may have seen the word somewhere — [01:56] and told me the last semester of my last year, “Why don’t you take this course?” [02:02] And the rest is history, my history, [02:07] and then Larry and I have continued to be great friends for the last, I don’t know, 60-something years, [laughs] because we’re talking about 1964, 1965. [02:18] JMc: OK. But you clearly took to linguistics, right? [02:21] Like, clearly, the subject then clearly fascinated you. [02:25] FN: Yes, absolutely, and I, at that point, decided I was going on to do graduate work in linguistics. [02:33] I didn’t even decide this until the very end of my last year as an undergraduate. [02:39] The only place I could go at the time was the University of Rochester, where I was an undergraduate with Larry, [02:46] but the next year, I applied to Illinois to study with Robert B. Lees, who was Chomsky’s first student. [02:57] I didn’t figure I had the marks to get into MIT, so I didn’t even try, but Lees was happy to take me in. [03:05] The department had just opened, and everybody was from MIT, all of my professors. [03:12] They were all from the first class of graduates at MIT. [03:15] JMc: OK, so it was a sort of MIT outpost. [03:18] FN: Yeah, the first MIT outpost. [03:21] There were many, many more… JMc: OK. [03:23] FN: …as time went on, but that was the first. [03:25] JMc: MIT Manifest Destiny, maybe. [laughs] [03:27] FN: That could very well be. [03:30] JMc: So how did you go then from linguistics proper, if we can put it like that, to the history of linguistics? [03:38] FN: Well, I was an ordinary linguist for at least 10 years, a syntactician mainly, [03:45] and while I think my work was competent, it certainly didn’t set people’s hearts a-thumping. [03:52] It was just basically competent. [03:55] But Robert B… This was the 1960s, and the battle between generativists and the old structuralists was still raging. [04:05] I mean, it was petering out, but Lees required that all the graduate students at Illinois read all of the main structuralist papers, mainly American, but also Jakobson, and Trubetzkoy, and Hjelmslev, and so on. [04:22] Now, most of my classmates hated that. [04:25] It was just so boring. [04:27] “We don’t do this any…” [04:28] But I loved it. [04:29] Not that I was in love with their theory, but to see what people had been doing really just 10 years ago, or 20, or 30, [04:38] and why we are taught at Illinois that this work was crap. [04:46] But at the same time, I mean, I certainly felt… [04:51] I saw all the problems with the post-Bloomfieldian work, but at the same time, it fascinated me, [04:56] and I never stopped being interested in how we got to where we are in linguistics, something that… [05:05] I mean, it’s a personal thing, I suppose, but always fascinated me and didn’t fascinate that many of my classmates and colleagues. [05:14] JMc: So, I mean, you were writing, as you were just sort of indicating yourself, [05:18] you were writing contemporary history when you started doing the history of linguistics. [05:22] FN: Yes. [05:23] JMc: This is something that we’ve spoken about a little bit on the podcast already, the sort of difficulty of doing contemporary history, because you don’t have any historical distance, like, you’re there while it’s happening. [05:33] So how do you see that? [05:35] Do you see it as a problem, or… [05:38] FN: Well, I mean, it’s both a problem and a benefit. [05:44] I’ve… [05:46] Linguistic Theory in America was both most praised and most condemned for exactly that reason, that I was writing about the present or the very near present as history. [05:56] Now, I think the benefit was that I knew all these people, even… [06:04] I mean, I even knew the old structuralists fairly well. [06:09] I mean, they were on their last legs, but I got to meet them at LSA meetings and so on. [06:14] So, I mean, I had insights. [06:17] I knew what these people were thinking and why they were doing it, and I was able to convey that, which conveyed a sense of interest and excitement. [06:28] At the same time, I was condemned for putting my own personal views, my own personal exp- [06:38] I mean, if I wrote something very negative about George Lakoff, who was very, very much alive at the time, George Lakoff would blow up. [06:47] He said, “You know, you can’t… Where does he get off writing about me? [06:52] I wasn’t thinking that. [06:53] That’s not why I did that.” [06:55] So while the reviews were mostly positive except here and there… [07:00] Historiographia Linguistica was not a positive review. [07:04] Stephen Murray, I don’t know if you ever met him, but he was kind of a close colleague of Konrad Koerner’s. [07:11] JMc: OK. [07:12] FN: But by and large, people were fascinated by it. [07:15] I mean, certainly it changed my life for the better, even though for the first time in 10 years [07:20] — which is… I mean, I had been out there for over 10 years — [07:25] people wanted to read what I wrote, and that was a very, very new experience for me, [07:30] because I was in a crowded field of syntacticians trying to write the definitive paper on English nominalizations or something like that, which nobody paid much attention to. [07:42] And then I wrote, it was just the right time for that book to come out, because generative grammar… [07:48] Well, 1980 was the first edition, and so people… [07:53] Generative grammar actually did have a history then, 1957 to 1980, gave me enough time to reflect on what was happening and what’s going on now. [08:05] So from a personal point of view, [08:07] even though I accept the criticism that my work was inevitably biased because, [08:14] being a practitioner in the field, I had my own ideas about the way syntax in particular should go, [08:23] nevertheless, I mean, people found it interesting, even if it was interest in the sense of, we have to condemn this personal biased view from just somebody who came out of… [08:36] Well, I’m not going to say out of nowhere, but was not one of the very leading figures of the field. [08:42] “Where does he come off?” [08:44] JMc: Yeah. OK. [08:45] But what was your method then, writing this sort of contemporary history? [08:48] I mean, obviously, you cited people’s publications, as all historians do, [08:54] but I guess it wasn’t necessarily archival-based, like historians who are working with the past, [09:02] but they want to get some sort of contemporary perspective on the past, [09:06] will go into the archives and look at the primary documents from then, [09:10] but the primary document, or the producers of the primary documents, were living and breathing people that you associated with on a daily basis. [09:17] FN: Exactly, and the archives were in my head. [09:20] JMc: Yeah. [09:21] FN: Going back… [09:22] I mean, I wasn’t in linguistics in 1957 by any means — I was 13 years old — but I had read every important paper. [09:31] I knew all the important people — some very well, some not so well, but I had met them all. [09:37] So yes, I mean, in terms of what a historiographer is supposed to do, I didn’t do it. [09:43] I think in American Linguistics in Transition, my more recent book, I did. [09:47] I mean, it’s full of archival material and interviews and things like that. [09:52] But I didn’t… [09:54] I mean, I wasn’t… At the time, I wasn’t saying this is my view of how to write history. [09:59] It just seemed like a really fun thing to do, [10:03] and I got a lot of encouragement, partly from Geoff Pullum, but also Joe Emonds, Barbara Partee, and Steve Anderson, [10:11] and Steve Anderson has worked in the history of linguistics. [10:14] They all read it very, very carefully. [10:17] I had dozens of pages of helpful criticism. [10:24] So I found from the beginning that there were people who wanted me to do this, [10:33] so whether I was violating every rule of historiography, I’m not sure, but I’m glad I did it. [10:41] JMc: Well, I’m not sure histories are pr- you know, history’s like linguistics. [10:44] It’s not necessarily a prescriptive discipline, [10:46] like you do historiography using whatever means are available to you, [10:50] but I guess there is a guild of professional historians that like to complain that everyone thinks they can do history, but no one knows how to. [laughs] [10:58] FN: I mean, well, you’re right. [11:00] I mean, when it came to Linguistic Theory in America, people were saying, “This is chronicling. This is not history.” [11:06] JMc: Yeah. [11:06] FN: And that’s fine. [11:09] I never said I am historian of linguistics. [11:11] I never went to any of the conferences. [11:13] Konrad Koerner was certainly not interested in the more recent stuff that I was writ- [11:19] I mean, he later published things that I wrote on the structuralists and so on. [11:22] JMc: Yeah. [11:23] FN: But the few people at the time who did history of linguistics, like Koerner or Dell Hymes… [11:32] In general… [11:36] Keith Percival, he was interested and very helpful, and he gave me some insights on the structuralists. [11:43] JMc: OK, Percival, who wrote a scathing review of Koerner’s first book. [11:47] FN: Yes. JMc: Yeah. [11:48] FN: Yes. I think one thing that made Keith such a good historiographer of linguistics is that he actually did linguistics. [11:57] I mean, he wrote a grammar of Toba Batak, I believe it was, a language of Indonesia, [12:05] and before he turned to the history of linguistics, his degree is from Yale, and he studied with the leading figures of the time, [12:13] whereas Koerner did have a degree in linguistics from Simon Fraser in Vancouver, [12:19] but they had a guy named Bursill-Hall there who taught… [12:23] You could study with him history of linguistics without studying linguistics, [12:29] and I think that’s how Koerner got his… [12:33] Koerner did, I mean, amazing things for the field of history of linguistics [12:38] — I mean, starting journals, conferences, discussions — [12:42] so my appraisal of him is definitely not all negative. [12:48] JMc: Yeah. FN: Not that you asked. [12:49] JMc: Yeah. [FN laughs] [12:50] So, well, I mean, so do you think you need to be a linguist to write history of linguistics? [12:56] FN: I think you need to know a lot about linguistics, at least. [13:01] I mean, I’ve read a fair amount in the history of science, history of physics, history of chemistry, and so on, and biology. [13:09] By and large, these people know the field inside and out. [13:13] There are a lot of people who write in the history of linguistics who don’t know linguistics inside out. [13:21] They’re possibly, let’s say, instructors in the history of French, [13:26] and they discover a medieval French grammarian who nobody’s written about before, [13:34] but they don’t know current linguistics. [13:39] Is that a problem? [13:40] I’m not sure. [13:42] I would think in order to have a well-rounded view of work that’s done in the past, you need to know what’s going on in the present, and vice versa. [13:52] JMc: Yeah. [13:53] I guess, I mean, also the problem is what you would call linguistics. [13:57] We have an academic discipline now called linguistics, but there wasn’t necessarily anything directly comparable in the medieval period. [14:05] FN: No. JMc: So… Yeah. [14:06] So, I mean, maybe the problem is projecting our academic discipline of linguistics backwards in the medieval period. [14:14] FN: No, it didn’t exist as an academic discipline, but then neither did physics. [14:18] JMc: Yeah, sure. [14:19] FN: It was natural philosophy. [14:22] But I take your point that people didn’t call themselves… [14:27] I mean, you could change the name from philologist to linguist or whatever, [14:32] but yeah, I mean, the principles of linguistics are much more recent. [14:38] The person they’re writing about certainly wouldn’t be expected to know the difference between langue and parole and so on, [14:45] but I think that it’s important that the person writing about the medieval French linguist have an understanding of how these investigations have changed over time and just not held in a vacuum, just not be in a vacuum. [15:02] It’s like, I mean, this is not just a criticism of history of linguistics. [15:07] I have a phonetician friend, Pat Keating, who, like many phoneticians, goes to the Acoustical Society meetings every year because there’s always something of interest, [15:18] and she says every year, year after year, some acoustic… somebody in the Acoustic Society discovers the phoneme. [15:29] “Here’s the interesting thing, you know, there’s all these sounds, but some of them can be grouped together,” and they’ve read no linguistics. [15:39] And you could say the same about sociology. [15:42] I once asked Bill Labov why so little linguistics is done in sociology departments, and he said, “They don’t want to take five minutes to learn the basic principles of linguistics.” [15:56] And there are people who write, who are in the field of history of linguistics, broadly conceived, who I don’t think know anything about modern linguistics, [16:10] and I think that is not good. [16:14] JMc: Yeah, OK. [16:16] So what do you think the point of doing history of linguistics is, then? [16:20] What does history of linguistics have to contribute? [16:23] FN: Well, I think the stock answer is to avoid the mistakes of the past. [16:28] I’m not sure that ever works. [16:30] But I think you can get a sense of history and direction by looking at the field, and I’m interpreting this through my own eyes. [16:38] It seems to me that every major step forward in linguistics has been achieved by saying, “We don’t have to talk about this stuff, this other stuff.” [16:51] So what was a great breakthrough in the 19th century in historical linguistics? [16:57] That you can study language change without knowing or caring much about the culture and society of the people who are speaking the language. [17:06] Regularity of sound change was kind of the culmination of that. [17:10] Then came the structuralist revolution, and people discovered that you can write a lot about the structure of language without taking that much account of how language is used. [17:23] Now, here it’s more debatable, but I think everybody agrees that, I mean, almost everybody, that we can write a grammar of a language without writing about the folktales in that language or how people relate in a hierarchy. [17:41] Structure is independent of that. [17:43] And then with the Chomskyan revolution, again, there was a further restriction that we can say a lot about the structure of language without talking about meaning, at least to get the basic aspects of structure, which at least the European structuralists did not believe. [18:03] They may have practised differently, but they certainly didn’t act like they believed that. [18:08] So, I mean, I think you can get a perspective of that, saying, “I’m not going to look at this, I’m not going to look at that,” is not necessarily a bad thing, [18:18] and that’s what, of course, generative grammarians have mostly been criticized for. [18:22] In fact, it could be a very good thing, as history has shown us. [18:25] JMc: OK. So you think there is progress in linguistics? [18:29] FN: Well… [chuckles] I think there’s been general progress over the last couple centuries. [18:37] If you’re going to ask me, has there been progress in the last 20 years, I would say I’m not sure. [18:45] I’d have to think about that. [18:46] JMc: OK. [18:48] FN: I think that, in fact, theoretical linguistics, not just generative grammar, but functional linguistics too, has been treading water for a couple decades. [19:01] JMc: OK. [19:01] FN: Maybe I just say this because I’m an old guy, and I used to think that things were better in the, you know, like all old guys, things were better in the past. [19:11] But there, for a long time, in generative grammar, at least mainstream, there was Chomsky as an anchor, and this was in many ways a very bad thing, so there were… [19:24] I have colleagues, many colleagues who would spend their entire careers rewriting their dissertation after Chomsky published a new paper. [19:32] I mean, that’s terrible. [19:34] No person should dominate a field like that, and that’s bad. [19:38] And of course, Chomsky’s not producing anymore, and a lot of the generative grammarians, I think, never learned to think independently, and they don’t have this anchor of Chomsky [laughs] directing. [19:54] But I see the same thing in functional linguistics. [19:57] I mean, I think there was this, you know, studies of grammaticalization and hierarchies and so on. [20:05] We were talking about Michael Silverstein yesterday. [20:07] I mean, I think some of the work that he did was really good. [20:10] He wouldn’t have called himself a functionalist, but still, functionalists took advantage of that. [20:15] And I don’t see, in either formal linguistics or functional linguistics, a great… [20:23] I don’t have a feeling that great progress has been made recently. [20:28] But again, this just could be an old guy saying, you know, “The good old days, you know, they’re gone.” [20:33] JMc: Yeah. OK. [20:36] Well, let’s move on to some broader contextual questions. [20:40] You’ve also been involved a lot in political activism. [20:43] FN: Right. [20:44] JMc: So can you tell us about that, and does your political activism have any connection with your historiographic sensibilities? [20:54] FN: I have to say that this is the question that Chomsky was asked the most: [21:03] “What’s the connection between your political activities and your linguistics?” [21:07] and he would always give this, “Well, there’s no connection except that a thinking, knowledgeable, aware person would be like me.” [21:18] And… [21:20] Well, when I was a student, students were radical, even in the United States, or maybe even especially in the United States. [21:27] There was a period of intense student activism just exactly when I was a graduate student in particular, the late ’60s, and I was swept up in that. [21:38] The question is, why did I continue for another 10, 15 years as… Well, I was… as a Marxist. [21:46] I mean, Chomsky… [21:47] I mean, Chomsky was not a Marxist, but I think that he was a kind of inspiration to many linguists at the time to be politically active. [21:58] I mean, it’s hard to fall under the spell of a particular person for some of their activities [22:05] and not at least for a time to look into, “Well, if he says this about nominalizations, then maybe I should read what he says about Vietnam,” [22:18] and so I think that that had a lot to do with it being in just the general milieu, especially in American linguistics in the 1960s and ’70s. [22:32] It was… In general, practitioners of linguistics were much more to the left, and I was part of that. [22:41] I joined the Trotskyist group, which most didn’t, [22:46] but now when I look back upon my life, I mean, it seemed like I was involved in that for a long time, but it was really just late ’60s to mid-late ’70s, which is a very short period. [23:00] I’m not a flaming revolutionary anymore, but I don’t know, I’m still left of centre and I’ve never seen any reason not to be, [23:11] and that’s probably part of the reason that we moved from the United States to Canada and became Canadian immigrants, [23:21] where the centre of political discourse is so far to the left of the United States that the Democratic Party has positions that are pretty much the same as the Conservative Party in Canada, [23:35] except the Conservative Party in Canada is to the left of the American Democratic Party in some ways. [23:42] JMc: But I guess, I mean, at this very moment, we are possibly going through a revolutionary period, especially in the American context, but a revolution from the right. [23:51] FN: Yes, exactly, and that’s very, very scary. [23:55] JMc: Sure. [laughs] [23:57] FN: Yeah. It hasn’t affected every Western country equally. [24:06] Canada, for example, has… The Liberals have won the last four elections. [24:13] Now, I don’t vote for the Liberals, I vote for the NDP, which on paper, like the British Labour Party, is socialist, [24:22] but it’s probably socialist to about the same degree that the British Labour Party is socialist. [24:28] But the NDP does have power in two provinces. [24:31] It’s not… [24:32] I mean, anything like that would be unthinkable in the United States, [24:37] that a party with a program like the NDP could get elected municipally, even. [24:44] JMc: Yeah. OK. [24:46] So, to come back to the question, you don’t think that your interest in politics had any bearing… [24:54] FN: Well, I mean I- JMc: [unclear] [24:57] FN: Yes and no. [24:58] I mean, I had a general interest in history, and probably my interest in history fanned the flames of my interest in politics, as well as linguistics, [25:13] and so, again, I would read tracts by Trotsky from, you know, 1925 and so on, which even my fellow leftists didn’t do, because they thought it was basically boring. [25:28] What’s important is what we’re doing now. [25:30] So there’s a historical side to both that I found very important, but certainly not everybody does. [25:40] JMc: Yeah. OK. [25:42] You’ve also been involved in academic politics, for want of a better term. [25:45] FN: Yeah. [25:46] JMc: So you’ve been heavily involved in the Linguistic Society of America. [25:50] You were at one point Mr. President [laughs], and you still hold an office. [25:56] FN: I’m Secretary-Treasurer, which I did 35 years ago, and now I’m doing it again. [26:01] JMc: OK. [26:01] FN: Fortunately, I only have a year and a half left, because it’s a lot of work and not a lot of satisfaction. [26:12] JMc: Yeah. OK. [26:12] FN: And certainly not a lot of honour, as being president might be. [26:15] JMc: Yeah. So what was it like being the president of the LSA, [26:20] and considering that you’ve spent so much time investigating the sort of, you know, internal machinations and political struggles of different schools of linguists, [26:32] were you able to apply your historical knowledge in that role? [26:36] FN: This happens all of the time. [26:38] In fact, at every meeting of the executive committee, or the officers, or in conversation with our executive director, they come up with an idea, and I can say, “Well, we tried that in 1983, and it didn’t work.” [26:53] I decided a long time ago that my professional time that wasn’t spent teaching or research would be devoted to the field of linguistics, and not to, say, university administration. [27:08] I mean, the idea of becoming a dean at my university was just repellent to me. [27:14] So a lot of people occupy their spare time as an academic, if you want to call it that, climbing the ladder at their university to dean, or maybe even higher than dean, [27:31] but that never appealed to me. [27:34] I don’t like meetings. [27:37] And the LSA was just, you know, just waiting for somebody to come along who knew a lot about the LSA and its history, had written on it, was not so sectarian that they would be unacceptable to a lot of the membership, and I really get off on it. [28:00] The idea that I’m a descendant, certainly not intellectually comparable, but a descendant of Boas and Sapir and Bloomfield doing what they did, I mean, it really fills me with awe that I’m kind of following in their footsteps in a certain way, [28:23] and I certainly wouldn’t feel this way if I weren’t totally involved in the history of linguistics. [28:28] So yeah, absolutely, my involvement in the LSA comes, to a large extent, from my knowledge of the history of the LSA. [28:41] JMc: Yeah. [28:42] FN: And the LSA is falling on hard financial times. [28:47] We’re losing members. [28:49] The meetings aren’t as well attended as they used to be, but they’re things mostly beyond our control. [28:57] So for example, until five, ten years ago, probably a third of the people, a quarter of the people who came to an LSA meeting were there to either interview somebody for a job or to be interviewed. [29:10] Not anymore. That’s all online. [29:12] People can get Language, any journal, online. [29:16] They don’t have to subscribe to Language, which means being a member of the LSA. [29:23] And we’re not the only society that’s having this problem, but it’s a little depressing. [29:28] JMc: Yeah. OK. [29:30] But I mean, do you think it’s a sign or a symptom of the broader pressures that academia as an institution is under? [unclear] [29:39] FN: Yeah, well now if we’re going to talk about the last year, absolutely. [29:43] The LSA is lucky that we have had federal grants in the past, big ones, but we have none now. [29:50] Not that they’ve been… We just haven’t applied for any. [29:54] Those societies, the big ones like the MLA or the historians and so on, they’re basically being told by the Trump administration that you’d better not pass any more resolutions in favour of, against discrimination against minorities or gender-based discrimination and so on, or we’re going to cut off all your money. [30:19] Fortunately, we’re not in that position, although individual linguists are. [30:24] Individual linguists have federal grants. [30:29] Theoretical linguists aren’t so much affected, but sociolinguists certainly are, [30:34] and there’s always been a huge grant support for sociolinguistics in the United States, and that’s all threatened right now. [30:44] JMc: Yeah. Well, on that sunny note, maybe I should thank you for answering those questions. [30:51] FN: Well, thank you for inviting me to be in this elite group. [30:56]

In this interview, Randy Harris interviews James McElvenny about his recent book A History of Modern Linguistics. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube 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]

In this interview, we talk to Geoff Pullum about his career, his contributions to linguistics, and how he sees the future of the field. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 47 Huddleston, Rodney, and Geoffrey Pullum K., eds. 2002. Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pullum, Geoffrey K. 2018. Linguistics: Why it matters. Cambridge: Polity. Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band – Que Sera, Sera (1967) (YouTube) 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 embarking on our series of oral history interviews with living legends in linguistics, and our first living legend is Geoff Pullum, who we’re meeting here in Edinburgh. [00:33] So, Geoff, could you please briefly outline your career, so your transition from professional musician, which was your first job, as I understand it, to uni student and then academic, and then your move from the UK to America and then back to the UK? [00:53] GP: The whole of that? [00:54] JMc: The whole of that, yeah. [00:56] GP: Well, first, I should make it clear that as a musician, as a piano player in a rock and roll band initially, who later moved on to Hammond organ, [01:08] I was in that job because it was really the only way I could sink below the jobs I had had up to that point. [01:18] I was a high school dropout and had no ideas at all of what I was going to do, [01:25] and playing the piano in a rock and roll band doing German residencies and German nightclubs and American air bases seemed better than sweeping floors. [01:38] JMc: OK. Which parts of Germany were you in? [01:40] GP: The Rhineland, mainly. [01:42] JMc: OK. [01:43] GP: For five years, I made my living as a professional musician, and Pete Gage and I tried to form a band that was really inspired by the performances of James Brown, a great Black American showman, band leader and so on. [02:04] But there were a lot of things we didn’t have, like a singer with that kind of vocal range and this kind of business acumen and so on. [02:14] Building a band means being sophisticated about money, technology, and networking, knowing the right people and how to deal with outright crooks and so on. [02:32] At the end of five years, I was beginning to find it a terrible way to earn a living. [02:39] The tedium is hard to get across. [02:44] You travel all day, maybe five, six hours sitting in a van up motorways that you’ve seen before. [02:52] You spend two hours hauling equipment in and setting stuff up. [02:56] You then spend one hour maybe playing the same songs you’ve played before, and then more waiting and hauling all the stuff out. [03:05] Then you sleep in a cheap hotel and get back in the van and do it again. [03:11] It’s a horrible life. [03:13] I wanted glamour and excitement. [03:15] JMc: I mean, it doesn’t sound that much different from being a university lecturer repeating the same material [laughs] [03:20] GP: Oh, it’s very, very different. [03:21] JMc: OK. [03:22] GP: And I found being a Professor of Linguistics, which I was basically within about 10 years after I quit the music business, vastly better than being a rock musician, so much better in every single way. [03:36] JMc: But your band was relatively successful, wasn’t it? [03:39] I’ve seen a clip even from German TV of you guys performing. [03:43] GP: As Geno Washington & the Ram Jam Band… [03:46] JMc: Yeah, exactly. [03:47] GP: …it was moderately successful. [03:50] That’s not quite good enough to make a lifetime career. [03:56] We were contemporary with the Rolling Stones, and I really admired them for having the tenacity, the staying power and the business acumen to just turn it into a multi-million-dollar business. [04:10] We didn’t have that. [04:12] The Ram Jam Band had broken up within three years of being founded, leaving me with absolutely nothing because I had no high school education to speak of. [04:22] I had been failing all my exams at the age of 16. [04:27] I had to start from scratch, and that was a struggle. [04:31] I would not advise anyone to follow this path. [04:38] By dint of sixth form college courses, as they’re called in Britain, I scraped together enough qualifications that I was minimally qualified to enter a university and applied to six of them, [04:53] and just one, the University of York, took a chance on me, mainly because the head of department happened to know my academic referee, a teacher called Charles Duchesne, who really is someone I owe a lot to. [05:11] He happened to know him personally and called him on the phone, and Duchesne apparently said, “Well, yes, he’s got a chequered background, and… But he is smart, take a chance.” [05:23] Robert Le Page did that and allowed me into the University of York’s Department of Language, [05:32] partly through misunderstandings, but the interview went well and I was in. [05:39] And I discovered that linguistics was fascinating and I started working at it all the time. [05:46] How I knew to apply for linguistics departments was another accident. [05:51] In the 1960s, there were no departments in Britain that gave an undergraduate major course in linguistics, [06:01] so back in 1963, ’64, ’65, I couldn’t have gone to university and studied linguistics, [06:12] but by 1968,it was possible at just two places, and one of them had admitted me, despite my dreadful academic record. [06:24] Once I was working for the first time in my life on something academic that I found rewarding and interesting, I just sort of took off. [06:36] The way I look at it is, you don’t really need to be some born genius to achieve reasonable success. [06:47] If you work all the time on it, put all your energy into it, because of your interest, you’ll do pretty well. [06:54] So I did pretty well, and ignoring the advice of people who told me, “Well, you can’t possibly continue with it. There are no jobs.” [07:03] I applied to do a PhD at Cambridge, and within one year at Cambridge, though it was a terrific year, a formative year, when I met most of the linguists of my generation that I ever knew [07:17] — it was a marvellous coming together of numerous people like Gerald Gazdar and Ewan Klein and Greville Corbett, Andrew Radford; [07:27] all sorts of people happened to be there in Cambridge, mainly because Ed Keenan had an appointment at the Research Centre at King’s College and along with Bernard Comrie was running a seminar on universal grammar, which we all attended, [07:45] so it was a terrific year at Cambridge. [07:49] But by the end of it, I had actually been offered a lectureship at University College London after a brief interview visit and giving a sample job talk. [08:00] And that paid more than being a graduate student. You didn’t need a PhD to be a lecturer in those days. [08:07] JMc: And was the field expanding as well, like that there were actual jobs? [laughs] [08:13] GP: Well, there was one for me, and I always tell graduate students who are worried about the job market is, [08:20] yeah, there may be hundreds of students on the market looking for academic jobs. [08:26] You don’t have to worry about them. [08:28] You’re going to be up against maybe three or four people. [08:31] You just have to give a better talk than they did on that day and you’re in. [08:39] You’ve got to have enough of a record that you can get placed on some shortlist, but in the end it narrows quite a lot. [08:46] I was offered this job at University College London by Neil Smith and his close friend Deidre Wilson and Dick Hudson, and those three people became my colleagues as I began life as a lecturer in 1974. [09:03] I didn’t particularly like living in London. [09:06] By this time, having seen all of England when I was a rock musician touring, I didn’t really like England, and there were all sorts of things happening that led me to like it even less. [09:19] The gathering storms of first trade union destruction of various industries and then the Conservative Party’s attempt to destroy the trade unions and so on, it was a usual time of terrible political conflict. [09:35] But by the end of the 1970s, it began to look like Margaret Thatcher was going to storm into power at the next election, as indeed she did, and she stormed in on a wave of racism. [09:49] The vote share of the National Front, the extreme-right party of the day, collapsed to almost nothing when Thatcher was elected because the racists had what they needed. [10:01] Now, I was married to a Black Jamaican I’d met in a club while I was a musician and we had a son, [10:08] and my son was six years old, [10:11] but as he played on the floor with a toy car one Sunday morning as his mother and I listened to a TV interview with Margaret Thatcher talking vaguely about repatriation — voluntary, of course — [10:29] my son looked up and said, “Are they going to send mummy back to Jamaica?” [10:36] He could see what she was saying was, “We’re going to get rid of the coloureds.” [10:42] I thought, this is so horrible. Somehow I’ve got to escape from this culture, from this country. [10:51] And one day, yet another pure piece of luck here, one day the phone rang and Fritz Newmeyer, well-known linguist already, who I had met in Edinburgh at a linguistics association conference and kept in friendly touch with ever since, [11:11] was on the phone from Seattle, Washington, asking if I would like the idea of being a visiting professor at the University of Washington for six months. [11:22] I said, “I’ll take it!” [11:25] You’re meant to negotiate. [11:26] I just said, “Fritz, yes, I’ll come. Get me out of here.” [11:31] And by 1980 I was a College Visiting Professor at the University of Washington. [11:38] I had published quite a bit, and that’s why I was known well enough. [11:42] During that year, a job came up at the University of California’s Santa Cruz campus, where Jorge Hankamer was beginning to form a linguistics department from almost nothing, and he advertised a post for a syntactician. [12:01] His idea was, form a cluster of people who can talk to each other and really have a specialism. [12:10] Don’t just hire one of every kind of linguist there is at first. [12:14] Build a department on some solid research and collaboration. [12:18] So although he was a syntactician, he wanted to hire another one, and he knew me already from my work and from correspondence, [12:28] so I interviewed at Santa Cruz and got the job. [12:32] So by 1981, in the summer of 1981, I was an Assistant… Associate Professor at UC Santa Cruz because my publications were now sufficient that they had given me a tenured position from the start. [12:48] Another piece of fantastic luck. [12:51] So, I think, so far the bottom line of all this is, I had numerous pieces of extraordinary luck, and I wouldn’t advise anybody to imagine that things I did were a good idea or a way that you could get into academic life. [13:13] It was just totally wacky and strange and coincidental, and I’ve been very, very lucky. [13:22] I’ve taken you from being a high school dropout in South London… [13:25] JMc: Yeah. [13:26] GP: To being an Associate Professor at UC Santa Cruz through a path that nobody else could follow, and I wouldn’t recommend it… [13:34] JMc: Yeah. [13:35] GP: And it shouldn’t really have happened, but it did. [13:38] JMc: Yeah. [13:39] GP: From then on, Santa Cruz turned out to be a wonderful place to build a career. [13:44] Hankamer’s project to build a new Department of Linguistics succeeded. [13:50] It was not like Pete Gage’s attempt to build the Ram Jam Band. [13:54] This became really successful. [13:56] By the time we had a PhD program and were producing graduate students with PhDs in 1991 onward, we were already ranked in the top 10 in at least one survey of linguistics departments in the USA. [14:15] UMass Amherst tended to be right at the top. [14:19] MIT was always up there. [14:22] UCLA was great, but for Santa Cruz to have got into the top 10 was just quite an amazing result. [14:29] And almost every year, another hire was made, [14:34] so one by one, we were joined by Judith Aissen, and Bill Ladusaw, and Jim Mccloskey, and Sandra Chung, and Junko Ito, Armin Mester, Jaye Padgett and so on, Donka Farkas. [14:51] All of these people had real research careers, but also a real enthusiasm for undergraduate teaching was what we had started with. [15:01] So the most unusual thing about Santa Cruz was that it was founded on enthusiastic and rigorous undergraduate teaching and built a PhD program on the top of that later. [15:15] That’s the exact opposite of what happened at places like UC San Diego, [15:21] where it started with research institutes, began with some graduate programs to give the researchers someone to teach, [15:31] and gradually built undergraduate programs below that, as it were, and turned into a fine campus, much bigger than Santa Cruz and much more successful in research. [15:44] The difficulty at Santa Cruz was trying to keep research alive on a small campus that was dominated by undergraduates and just couldn’t bring in the biggest grants. [15:58] There was no way little Santa Cruz could get a training centre like UCLA could get, or an institute for theoretical physics like Santa Barbara could get, or Nobel Prizes like Berkeley could get. [16:13] JMc: But there are no Nobel Prizes in linguistics. [16:15] GP: That’s right, and once Joan Maling had suggested the idea to me that I should start writing opinion columns about linguistics, [16:26] I think she suggested that in 1987, I wrote a Topic Comment column for that series on how there are no Nobel Prizes in linguistics, no trips to Stockholm for us, [16:45] but meanwhile in the other big subjects — where Santa Cruz often did reasonably well, considering how small it was — things were very different. [16:54] At Berkeley, more Nobel Prizes were awarded to the faculty than the Soviet Union achieved in its entire history, and that was just one campus of what is now a 10-campus system, [17:09] so the high-ups at the University of California used to point out that the full 10-campus University of California is unquestionably the greatest public university the world has ever seen. [17:25] And I had had the good luck to just happen to be at the smallest but also the prettiest campus of the world’s greatest public university. [17:36] It was like there wasn’t much chance of a way up from there. [17:40] I had been so fortunate that surely nothing else was going to happen. [17:45] I would just eventually die there and my ashes would be scattered on the Monterey Bay. [17:50] That’s what I thought until 2006 when, for various complicated reasons, I decided to just put in an application for a couple of chairs in Britain to see how it went. [18:06] As a result of that, I was interviewed and introduced to the University of Edinburgh and found that my then-wife, the philosopher Barbara Scholz, [18:19] was completely correct when she described Edinburgh as the most intellectually lively place she’d ever been in. [18:28] It was fantastic. The visit was so great. [18:31] When I was offered the professorship of general linguistics at Edinburgh, [18:36] I finally realised I actually am going to leave Santa Cruz, and I did, in 2007. [18:43] I moved from Santa Cruz to Edinburgh. [18:46] People say all the time, they said, “Oh, but the weather.” [18:50] Now, it’s true. [18:51] Santa Cruz has glorious climate. [18:54] The weather, to put it simply, is approximately the same as you get in heaven. [18:59] Warm sunshine, cool air from the Pacific Ocean. [19:03] It’s gorgeous. [19:05] JMc: But you haven’t been to heaven yet, have you? [19:07] And do you think you’ll ever get there? [laughs] [19:09] GP: I’m quite confident that it has the weather that… [19:12] JMc: Yeah. GP: … Santa Cruz has. [19:14] JMc: Yeah. GP: It just seems obvious. [19:17] Now, what they don’t tell you in the brochures about Santa Cruz is that it can be different at some times of the year. [19:25] When you see the January storms and it’s cold and wet and high winds are blowing in atmospheric rivers off the Pacific Ocean, it can get pretty awful. [19:36] And in Edinburgh that happens a lot right through the winter. [19:41] But what I found after arriving in Edinburgh was, it simply didn’t matter. [19:46] I wrapped a warmer coat around me and laughed at the weather. [19:51] I thought, yes, the weather is trying to make me go away. [19:56] But I’m not going to. [19:58] This is the best. [20:00] Because Edinburgh, I think, has the most remarkable collection of language scientists I know of in any university in the world. [20:10] I’ve never seen anything like it. [20:11] It’s hard to count because of the huge numbers of postdocs working in the Informatics Forum next door and definition of psycholinguistics and so on, [20:22] but I think it’s in the region of 60 full-time researchers who actually got some profile in the subject between the four departments that are relevant: linguistics, psychology, philosophy, and informatics. [20:40] It’s extraordinary, and there’s just always stuff going on, as you know. [20:45] So I actually found somewhere to go from Santa Cruz that was a promotion. [20:54] Once again, quite a bit of luck was involved. [20:57] By 2007, I think I was best known for the contributions I’d made between 1995 and 2002 to the making of the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, which is the biggest thing in my research career, for sure. [21:14] Rodney Huddleston invited me in when he found that his big plan for such a grammar was foundering. [21:23] The team he had originally put together in Australia were just not coming up with the stuff. [21:29] It was all falling apart, [21:30] and Cambridge University Press said, “You’ve got to do something,” and suggested me as a possible collaborator, [21:38] so in 1996, for good or ill, and I didn’t know if it was going to work out at that time, I started spending every northern summer in Australia working with Rodney Huddleston on the Cambridge Grammar. [21:54] I would fly out round about the end of June to arrive in Queensland on the coldest day of its year. [22:01] JMc: Which must have been like 30 degrees, right? [22:03] GP: It can get freezing cold… JMc: Yes. [22:05] GP: …and they haven’t built the houses for dealing with that. [22:08] So by the… I did that for five years straight. [22:12] By the time I was 55, I had seen 60 winters, which worried me a bit because I thought, [22:21] I wonder if they count down to your death in winters or in actual calendar years. [22:27] But despite the long, hard days of 12-hour days of working from dark dawn to dark dusk in the cold and fog of Queensland, Australia with Rodney Huddleston, who was a ruthless taskmaster, but also a very good friend, [22:48] we did get the Cambridge Grammar together, and Rodney reckons it couldn’t have been done without the drive and help with connection to theoretical linguistics that I provided. [23:04] He was certainly the major force, though, and I always refer to the Cambridge Grammar as Rodney Huddleston’s greatest achievement. [23:12] I was a kind of first lieutenant helping him out in various ways, but it was his vision and his hard work that really got it through. [23:23] It’s an extraordinary work of scholarship, the biggest thing I’ve ever contributed to. [23:31] I was proud to have my name on it, [23:33] and I think the University of Edinburgh was canny enough to see that if they hired me within five years of its publication, they’d have their name on it, sort of. [laughs] [23:48] So it was because of that visibility that I got hired at Edinburgh, [23:56] and that was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, where going to Santa Cruz was the second best. [24:06] JMc: One last thing that you might want to talk about is, do you think that linguistics, which is the field that you have dedicated so much of your working life and mental energy to, [24:19] do you think that linguistics is anything more than just a sort of intellectual pastime? [24:25] Like, it’s definitely very interesting, but do you think it actually matters? [24:29] I mean, I think you even wrote a book once, didn’t you? [24:31] Linguistics: Why It Matters. [24:32] GP: That’s another interesting story. [24:35] The story of the book Linguistics: Why It Matters. [24:39] I was asked by Polity Press of Cambridge, England, to do that book. [24:46] They told me how long it should be, what it should be called, what style it should be in. [24:51] Everything about the book was fixed. [24:54] And I thought, I like that idea. [24:56] I like writing, and I like writing to order on a particular topic with them in control. [25:03] I can do that. [25:04] It’s a bit like being a session musician, which I did to a very small extent in the 1960s. [25:10] It’s somebody else’s idea and project and so on, but you just do your bit and contribute to it. [25:16] So I contributed to their Why It Matters series and wrote what I could about why linguistics matters to anything. [25:27] And I really hope it does, [25:30] but I wouldn’t want to give the impression that I’m completely confident of that. [25:36] My own work in linguistics… And I was worried that you might ask me to talk about the coherence of my overall oeuvre, the thread that links everything I’ve ever done, and of course, there isn’t one. [25:51] I have been… It would be reasonable to criticize me for having been too miscellaneous in the things I did, [25:58] because I liked all of it. [25:59] I wasn’t one of these syntacticians who couldn’t bear phonology. [26:03] I thought I’d be a phonologist at one point. [26:05] I liked phonetics a lot. [26:07] I taught practical phonetics a dozen times at Santa Cruz. [26:12] I did all kinds of things because they seemed appealing to me at the time, [26:17] and now I look back on 50 years of publishing in linguistics and teaching it to large undergraduate audiences a lot of the time, [26:26] and I worry that little has emerged from it that truly helps to feed the chickens, as they say. [26:37] The obvious thing that was supposed to come out of it, as I always believed, was natural language processing, [26:48] that we would finally get big-scale grammars formalized accurately and parsers that really worked and get them tuned up so they worked fast, [27:00] and translators that, from a full structure of a sentence, could work out what its literal meaning must be, [27:10] and artificial intelligence handling the business of the pragmatics, [27:16] and we would have proper natural language processing. [27:19] And what did we get? [27:21] We got large language models: [27:23] huge, expensive algorithms that have the knack of constructing strings that are the sort of strings it might seem you would like, given what your prompt was. [27:40] It’s hard to explain this, but this is my best shot at it. [27:44] Given a prompt which has all sorts of clues as to what you’re interested in, their task is to build a string of letters, one by one, that is of the sort that it seems, from their training data, you might like. [28:00] Truth has nothing to do with it. [28:04] Meaning has nothing to do with it. [28:06] There is no parsing. [28:08] The fact that the grammar produced by large language models like ChatGPT comes out so smoothly and surprisingly without errors is an extraordinary discovery, [28:24] and I believe Steven Piantadosi is absolutely right when he points out it really means that the argument from poverty of the stimulus is completely unsound in the first place. [28:37] It isn’t true that you cannot learn most of English grammar down to fine detail from mere exposure to raw data. [28:46] You obviously can. [28:48] ChatGPT did it. [28:50] But there’s no linguistics in it. [28:53] So the one area that I would have thought, — and it’s Chapter Five of my book, Linguistics: Why It Matters, [29:00] which I now want to sort of recall, bring in all of the copies and burn them, [29:05] because my Chapter Five is now nonsense. [29:09] You read it. [29:11] Well, let’s just say it shows every sign of the truth, which is that it was written mainly in December 2017, [29:19] just before ChatGPT was released. [29:22] Five years after that, it looks ridiculous. [29:24] I’ve got to rewrite Chapter Five for a second edition of that book and talk about LLMs, [29:32] and it’s not going to be pretty, because they are a menace. [29:37] So with the most important thing that could have provided a proper application for linguistics suddenly gone, at least for a while, because people have formed the insane idea that LLMs will do it just as well and so we can use them instead. [29:56] It’s a terrible idea, but that’s what people think. [30:00] JMc: So you think it’s an illusion, the output that you’re getting from LLMs at the moment? [30:04] GP: Oh, yeah, completely. [30:06] People are deluding themselves. [30:07] It’s the ELIZA phenomenon of people thinking, because strings of the sort they like to see are coming out, that there must be a mind back there that is producing them. [30:18] JMC: But what do you think will have to happen for the spell to be broken? [30:22] GP: Complete collapse of the AI bubble, [30:27] the whole industry with its extraordinary hundreds of billions of dollars of investment. [30:35] More than that, I think. [30:36] They’re talking in trillions. [30:39] It will all have to collapse in an embarrassing shambles, and we will have to pick up the pieces. [30:48] All sorts of things about a careful study of linguistics are still important, [30:54] like a basic understanding of sociolinguistics for teachers, [30:59] so that they don’t perpetrate the nonsense about if you speak that way, it means you’re stupid. You should speak like this instead. [31:10] Foreign language learning is informed by linguistics to a considerable extent. [31:17] That’s going to continue to be important. [31:20] There are connections to all sorts of other subjects. [31:24] But for me, the idea of natural language processing of the real kind was going to be the thing that made linguistics fundamentally important, [31:38] and for now, that has just been wiped away. [31:43] Departments of computational linguistics have turned into departments of large language models. [31:49] I don’t like to think that I spent 50 years doing entertaining intellectual things that in the end didn’t amount to much of a contribution to society. [32:03] I would sort of hope it was more than that, but the generations that come after us will have to decide on that. [32:14] JMc: [laughs] OK. [32:16] GP: I expect to be judged after my death and preferably not before. [32:21] JMc: OK. [laughs] [32:22] Well, with that thought, thank you very much for the interview. [32:26] GP: Been nice to be with you, James. [32:28]

In this interview, we talk to Philip Kraut about the brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, their scholarly contributions and political engagement. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 46 See Wikisource for scans of the Grimms’ original works: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Br%C3%BCder_Grimm https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Jacob_Grimm https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Grimm DWB – Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen (Ed.). 1965–2018. Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. Neubearbeitung. Vol. 1–9. Stuttgart: Hirzel. (www.woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB2/) Beck, Heinrich, Herbert Jankuhn, Hans Kuhn, Kurt Ranke, Reinhard Wenskus, Heiko Steuer et al. (Eds.), Rosemarie Müller (editorial team) & Johannes Hoops (founder). 1973–2008. Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. Vol. 1–35. Index Vol. 1–2. 2. ed. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter. (https://www.degruyter.com/database/gao/html) Bluhm, Lothar & Stefan Neuhaus (Eds.). Handbuch Märchen. Berlin 2023. (https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-66803-0) Denecke, Ludwig. 1971. Jacob Grimm und sein Bruder Wilhelm. Stuttgart: Metzler. Diez, Friedrich. 1836–1844. Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen. Vol. 1–3. Bonn: Weber. (https://books.google.de/books?id=5dgTAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=de&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false) DWB. 1854–1961 – Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm. Vol. 1–16 (32 Subvolumes). Leipzig: Hirzel. Quellenverzeichnis. 1971. Leipzig: Hirzel (http://woerterbuchnetz.de/DWB/) Friemel, Berthold; Vinzenz Hoppe, Philip Kraut, Holger Ehrhardt und Roman Alexander Barton (Eds.), im Anschluss an Wilhelm Braun und Ludwig Denecke. 2022. Briefwechsel der Brüder Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm mit Johann Martin Lappenberg, Friedrich Lisch und Georg Waitz. Stuttgart: Hirzel, Jacob Grimm’s political letter: 772, Nr. 46. Grimm, Jacob. 1819–1840. Deutsche Grammatik. Vol. 1–4. Göttingen: Dieterich. Grimm, Jacob. 1828. Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer. Göttingen: Dieterich. Grimm, Jacob. 1834. Reinhart Fuchs. Berlin: Reimer. Grimm, Jacob. 1835. Deutsche Mythologie. Göttingen: Dieterich. Grimm, Jacob. 1838. Jacob Grimm über seine Entlassung. Basel: Schweighauser. Grimm, Jacob. 1843. Notizheft N. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nachlass Grimm 294. (https://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB00032DCD00000000) Grimm, Jacob; Wilhelm Grimm (Eds.). 1812. Kinder- und Hausmärchen. [Vol. 1]. Berlin: Reimer. (Several volumes and editions: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Kinder-_und_Hausm%C3%A4rchen) Grimm, Wilhelm (Ed.). 1838. Ruolandes liet. Göttingen: Dieterich. Grimm, Wilhelm. 1824–1825. Handschriftliches kulturgeschichtliches Lexikon in zwei Bänden. Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Nachlass Grimm 210. (https://resolver.staatsbibliothek-berlin.de/SBB0003411000000000) Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1877–1913. Sämmtliche Werke. Ed. by Bernhard Suphan. Vol. 1–33. Berlin: Weidmann. (https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/Johann_Gottfried_Herder) Kraut, Philip. 2023. Die Arbeitsweise der Brüder Grimm. Stuttgart: Hirzel. (https://biblioscout.net/book/99.140005/9783777633954). Kraut, Philip. 2023. „Nahe Fremde. Über August Wilhelm von Schlegels Vergleich altdeutscher und altindischer Literatur (Herzog Ernst, Ramayana).“ In Wirkendes Wort 73: 207–221. Kraut, Philip. 2023. „Wilhelm Grimm kritisiert Homer. Literaturhistorische Etymologie am Beispiel der Sage von Polyphem.“ In Wirkendes Wort 73: 411–436. Martus, Steffen. 2009. Die Brüder Grimm. Eine Biographie. Berlin: Rowohlt. Verhandlungen der Germanisten zu Frankfurt am Main am 24., 25. und 26. September 1846. Frankfurt am Main: Sauerländer 1847.

In this interview, we talk to Beijia Chen about the citation networks binding the Neogrammarians as a school. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 45 Amsterdamska, Olga. 1985. “Institutions and Schools of Thought: The Neogrammarians.” American Journal of Sociology 91: 332–358. 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. Fangerau, Heiner & Klaus Hentschel. 2018. “Netzwerkanalysen in der Medizin- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte – Zur Einführung.” Sudhoffs Archiv 102 (2): 133–145. Fleck, Ludwik. 1980 [1935]. Entstehung und Entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen Tatsache. Einführung in die Lehre vom Denkstil und Denkkollektiv. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. 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. Harnack, Adolf von. 1905. “Vom Großbetrieb der Wissenschaft.” Preußische Jahrbücher 119: 193–201. 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. 19th and 20th 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. Price, Derek J. de Solla. 1963. Little Science, Big Science. New York & London: Columbia University Press. Price, Derek J. de Solla. 1965. “Networks of Scientific Papers.” Science 149 (No. 3683): 510–515. 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]

In this interview, we talk to Ian Stewart about modern ideas surrounding the Celts and how these relate to historical-comparative linguistics. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 44 Crump, Margaret, James Cowles Prichard of the Red Lodge: A Life of Science during the Age of Improvement (Nebraska, 2025). Davies, Caryl, Adfeilion Babel: Agweddau ar Syniadaeth Ieithyddol y Ddeunawfed Ganrif (Caerdydd, 2000). Droixhe, Daniel, La Linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire (1600-1800): rationalisme et révolutions positivistes (Geneva, 1978). Lhuyd, Edward, Archaeologia Britannica: Vol. 1 Glossography (Oxford, 1707). Pezron, Paul-Yves, Antiquité de la nation et de la langue des Celtes, autrement appellez Gaulois (Paris, 1703). Pictet, Adolph, ‘Lettres à M. A.W. de Schlegel sur l’affinité des langues celtiques avec le sanscrit’, Journal asiatique 3.1 (1836), 263-90, 417-448; 3.2 (1836), 440-66. Poppe, Erich, ‘Lag es in der Luft?: Johann Kaspar Zeuß und die Konstituierung der Keltologie’, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 2 (1992), 41-56. Prichard, James Cowles, The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations: Proved by a Comparison of their Dialects with the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic Languages (London, 1831) Roberts, Brynley F., Edward Lhwyd: c.1660-1709, Naturalist, Antiquary, Philologist (Cardiff, 2022). Shaw, Francis, ‘The Background to Grammatica Celtica’, Celtica 3 (1956), 1-16. Sims-Williams, Patrick, Ancient Celtic Place-Names in Europe and Asia Minor (Oxford, 2006). Sims-Williams, Patrick, ‘An Alternative to “Celtic from the East” and “Celtic from the West”’, Cambridge Archaeological Journal 30 (2020), 511-29. Solleveld, Floris, ‘Expanding the Comparative View: Humboldt’s Über die Kawi-Sprache and its language materials’, Historiographia Linguistica 47 (2020), 49-78. Stewart, Ian, The Celts: A Modern History (Princeton, 2025). Stewart, Ian, ‘After Sir William Jones: British Linguistic Scholarship and European Intellectual History’, Journal of Modern History 95 (2023), 808-846. Stewart, Ian, ‘James Cowles Prichard and the Linguistic Foundations of Ethnology’, Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte 46 (2023), 76-91. Van Hal, Toon, ‘Moedertalen en taalmoeders’. Het vroegmoderne taalvergelijkende onderzoek in de Lage Landen (Brussels, 2010). Van Hal, Toon, ‘When Quotation Marks Matter: Rhellicanus and Boxhornius on the differences between the lingua Gallica and lingua Germanica’, Historiographia Linguistica 38 (2011), 241-52. Van Hal, Toon, ‘From Alauda to Zythus. The emergence and uses of Old-Gaulish word lists in early modern publications’, Keltische Forschungen 6 (2014), 219-77. 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. [00:21] Today we’re talking to Ian Stewart, who’s a historian of Britain and Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries and a researcher at the University of Edinburgh. [00:32] Ian’s latest book, The Celts: A Modern History, is coming out in March 2025 with Princeton University Press. [00:42] In this book, Ian offers a path-breaking, and at the same time magisterial, account of how the modern notion of the Celtic nations took shape. [00:51] Linguistic evidence and theorizing, as Ian shows in his book, played no small part in these developments. [00:58] Ian’s also looked at the early history of historical-comparative linguistics in Britain and suggested some key revisions to the standard narrative of how this field took root there. [01:10] The stories of the modern notion of the Celts and of early historical-comparative linguistics in Britain have many points of contact, and this is what Ian will be talking to us about today. [01:21] So, Ian, who are the Celts? [01:23] What was the significance of identifying the so-called Celtic nations in the modern period? [01:30] IS: Hi, James. [01:32] As you know, I’m a big fan of the podcast, and so it’s really exciting to be here. [01:36] Who are the Celts? [01:38] Well, that depends on who you ask and when. [01:42] It’s a question that’s been asked in many different ways over the last two and a half thousand years, at least. [01:48] To begin with, the Celts are a people who started to be mentioned in classical sources in about 500 BCE. [01:56] Herodotus, for example, refers to them as a people living somewhere in Western Europe. [02:02] In the 4th century BCE, people like Plato and Aristotle refer to them as a warlike people. [02:07] This is especially after a Celtic group sacked Rome in about 387 BCE, and then 100 years later, another group invaded the Balkans. [02:18] And so, you see, the Celts remained the steady presence as a bellicose people somewhere in Europe, but they became sort of less feared as the Romans grew in power. [02:30] Caesar’s famous Gallic Wars, obviously written in the middle of the 1st century BCE, is about the conquest of Gaul, one of whose parts is called Celtica. [02:40] And so, as we move into the first few centuries of the Common Era, references to the Celts start to become fewer, and by 500 CE, you know, they stop altogether. [02:49] So, to sum up, basically, from the classical sources, the Celts are a barbarian people who were fearsome enemies, with their own complicated social, cultural, and religious structures, who feature strongly in the literary record between about 500 BCE and 500 CE. [03:08] The details about this group, or groups, are really hazy. [03:12] They’ve been argued about in all sorts of different ways. [03:15] We don’t know, you know, how much sort of common identification among groups there was, but what we can basically say is that there were people speaking Celtic languages in most of Western and Central Europe, including Britain and Ireland, modern France, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Central Europe, Southern Germany, and as far east as Anatolia. [03:38] And so even though the Celts didn’t have their own literary cultures, and even though the historical record left by classical writers is pretty imperfect, the Celts left behind all sorts of evidence — including linguistic evidence, as you alluded to — that later scholars would make use of to construct this picture that we now have. [03:56] Now, why they become important in the modern period is, basically, they become rediscovered during the Renaissance [04:04] — when the predominant approach to history was genealogical, and the origins of nations, regions, cities, dynasties, all sorts of institutions, take on huge importance in establishing legitimacy — [04:19] and so scholars devoted considerable energy in tracing the migrations and conquests of ancient peoples [04:26] in order to give their own nation, or whoever they were writing for, a prestigious pedigree. [04:32] And basically, because of what I just mentioned about their extensive presence in the classical sources, and through their close association with the Gauls especially, the Celts retained this important place in the historical imagination. [04:45] So basically, from the early modern period, it’s off to the races, and they become claimed as prestigious ancestors in all of the countries I mentioned. [04:56] And so, my book is basically about this Celticism, which is basically why people in different places around Europe, from the early modern era to the present, have answered the question, who are the Celts and the way that they did, usually in favor of their own nation. [05:12] They’re usually trying to claim the Celts as their particular special ancestor, and the wranglings over the Celts basically change… [05:23] I sort of say that they’re determined by… basically, that these pictures of national images of ancestry change as a result of scholarly imperatives, but also political imperatives. [05:35] So it’s not just that nations are invented from scratch. [05:39] You know, in the modern period, as some of the literature, some of the classical literature — you know, classical in terms of history of modern nations and nationalism — basically, nation builders work with materials at hand. [05:50] But at the same time, scholars are often nation builders, and their political commitments shape their scholarship. [05:56] JMc: And why is genealogy the dominant model for nation building in this period? [06:02] Why is the key thing to trace your nation back to a particular set of ancestors? [06:08] IS: Basically, I think it’s a pretty simple equation that primacy was really important, so being the first people somewhere, having had, you know, the most extensive territory or the most glorious conquest. [06:25] And so basically, pedigree meant prestige, and we have to remember that before the rise of modern scholarship, you know, before modern historical linguistics, archaeology, folklore I suppose, and things like that, you’re basically working with the classical sources, [06:43] and so if a people is mentioned extensively in the classical sources, like the Celts are, there’s a lot more you can do with that. [06:50] JMc: So you mentioned that the Celts left behind a certain amount of linguistic evidence. [06:55] How much of a role did this linguistic evidence play in the modern project of constructing Celtic identity, and was it the main kind of evidence, or was archaeological evidence just as important, for example? [07:09] IS: Things change over time, but I would argue that language has been the most important and consistent thread in tracing the history of the Celts over the last five centuries. [07:20] Basically, linguistics is crucial in the Celtic case for two reasons. [07:26] The first is that it’s only through linguistic scholarship that the entirety of the modern Celtic family was recognized, [07:33] so in other words, that the speakers of the two linguistic branches — so Welsh, Breton, and Cornish speakers — are related to speakers of Irish, Scots Gaelic, and Manx Gaelic. [07:46] And that’s realized about 1700. [07:48] And the second is that it was only through comparative linguistics that the Celtic nations were recognized to be a part of the wider Indo-European family, as opposed to an indigenous population that was pushed further west by invading Romans or Goths, etc. [08:05] And so I can unpack those two things for you. [08:08] On the first point about providing a more holistic picture of the Celts, the interesting thing is that in the early modern period, neither the Welsh nor the Irish, their dominant linguistic tradition isn’t thought to be Celtic, and they actually weren’t thought to be related to each other, and I think this is particularly striking because these are probably now seen as two of the most Celtic nations. [08:32] But basically, native Irish tradition held that the language derived from the ruins of Babel, where the best parts of all languages were cobbled together, and then taken by the Scythians, who became the Scots, to Egypt, Spain, and then Ireland. [08:46] And it’s really complicated, but the point is that it definitely wasn’t Celtic. [08:50] Meanwhile, Welsh tradition held that it derived from Hebrew. [08:54] So before the 18th century, the Celts are sort of most associated with Gaul, and therefore France, and more surprisingly, with Germany. [09:02] So Toon Van Hal has shown how French and German humanists argued over what language Gaulish really was, and which of their modern vernaculars was closest to it, and so the languages of Britain and Ireland aren’t really into the picture. [09:16] It’s more of a Continental argument until about the end of the 17th century, and in fact, no classical sources refer explicitly to the inhabitants of Britain and Ireland as Celts. [09:28] But basically, the important thing that happened was that Caesar had actually described many of the cultural links between Gaul and Britain, and one of those that he’d mentioned was language. [09:37] So as soon as scholars in the early modern period started to get their hands on Welsh vocabularies, they were able to trace links between the few Gaulish words that they had and Welsh, [09:49] and the person who provided the most crucial work was the Dutch scholar Marc van Boxhorn, who recorded that he was so pleased to receive a Welsh dictionary that he kissed it. [09:59] And if the ancient Celts spoke Gaulish, the thinking went, and, according to Caesar, the ancient Britons spoke a similar, if not the same, language as the Gauls, then because Welsh was descended from the language of the ancient Britons, it was probably Celtic too. [10:16] And it was already recognized that Breton and Cornish were related to Welsh, so they all became seen as this cohesive group with likely ties to the ancient Gauls or Celts. [10:26] This is hammered home increasingly towards the end of the 17th century, especially by a Breton monk named Paul-Yves Pezron, who got many things wrong but really succeeded in driving that point home. [10:38] But at this point… [10:39] So in the 1690s, the Brittonic languages and the Gaelic languages were still seen as unrelated. [10:46] The key move here was made by a Welsh scholar named Edward Lhuyd. [10:50] He’s a real hero in Celtic studies. [10:53] He travelled around Britain and Ireland doing fieldwork for several years at the turn of the 18th century, and he actually recorded words from speakers of these languages and drew up vocabularies. [11:06] So in late 1699, he had composed a comparative vocabulary of Welsh, Irish and English words, and there he noted that there were a number of sound correspondences, and the most famous of these is the P and C or Q distinction in Celtic. [11:23] And this is a quote from Lhuyd. [11:24] He said, “I cannot find the Irish have a word purely their own that begins with a P and yet have almost all of ours which they constantly begin with a C.” [11:36] So some of the classic examples of this distinction are pen and ceann (so pen is Welsh for “head,” and ceann is obviously Irish) or pedwar and cathair, which is the number four. [11:50] But it can also be mac, which is the Irish word for “son,” and mab, which is the Welsh word. [11:56] This is now called the P and Q Celtic distinction, and this gave rise to the terrible joke that Celticists have to mind their P’s and Q’s. [12:05] But so it was Lhuyd’s achievement to show that these two branches of language were related and could be referred to as Celtic. [12:16] And so for the second part, connecting the Celts to the Indo-European family, it was comparative philology, obviously, that did this. [12:23] And so after the Celts become established as this cohesive group, there are still lots of opinions flying around in the 18th century. [12:32] We’re still in the era before comparative and historical linguistics became a cohesive discipline with recognized principles and dogmas, really, if you like, [12:42] and actually, some people might have recognized that the Celts were a distinctive family, but they started to doubt whether it was a family that belonged to the larger Indo-European family, because the Celtic languages have some strange features. [12:57] Its vocabulary is quite different. Its grammar also seems strange. [13:02] So, most obviously, it’s a VSO grammatical system, so verb, subject, object. [13:07] It also has, and this is probably the most famous thing, a system of initial mutations where the first sound of a word changes based on its grammatical function in relation to the word before it. [13:18] This can be for grammatical purposes or just euphony. [13:22] And so some people doubted that together these features could be reconciled with the other Indo-European languages, and people like A. W. Schlegel, so no mean philologist, was someone who doubted the position of Celtic. [13:36] And just to make a long story short, in the 1830s, three works were published by the English scholar James Cowles Prichard, by the Genevan Adolph Pictet, and by the German Franz Bopp, who published work explaining these differences and showing how they fit within the European… Indo-European framework. [13:55] Prichard compared Welsh and Sanskrit, Pictet, Gaelic and Sanskrit, and Bopp showed the principles and operation behind the initial mutations, and so these three works together definitively established that the Celtic languages were Indo-European, and therefore that the Celtic race, as it was starting to be called at this time, was part of that larger Indo-European family or race. [14:17] JMc: So one of the key figures that you mentioned just there was the Englishman James Cowles Prichard. [14:23] So what exactly was his contribution to demonstrating that the Celtic languages are part of the larger Indo-European family, and how exactly did his proof work, and what methods did he use to construct it, [14:37] and did he have any priority over any of the other scholars working at the time on the problem of Celtic as an Indo-European language? [14:46] IS: That’s a really, really interesting question, one that I’ve worked on for a long time. [14:51] I think he… [14:52] Well, he was someone that was overlooked both in Celtic studies and in the history of Celtic philology, and therefore in the history of Celticism. [15:00] He’s most recognized for having been Europe’s leading ethnologist, so kind of the first phase of anthropology. [15:08] He’s like a physical and cultural anthropologist, but really his largest concern was to ensure that the Celtic nations were — in this instance, his largest concern — was to show that they were part of the Indo-European family for two reasons. [15:23] The first one is biblical orthodoxy. [15:25] He was raised a Quaker, he converted to Anglicanism, but he still obviously adheres to the biblical account. [15:32] And the second reason is that he’s Welsh. [15:34] His mother was descended from a Welsh family, at least is what I think we know, but accounts kind of differ on this. [15:41] Some say that he could speak Welsh with his patients, where he was a physician in Bristol, but it’s clear that he could read Welsh, and he was connected to Welsh cultural circles. [15:50] But the thing that I think that’s most interesting about him in this case is that he was recognizing the sort of the full import both of the Indo-European idea, and of the possibilities for comparative philology, before the major developments in Germany, above all. [16:06] So in 1813, he said that “[i]t’s only an essential affinity in the structure and genius of languages that demonstrates a common origin. [16:15] This sort of relationship exists in the Sanskrit, the ancient Zend, as well as the modern Persic, Greek, Latin, Germanic dialects; and is found, though not to the same extent, in the Celtic and Slavonic.” [16:26] And so basically, what you have there is a pretty clear paraphrase of the philologer passage from William Jones. [16:34] So I think Prichard comes to that as… [16:36] That’s an early conclusion, both in the context of Celtic comparative philology, and I think in the history of comparative philology writ large, but basically, he puts off… [16:47] He says he’s going to publish a work about the Celtic and Slavonic dialects, as he calls them, but he puts this off until 1831. [16:55] He did publish an essay in 1815 where he showed some of these proofs that would appear in his later work, but these were mostly just comparative vocabulary, [17:06] but once you see everything that he puts together, it’s pretty clear that this needs to be explained, and that if it’s not borrowing, you know… [17:17] If it’s borrowing, then there’s a lot of explaining to do, because there is a ton of similarity, but what he eventually does is, he shows some of the grammatical similarities in 1831. [17:28] So he shows that verbs — that’s his main point of evidence — he shows that verbs are conjugated in the Celtic languages in essentially the same way as we’re familiar with in, you know, with the Indo-European languages. [17:40] He shows that verb endings come from abbreviated pronouns, and he’s really riffing off of the work of Franz Bopp here. [17:48] But Prichard was working with modern Welsh, and so he couldn’t really construct a historical grammar in the way that Grimm had for German, but his vocabulary proofs, like I said, are very convincing. [17:59] And Grimm himself announced as soon as he read this work that he had decided… that Prichard had shown this was Indo-European. [18:06] Now, at the same time, Adolph Pictet is working in Geneva on a proof using mainly Irish and Scots Gaelic to show similarities with Sanskrit, and he’s really targeting A. W. Schlegel, and he publishes this proof in a series of three open letters. [18:22] And it’s really funny, Pictet definitely owned Prichard’s work because his copy exists in the Cornell Library, but he never references him, and just over 20 years later, he writes to an Irish scholar who is reviewing a work by Johann Kaspar Zeuss, who wrote the first historical grammar of the Celtic languages. [18:43] This Irish reviewer had written that Zeuss proved the Celtic languages to be Indo-European, and Pictet actually wrote that, “No, no, no, I showed this many years ago, and it’s not fair that you’re saying it was Zeuss.” [18:58] So it’s ironic because Pictet was himself being unfair to Prichard. [19:02] And so, while I think Prichard is recognized to some extent in the 19th century, once we get to the 20th century he’s really written out of the story for reasons that we’re familiar with in the history of linguistics: because as soon as someone’s proof is superseded, they become basically dismissed. [19:21] And so I think part of what I’ve tried to do is recover Prichard both for Celtic studies and for the history of linguistics as part of this sort of new narrative… well, a revision to the standard narrative that you said earlier about what’s happening in the field, and he’s a good example of how approaching the history of the subject in this way can show new things, I think. [19:43] JMc: So Prichard’s been forgotten in the standard narrative that we tell these days about the history of historical-comparative linguistics. [19:53] How does restoring him to his proper place in this narrative challenge this received story that we usually tell in the history of linguistics? [20:03] IS: Well, basically, I focus on Prichard because he’s the best linguist out of all the British scholars I’ve worked on, but he actually comes at the end of this line of scholars in Britain who realized the significance of the Indo-European idea well before the sort of German developments. [20:26] And they were all Scots, actually, except for Prichard, though he studied at the University of Edinburgh, and I think that’s really important, because it’s the Edinburgh Review where a lot of this stuff is aired. [20:37] And so this is significant for a couple reasons, one of which is that the history of comparative philology or historical-comparative linguistics in Britain hasn’t really moved on from Hans Aarsleff’s book in 1967, The Study of Language in England, and there, you know, he includes some Scottish developments as part of the English story. [20:59] But so basically, what I’ve tried to do is add Scottish scholars to the picture, and also tried to show that, against Aarsleff’s narrative, that there were people aware of basically the importance of the Indo-European idea, and what comparative philology could do, well before the 1830s, but they were all doing different things with it. [21:21] So Alexander Hamilton, who’s famous for having taught Friedrich Schlegel, he constructed a comparative vocabulary in 1810 in the Edinburgh Review, which Prichard then picked up on, but he was more of a philologist than a comparative philologist, and ultimately, he wrote a really big work on Indian mythology. [21:40] John Leyden was another comparative philologist, but he was far too ambitious, and he was more interested in South Asian and Asian languages, and he died before he could complete anything substantial. [21:51] His friend Alexander Murray completed a big magnum opus, where he clearly recognized the Indo-European idea, and he included the philologer passage, but he was trying to trace the origin of language, which he reduced to nine sounds, which made his book kind of ridiculous at the time. [22:06] But the point is that he was interested in the origin of language and not necessarily the comparison of language for its own sake. [22:13] And all of these guys came before Prichard, who I said had reached this sort of Indo-European recognition by 1813, but his main interest was ethnology. [22:23] And so, what I think I’ve shown is not that British scholars invented comparative philology or anything like that, but basically that they were better than they’ve been getting credit for, and they were interested in many other things, and they died before they could produce anything substantial. [22:38] And British scholars, in this respect, I think, fit into this larger story where, since we’re moving beyond the standard narrative where Jones discovers the Indo-European connection and then it sort of is built from there, [22:52] there’s obviously this revised story that’s developed over the last few decades, like Daniel Droixhe and Toon van Haal are two people who have shown that there was a great deal of what could be called comparative philology going on in early modern Europe. [23:04] Okay, the grammatical aspect wasn’t developed, but the framework is definitely there. [23:09] And our friend Floris Solleveld has been rewriting the history of linguistics in the 19th century and showing how that similar ideas that we think of with the Indo-European family were being developed in relation to families like the Malayo-Polynesian group. [23:25] But Floris has really shown also just how difficult it was to get linguistic samples, and that scholars actually had to have the material with which to work. [23:36] And so, if you read Wilhelm von Humboldt or Peter Stephen Du Ponceau, two early 19th-century linguists, they weren’t talking about the philologer passage. [23:45] They were praising, you know, Adelung and Vater and the Mithridates, you know, for bringing much more linguistic evidence beyond Europe to light, and Prichard actually also reviewed the Mithridates, and that’s where he lays out his idea of the Indo-European idea fairly early. [24:03] And so with this… the revised standard narrative is part of realizing that people were using language and linguistic studies for things far beyond just, you know, the intrinsic language of… language itself. [24:16] I think it should help us to realize that language was… is, was and has always been, you know, a central point of consideration in definitely the Western intellectual tradition from the ancient period onwards. [24:31] So I think it’s, you know, it’s helpful for us to realize that with the study of language, we can learn a lot more about the human sciences and the humanities, and I think also that the humanities and human sciences, social sciences, have a lot to learn by considering the history of linguistics. [24:46] JMc: Great. Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [24:50] IS: Yeah, thanks. Thanks. Thanks for having me, James. [24:52]

Judy Kaplan, a historian of the human sciences and Curatorial Fellow at the Science History Institute, dives into the fascinating world of mid-20th century American linguistics. She discusses the clash between structuralism and generative grammar, revealing how key scholars shaped the field. The conversation also explores the evolution of language universals, touching on pivotal conferences and the Cold War's impact on linguistic research funding. Kaplan highlights the balance between linguistic diversity and universal principles, making for an engaging and insightful discussion.

In this engaging discussion, Randy Harris, a professor at the University of Waterloo and author of 'The Linguistics Wars,' delves into the intense controversies of 1960s and 70s American linguistics. He shares insights on the rivalry between Noam Chomsky and George Lakoff, exploring foundational theories like deep structure and generative semantics. The conversation also highlights the emotional complexities behind scientific debates and the evolution of cognitive linguistics, showcasing how these conflicts shaped the discourse in modern linguistic theory.

In this interview, we talk to Chris Knight about Chomsky, pure science and the US military-industrial complex. Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube References for Episode 41 Radical Anthropology Group. YouTube channel | Vimeo channel Allot, Nicholas, Chris Knight and Neil Smith. 2019. The Responsibility of Intellectuals; Reflections by Noam Chomsky and Others after 50 years, with commentaries by Noam Chomsky. London: UCL Press. Open access Chomsky, Noam. 2016. ‘Chomsky responds to Chris Knight’s book, Decoding Chomsky’ Libcom Chomsky, Noam, and Chris Knight. 2019. ‘Chomsky’s response to Chris Knight’s chapter in the new Responsibility of Intellectuals book’. Libcom Knight, Chris. 2016. ‘John Deutch – Chomsky’s friend in the Pentagon and the CIA’. Libcom Knight, Chris. 2016. Decoding Chomsky: Science and Revolutionary Politics. Newhaven: Yale University Press Google Books Knight, Chris. 2023. ‘The Two Chomskys: The US military’s greatest enemy worked in an institution saturated with military funding. How did it shape his thought?’ Aeon Newmeyer, Frederick J. 1988. The Politics of Linguistics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 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. [00:18] There you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss. [00:22] Today we’re joined by Chris Knight, who is a senior research fellow in anthropology at University College London and a long-standing political activist. [00:33] These two strands of his work and striving come together in the Radical Anthropology Group, which Chris co-founded. [00:41] Among the group’s activities are a regular series of talks and lectures, which can be watched online on the group’s Vimeo channel. [00:49] The link is available on the podcast page. [00:52] In a recent update on the podcast, we promised that we’d look at the history of linguistics in the Cold War period, [00:59] with a focus on how the social and political climate of the time may have helped to shape the field of linguistics [01:06] — that is, how this climate influenced what linguists took an interest in, how they approached their subject matter, human language, [01:13] and how they marketed themselves and their work. [01:17] Chris has produced some very provocative work that explores the relationship of the research of Noam Chomsky, perhaps the key figure of linguistics in this period, [01:27] to the U.S. military-industrial complex of the Cold War. [01:31] Chris has written about this most extensively in his 2016 book Decoding Chomsky, [01:37] but also in a number of articles that are referenced on the podcast page. [01:41] The great conundrum Chris seeks to resolve in these texts is how Chomsky could reconcile the fact that his research was paid for largely by the U.S. military [01:51] with his activism in opposition to the Vietnam War and in support of other left-wing causes. [01:58] So Chris, could you outline your views for us? [02:01] What was the relationship of Chomsky’s linguistic research at MIT to the U.S. military-industrial complex, [02:09] and what effect did this have on Chomsky’s approach to studying language? [02:15] CK: Well, Chomsky was initially employed at MIT rather than, say, a more posh place such as Harvard because, being Jewish — and, as Chomsky put it, the anti-Semitism around being as thick as soup — it was easier for him to get a job at MIT, [02:33] and his initial employment was to work on a kind of craze of the time, actually: machine translation. [02:39] Chomsky, from the outset, realized that for machine translation to work, you’d have to have computers far more powerful with far greater memory than anything that was around at the time, [02:51] and he realized that, really, you just need a vast number of sentences, and you kind of average them out and work out what the probable meaning of it is. [03:00] I say “you,” “you” being a computer here. [03:04] And he wasn’t interested at all, and what was much more exciting to him, but also very exciting to the U.S. military, [03:12] was the idea that just possibly the human mind is itself a digital computer of some sort, [03:19] and that underlying all the world’s different languages was this simple code. [03:25] So Warren Weaver had — this great fixer and founder of all sorts of things going on in U.S. military, industrial plus intellectual relationships — argued that possibly… [03:37] He actually used the analogy of the Tower of Babel, that underneath all the differences, if you delve right down to the very basis of language, you’d find a simple kind of underlying code, [03:47] which Chomsky before long called universal grammar. [03:51] And why that was exciting to the military would mean that you could just possibly ask the generals during, say, a nuclear war to kind of talk to their missiles. [04:03] I say talk, probably they meant type on a keyboard to their missiles, [04:07] but you could talk in any of the world’s languages, and the missiles would kind of get it [04:11] because installed inside the missile or inside the bomber or other form of technology would be this kind of black box containing the principles of all the world’s different languages. [04:23] So that was an extraordinarily exciting and ambitious idea, and when Chomsky was invited to work on it, he more or less said, [04:31] “Well, I’ll work on the principle. I’ll work on the science. I won’t work on any practical applications. I won’t try to operationalize what I’m doing. [04:41] Anyone else wants to do that, that’s up to them.” [04:44] But because this is intellectually exciting and thrilling, in fact, that underlying all the world’s languages is a simple universal grammar, he promised to work on that. [04:54] JMc: But isn’t it the case that Chomsky’s approach is rather formalist and that he’s interested in the structures of languages, [05:02] not necessarily in any semantic aspects? [05:05] So even if he could describe an underlying universal grammar of all languages, it would actually not be something that could be used in practice for the purposes of communication or for instructing machines. [05:20] CK: Well, exactly. And actually, in order to clarify this, Chomsky was very anxious to draw a very sharp distinction between language’s social use — social conversation, social communication — and language as formal structure, [05:39] and in fact, sometimes argued that possibly the very word “language” was misleading. [05:43] His interest was, if you like, grammar. [05:46] And yes, I mean, that’s absolutely right, but the point I think I would make is that there was a cost to this, [05:55] because in the end, in order to draw the sharpest possible distinction between language as use and language as grammar, [06:05] he argued that language is essentially not communicative, that essentially language is the language of thought [06:12] and that the first human on the planet ever to, if you like, [06:16] speak in his own words was talking to itself. [06:20] So in order to absolutely ensure that he kept his politics apart from his work for the military, he stripped language of everything social. [06:31] And you can sort of see why that was kind of necessary, because anything social in language is likely to be not just social, but political, [06:39] and if it’s political, it’ll be political in a context which Chomsky would have thoroughly disapproved. [06:47] So to make quite sure that he wasn’t colluding with the U.S. military on a political or social level, strip out the social from language and leave just the forms. [06:58] And so language is, if you like, the language of thought. [07:01] Language isn’t for communication. [07:03] But of course, the moment you do that, you then wonder, well, [07:06] what’s grammar for, if it isn’t to make thinking externalised and therefore accessible to others? [07:12] I mean, do we really need grammar when we’re thinking to ourselves? [07:15] Obviously, that’s a huge philosophical debate, but I think most cognitive scientists these days would say, well, no, [07:21] grammar is precisely to make sure that what’s in your head gets out to other people — in other words, make sure that it’s externalised. [07:29] And of course, language for Chomsky is I-language, internal language. It doesn’t get externalised. [07:34] JMc: But the formalist turn that Chomsky made wasn’t necessarily original to him, was it? [07:40] I mean, you know, what is often called American structuralism that immediately preceded his work in generative grammar – in particular, the school of the Bloomfieldians – already had a very formalist approach to language, [07:53] and that was couched in behaviourist terms, which Chomsky argued against. [07:57] But the actual processes of analysis where you concentrate just on the forms of language and describe the distribution as the Bloomfieldians did, [08:06] but then Zellig Harris, Chomsky’s teacher, and Chomsky himself, you know, talking about it in transformational terms, [08:12] this focus on pure form in language, without any consideration of meaning or use, you know, was something that the Bloomfieldians were already doing. [08:23] CK: Well, yes, no doubt about that. [08:25] And of course, Zellig Harris, in many ways Chomsky’s teacher, [08:30] his project was to make text accessible to a computer, to make texts legible, and that was the whole point of his formalism. [08:39] So there’s no doubt that different forms of formalism were around. [08:43] And of course, in my book, I explain how actually you can trace that right, right back through Jakobson, right back to the Russian formalists, Russian formalism, [08:52] including the extraordinary poet Velimir Khlebnikov. [08:56] And that whole idea of formalism is to try at all costs to kind of rescue science, and linguistic science in particular, rescue it from politics, [09:06] because if you just have pure form, you can argue that you’re doing something on the level of astronomy. [09:13] I mean, E=MC2; is not politics, it’s just pure science. [09:17] And there’s something clearly liberating and inspiring about the idea of doing pure science uncontaminated by politics. [09:26] The point I’m making is that if we go to the extreme in that direction, [09:32] you just haven’t got language. [09:35] I mean, all I’m saying is that at the end of the day, language is social, it is communicative, [09:41] and if you strip away not only the politics, [09:43] but the social dimensions, what you’ve got is some form of computation. [09:49] But I would argue, and I think most people these days would argue as well… Including people who’ve been taught by Chomsky. I mean, Steven Pinker, I can think of hardly any linguist these days who would argue that language hasn’t got some necessary and intrinsic connection with communication. [10:04] So if we take it too far, what you’ve got might be interesting, but it’s just not language. [10:10] JMc: Has Chomsky responded at all to your account? [10:14] CK: Yes. I mean, we’ve had a very difficult relationship over the years. [10:20] I was one of the founders of EvoLang, along with Jim Hurford, and we had a big conference in 2002 in Boston at which Chomsky made the final sort of massive contribution at the end of the whole week. [10:32] And yes, he has responded. [10:35] When my book came out, he described it as a “vulgar exercise of defamation, a web of deceit and misinformation”. [10:44] “The whole story is a wreck… complete nonsense throughout.” [10:48] JMc: That’s a direct quote, I take it. [10:50] CK: These are direct quotes, yes. That’s right. [10:53] And I kind of rather proudly put those comments in the front of my book, because at least it was a response from Chomsky. [11:02] He argued that the reason why he’s legitimately describing it as a wreck is because, quote, no military work was being done on campus during his time at MIT. [11:16] Which is fine, except that he also says the following: [11:19] “There was extensive military research on the MIT campus. In fact, a good deal of the nuclear missile guidance technology was developed right on the MIT campus.” [11:29] So what I’m saying is, the point I’m making about the just inescapable involvement with military technology and missile guidance technology, it’s not a point that Chris Knight makes. [11:42] It’s a point that Chomsky makes on numerous occasions. [11:45] And for some reason, I don’t know how to put this exactly, but Chomsky’s political admirers [11:51] — and of course I’m a huge admirer of his politics — [11:55] they’re always trying to find some connection between his linguistics and his politics. [12:00] They’re always trying to sort of say, Well, there must be something liberating about his linguistics and left-wing about his linguistics, in many cases. [12:07] And every time Chomsky came across activist supporters who asked him to explain that connection, he just got more and more impatient. [12:13] He just sort of shook his head. [12:14] “You’re not going to find anything politically inspiring in my linguistics. Forget it.” [12:18] And the Left just couldn’t kind of cope with this. [12:22] So how do I put this? [12:24] I mean, what I’m saying is that if you are a left-wing activist working in this military lab, [12:30] you’re going to need to draw a line between the two sides of your work. [12:38] I mean, just let me… I mean, a passage from my book, actually. [12:42] I describe how he became a friend of somebody called John Deutch, who before long was to become director of the CIA. [12:55] And Chomsky recalls, “We were actually friends and got along fine, although we disagreed on about as many things as two human beings can disagree about. [13:02] I liked him. We got along very well together. [13:03] He’s very honest, very direct. You know where you stand with him. We talked to each other. When we had disagreements, they were open, sharp, clear, honestly dealt with. I had no problem with him. I was one of the very few people on the faculty, I’m told, who was supporting his candidacy for the President of MIT.” [13:05] And so I’m just saying we need to appreciate the glaring contradiction here, because this is Chomsky’s view of the CIA. [13:31] “The CIA does what it wants. [13:33] It carries out assassinations, systematic torture, bombings, invasions, mass murder of civilians, multiple other crimes.” [13:39] In Indonesia, as Chomsky rightly points out, in 1965, the CIA organized a military coup to prevent the Communist party, described by Chomsky as the “party of the poor,” from winning a key general election. [13:53] The ensuing repression resulted in a staggering mass slaughter of perhaps half a million people. [13:58] So I mean, you know, you’re friends with a future director of the CIA, who’s a chemist involved in fuel-air explosives and other weapons of mass destruction. [14:10] You’re aware that the CIA is, from Chomsky’s point of view, a criminal organization. [14:16] You’re friends with, you have lunch with these people. [14:21] And then in the evening, you have a meeting with anarchists and revolutionaries and anti-capitalists and anti-militarists. [14:29] And I’m simply saying, can you see, you’re meeting with these people at lunchtime, in the evening, [14:34] you’re meeting with the opposite camps. [14:36] You wouldn’t want the anarchists present in your discussions with the future director of the CIA. [14:41] And when you’re at your anarchist meeting in the evening, I don’t think you’d want the director of the CIA to be publicly present in that meeting either. [14:47] You’ve just got to keep those two things apart, [14:50] and keeping them apart meant keeping apart different parts of Chomsky’s passion, Chomsky’s, if you like, his mind, his brain [14:59] — to the extent that when an interviewer said to him, “Well, there seem to be two Noam Chomskys. What do they say to each other when they meet?” [15:07] And Chomsky says there’s no connection. [15:10] There’s no connection between the two of them. [15:13] The connection is almost non-existent. [15:15] There is a kind of loose, abstract connection in the background, but practical connections are non-existent. [15:20] So he’s basically telling us that the two Noam Chomskys aren’t really on speaking terms. [15:26] Okay, I mean, you’re in a difficult situation. [15:29] You want your job. You can do very good work in that job, but there are institutional contradictions. [15:34] And I’m not even saying that Chomsky should have not taken the job. [15:38] I mean, because by taking that job and becoming such a star figure in linguistics based in MIT, he then gained a platform from which to launch his assault on the U.S. military, beginning with the invasion of Vietnam. [15:53] So had he not had that job, he might have been like any other sort of activist on the street somewhere without that powerful voice. [16:00] By the way, I need to say how much we right now miss that voice. [16:06] It’s well known, of course, that for over a year now, Noam has been not well, and we have lost a voice of sanity in what I regard as an increasingly deranged political world. [16:21] It’s a huge loss. We would have benefited so much from Chomsky’s voice, [16:25] particularly in connection with Palestine and what’s going on today in Gaza. [16:30] I’m saying that simply to stress, I’m not even criticizing Chomsky. [16:34] I’m saying in a difficult situation, all of us have to make a living. [16:37] We all have to have a job. Whatever job we take, mostly it’ll be financed by some kind of corporation or capitalist outfit or another. [16:45] More than others, perhaps, Chomsky is just, his contradictions, if you like, all of us experience those contradictions — in his case, to an extreme extent. [16:57] JMc: But I think Chomsky would perhaps argue, and you’ve touched on this point in a few of the things that you’ve said, [17:03] I think Chomsky would argue that there is such a thing as pure science, [17:08] that is, science as an activity that’s pursued without any political implications or interference, [17:15] and that whether someone is a good or a bad scientist has nothing to do with their politics. [17:22] And, I mean, if we follow this line of reasoning, we might even say that explicitly mixing politics and science [17:29] leads to such ridiculous outrages as the German physics of Nazi Germany, [17:34] the Lysenkoism of Stalinist times, or in linguistics to such things as Marrism. [17:40] So do you think that Chomsky is being disingenuous in insisting on pure science, [17:45] or do you think that he’s just mistaken? [17:49] CK: I think the most important thing today is the autonomy of science. [17:56] Science is a collectivist form of knowledge. It’s accountable. It works on the basis of peer review. [18:02] If you take, say, for example, climate science, I mean, how much do we need science these days to have its own autonomous, independent voice? [18:13] I would think, and Chomsky would certainly agree with this point, which is that probably the survival of our species as well as the rest of the planet may depend on freeing science from politics, [18:25] and in particular making sure that genuine scientists accountable to one another, [18:30] to the scientific community, have a voice. [18:34] In order for climate science to have its voice, climate science itself has to be respected by political activists as the source of their inspiration. [18:45] In other words, we need politics to be subordinated to science. I think science needs to guide politics. [18:53] When it’s the other way around, when it’s politics which distorts and guides science for its own purposes, [18:58] of course that leads to the idiocies of Stalinism, Lysenko being, of course, the most famous example. [19:05] But how can science be autonomous without having some, if you like, political agency? [19:12] That’s the point I’m trying to make. [19:14] Now, Chomsky certainly wanted science to be autonomous, but he said that science has got no relevance to politics, [19:22] it’s another thing altogether. [19:24] Science, he argued, can make contributions as tiny fragments of knowledge, but it can’t put together any kind of big picture. [19:31] Climate science is putting together a big picture of what it means to be a living planet, what it means to be alive, [19:37] how we humans even exist today with our minds and bodies and languages as one of the many species on this planet going right back to the origin of life four billion years ago. [19:46] JMc: So is your account of Chomsky’s linguistics essentially psychoanalytic in nature? [19:53] And by that I mean, do you think that Chomsky has subconsciously moved into abstract theorising to escape the possibility of his work ever being used in practice, for military purposes, [20:03] or do you think that he actually made a conscious decision to move into the abstract and away from any practical applications? [20:11] CK: Well, I certainly don’t feel we need psychoanalysts to work these things out. [20:16] JMc: I just mean, do you think that he’s made a conscious decision, or do you think that he’s not even aware of it himself [20:22] and you have revealed this underlying conflict taking place in his brain subconsciously? [20:28] CK: I think Chomsky himself found it easier to do his science and to do his politics [20:37] and not worry too much about the connection. [20:41] When he was asked about it, he would usually discourage people from thinking there was a connection. [20:47] As you know, I regard the connection as not a simple one. [20:51] It’s a connection between opposites. [20:53] His science is doing one thing, his activism is doing a different thing. [20:58] His science is for one part of society, essentially for the U.S. military. [21:01] His activism is to contribute to the opposition to that same military. [21:08] And so we have a connection between opposites, if you like. [21:11] We have, of course, the classic term for that is the dialectic. [21:14] I quote in my book, Chomsky is saying that when he hears the term “dialectic,” he says, “I reach for my gun.” [21:20] He doesn’t like that whole concept. [21:21] Well, okay, I can see why you wouldn’t want to think that your science is the opposite of your politics. [21:27] But okay, to me, it’s just crystal clear that he’s right to say they have no connection, but he’s wrong to sort of deny this paradoxical connection. [21:38] Okay, Chomsky does say — and again, I quote it in the book — [21:42] he says, “One of the things about my brain,” his brain, “is, it seems to have separate buffers, like separate modules within a computer. [21:50] I can be on an aeroplane going to a scientific conference, and meanwhile, [21:55] I’m writing notes about the speech I’m to make at an activist event. [21:59] So my brain can be doing these opposite things at once.” [22:02] I mean, all of us can do that to an extent, of course, [22:04] but I would simply say, again, it’s not explicitly conscious. [22:08] It’s not out there. If it was out there, Chomsky would be proud of it, happy about it, explain it. [22:13] But you can see, can’t you, it would be very difficult for him to be public about it and out there. [22:19] I mean, it’d be very difficult for him to be explaining to an activist audience what he’s doing for the U.S. military. [22:24] It’d be very difficult for him to be having a meal with John Deutch and discussing his political activism against everything that John Deutch stands for. [22:32] It’s difficult. I can do it because I’m not directly involved. [22:35] I think for Chomsky it was difficult, but not for psychological reasons. [22:38] I think for essentially social, political, I think the best word is “institutional.” [22:42] I think it was an institutional conflict. [22:45] To some extent, all of us are involved in those conflicts. [22:47] We live in a certain kind of society, conflict-ridden society. [22:50] But Chomsky is probably the most extreme example of the consequences of those institutional contradictions and conflicts. [22:59] JMc: So are the facts of your account contested at all? [23:01] CK: No, not really. It’s all on record. [23:05] I don’t think there’s a single thing I’ve said about the military priorities of MIT’s Research Laboratory of Electronics, [23:14] I don’t think there’s a single thing in my book that hasn’t been said perhaps more cogently and powerfully by Chomsky himself. [23:24] But I first became aware of it many years ago, and it was Fritz Newmeyer’s book, The Politics of Linguistics, which drew my attention to all of this. [23:34] He quoted Colonel Edmund Gaines. [23:36] He interviewed this colonel to ask why the U.S. military at the time was sponsoring transformational grammar, Chomsky’s research and the research conducted by Chomsky’s colleagues, [23:50] and he said, “We sponsored linguistic research in order to learn how to build command and control systems that could understand English queries directly.” [24:01] So in the course of writing my book, I decided to ask some of Chomsky’s students working in the MITRE Corporation. [24:09] And of course, the MITRE Corporation is not exactly the same thing as MIT, but it’s closely connected with MIT. [24:15] It’s where the theoretical accomplishments in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, particularly the Electronics Research Laboratory, [24:23] get operationalized, get turned into practical applications. [24:26] I asked Barbara Partee what she was doing supervised by Noam in the MITRE Corporation, [24:32] and she told me that the idea was that “in the event of a nuclear war, the generals would be underground with some computers trying to manage things,” [24:41] and “it would probably be easier to teach computers to understand English than teach the generals how to program.” [laughs] [24:49] It’s just such a beautiful quote. I mean, really, everybody knew what they were doing. [24:54] And Barbara Partee said that “we had sort of feelings of anxiety about the work we were doing,” because Barbara, as all Chomsky’s students, I think, were all pretty anti-militarist, [25:05] weren’t at all happy about what was going on in Vietnam at the time. [25:08] But there you are, they were doing this, and somehow, they managed to square what they were doing with their consciences [25:14] on the basis that it would be a very long time before you could actually, in practice, kind of talk to a missile and tell it, [25:22] “Go right. Go left. Hit the Viet Cong. Not there, you idiot. Go there,” [25:25] and talk to it in any language or type out on a keyboard in any language. [25:30] It was so far off in the future that somehow it didn’t matter too much that what they were doing was politically suspect. [25:37] JMc: Well, thank you very much for answering those questions. [25:40] CK: Thank you very much, James. [25:42]