In this fascinating discussion, linguistic pioneers Roman Jakobson and Nikolai Trubetzkoy delve into the groundbreaking contributions of the Prague Linguistic Circle. They explore the evolution of the phoneme, showcasing its pivotal role in modern phonology. The conversation highlights the intriguing interplay between structuralism, Gestalt psychology, and the arts, revealing how melody in music parallels language theory. Jakobson’s insights into avant-garde influences and his intellectual journey during WWII add depth to their transformative legacy.

Michael Ashby, a renowned expert in phonetics, discusses the fascinating evolution of phonetics in the 19th century. He highlights the interplay between linguistics, physiology, and emerging recording technologies that transformed the field. Key inventions like the phonautograph and phonograph reshaped phonetic scholarship, making it more empirical. Ashby also covers the establishment of the International Phonetic Association and its focus on linguistic reforms, emphasizing the challenges and cultural biases faced in creating a universal phonetic alphabet.

John Joseph, a renowned expert on Ferdinand de Saussure, shares insights into Saussure's profound impact on structuralism and modern linguistics. He discusses how Saussure's minimalist model redefined the relationship between language and identity. The conversation also touches on the critiques of Saussure's theories, particularly regarding their social context. Joseph highlights the innovative aspects of Saussure's teachings and explores his lasting legacy, contrasting his ideas with those of contemporaneous theorists, revealing a rich tapestry of linguistic history.

In this episode, we look at Ferdinand de Saussure’s contributions to linguistics, which are widely considered to be foundational to the later movement of structuralism. https://hiphilangsci.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/hiphilangsci_012_epi.mp3 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts Archive DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4767891 References for Episode 12 Primary Sources Bloomfield, Leonard (1924), Review of Saussure (1922), Modern Language Journal 8, 317–319. DOI: 10.2307/313991 Bréal, Michel (1897), Essai de sémantique (science des significations), Paris: Hachette. archive.org (Engl. trans.: (1900), Semantics: Studies in the science of meaning, trans. by Nina Cust, London: Heinemann. archive.org) Brugman, Karl (1876), ‘Nasalis sonans in der indogermanischen Grundsprache’, Studien zur griechischen und lateinischen Grammatik 9: 285–338. archive.org Kuryłowicz, Jerzy (1927), ‘ə indo-européen et h hittite’, in Symbolae grammaticae in honorem Ioannis Rozwadowski, vol. I, Krakow: Gebethner & Wolff, pp. 95–104. Möller, Hermann (1880), Review of F. Kluge, Beiträge zur Geschichte der germanischen Conjugation, Straßburg: K. J. Trübner (1879), Englische Studien 3: 148–164. archive.org Paul, Hermann (1920 [1880]), Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, Halle an der Saale: Niemeyer. archive.org (English trans.: (1891), Principles of the history of language, trans. H. A. Strong, London: Longmans, Green and co. archive.org) Saussure, Ferdinand de (1879), Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes, Leipzig: B.G. Teubner. archive.org Saussure, Ferdinand de (1922 [1916]), Cours de linguistique générale, ed. by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, Paris: Payot. 3rd edition, 1931: BNF Gallica (English translation: Ferdinand de Saussure, 1959 [1916], Course in General Linguistics, trans. by Wade Baskin, New York: Philosophical Library. 2011 edition available from archive.org) Secondary Sources Joseph, John E. (2012), Saussure, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Joseph, John E. (2017), ‘Ferdinand de Saussure’, Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Linguistics. DOI: 10.1093/acrefore/9780199384655.013.385 Koerner, E.F. Konrad (2008), ‘Hermann Paul and general linguistic theory’, Language Sciences 30: 102–132. DOI: 10.1016/j.langsci.2006.10.001

In this interview, we talk to Floris Solleveld about the character of linguistic research in the 19th century. https://hiphilangsci.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/hiphilangsci_011_intx.mp3 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts Archive DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4767978 References for Episode 11 Primary Sources Adelung, Johann Christoph and Johann Severin Vater (1806–1817), Mithridates, oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde, Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung. archive.org: vol. I, vol. II, vol. III parts I and II, vol. III part III, vol. IV Balbi, Adriano (1826), Atlas ethnographique du Globe, Paris: Rey. Google Books: Introduction, archive.org: Atlas Bleek, Wilhelm (1858–1859), The library of His Excellency Sir George Grey K.C.B.: Philology, London: Trübner & co. Google Books: Vol. I, Vol. II Boas, Franz (1940), Race, Language, and Culture, New York: Macmillan. archive.org Du Ponceau, Peter Stephen (1838), Mémoire sur le système grammatical des langues de quelques nations Indiennes de l’Amerique du Nord, Paris: Pihan de la Forest. Google Books Grierson, George (1903–1926), The Linguistic Survey of India, 11 in 20 vols, Calcutta: Govt. Printing House. University of Chicago Haeckel, Ernst (1868), Natürliche Schöpfungsgeschichte: Gemeinverständliche wissenschaftliche Vorträge über die Entwickelungslehre im Allgemeinen und diejenige von Darwin, Goethe, und Lamarck im Besonderen […], Berlin: Reimer. Google Books Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo (1787), Vocabolario poliglotto, con prolegomeni sopra più de CL lingue, Cesena: Biasini. Google Books Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo (1787), Saggio practicco delle Lingue con prolegomeni e una raccolta di orazioni dominicali in più di trecento lingue e dialetti, Cesena: Biasini. Google Books Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1836), ‘Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues’, Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java, vol. 1, ed. Alexander von Humboldt, Berlin: Dümmler. archive.org (English trans. On Language. The diversity of human language structure and ist influence on the mental development of mankind [1988], trans. Peter Heath, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) Klaproth, Julius (1823), Asia polyglotta, Paris: Schubart. archive.org: \Text, Atlas Koelle, Sigismund (1854), Polyglotta Africana, London: Church Missionary House. Lepsius, C. R. (1854), Das allgemeine linguistische Alphabet: Grundsätze der Übertragung fremder Schriftsysteme und bisher noch ungeschriebener Sprachen in europäische Buchstaben, Berlin: Hertz. archive.org (Lepsius, C. R. (1863), Standard Alphabet for Reducing Unwritten Languages and Foreign Graphic Systems to a Uniform Orthography in European Letters, 2nd rev. edn. London: Williams & Norgate. archive.org) Marsden, William (1782), “Remarks on the Sumatran Languages. In a Letter to Sir Joseph Banks, Bart. President of the Royal Society”, Archaeologia VI: 154-158. Marsden, William (1827), Bibliotheca Marsdeniana philologica et orientalis: A Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts, Collected with a View to the General Comparison of Languages, and to the Study of Oriental Literature, London: Cox. archive.org Müller, Friedrich (1876–1888), Grundriß der Sprachwissenschaft, 4 vols. Vienna: Hölder. Google Books: Vol. I Raffles, Thomas Stamford (1830 [1817]), The History of Java, 2 vols. London: Murray et al. archive.org: Vol. I, Vol. II Schlegel, Friedrich (1808), Ueber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier, Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer. archive.org (English trans. ‘On the Indian Language, Literature and Philosophy’ [1900], The Æsthetic and Miscellaneous Works of Friedrich von Schlegel, ed. and trans. E. J. Millington, pp. 425–536, London: George Bell and Sons. archive.org) Schmidt, Wilhelm (1919), Die Gliederung der australischen Sprachen, Vienna: Mechitaristen-Verlag. Schmidt, Wilhelm (1926), Die Sprachfamilien und Sprachenkreise der Erde, 1+1 vols, Heidelberg: Winter. archive.org: Atlas Schmidt, Wilhelm (1927), Rasse und Volk. Eine Untersuchung zur Bestimmung ihrer Grenzen und zur Erfassung ihrer Beziehungen, München: Kösel & Pustet. [2nd ed., 1935, Rasse und Volk. Ihre allgemeine Bedeutung, ihre Geltung im deutschen Raum, Salzburg/Leipzig: Pustet.] Secondary Sources Alter, Stephen (1999), Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race, and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins. Daston, Lorraine and Catherine Park (2006), “Introduction: The Age of the New”, in L, Daston & C. Park (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, Vol. III: Early Modern Science, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marchand, Suzanne (2003), “Priests among the Pygmies: Wilhelm Schmidt and the Counter-Reformation in Austrian Ethnology”, in H. G. Penny & M. Bunzl (eds.), Worldly Provincialism: German Anthropology in the Age of Empire, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, pp. 283–316. McNeely, Ian (2020), “The Last Project of the Republic of Letters: Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Global Linguistics”, Journal of Modern History 92: 241–273. Majeed, Javed (2018), Colonialism and Knowledge in Grierson’s Linguistic Survey of India, London: Routledge. Messling, Markus (2016), Gebeugter Geist – Rassismus und Erkenntnis in der modernen europäischen Philologie, Göttingen: Wallstein. Shapin, Steven (1996), The Scientific Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Solleveld, Floris (2016), “How to make a Revolution. Revolutionary Rhetoric in the Humanities around 1800”, History of Humanities 1.2: 277–301. Solleveld, Floris (2019), “Language, People, and Maps: The Ethnolinguistics of George Grierson and Franz Boas” [review essay], History of Humanities 4.2: 461-471. Solleveld, Floris (2020), “Lepsius as a Linguist: Fieldwork, Philology, Phonetics, and the ‘Hamitic Hypothesis'”, Language & History 63.3. Solleveld, Floris (2020), “Expanding the Comparative View: Humboldt’s Über die Kawi-Sprache and its Language Materials”, Historiographia Linguistica 47.1: 52–82. Solleveld, Floris (2020), “Afterlives of the Republic of Letters. Learned journals and scholarly community in the early 19th century”, Erudition and the Republic of Letters 5.1: 82-116. Solleveld, Floris (2020), “Klaproth, Balbi, and the Language Atlas”, in E. Aussant & J.-M. Fortis (eds.), History of Linguistics 2017: Selected papers from the 14th International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS XIV), Amsterdam: John Benjamins, pp. 81–99. Solleveld, Floris (2020), “Language Gathering and Philological Expertise: Sigismund Koelle, Wilhelm Bleek, and the Languages of Africa”, in J. François (ed.), Les Linguistes allemands du XIXème siècle et leurs Interlocuteurs étrangers, Paris: Éditions de la Société de Linguistique de Paris, pp. 169–200. Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc 00:18 Hi. I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. As always, you can find links and references to all the literature we discuss up on the website. With the last episode, we more or less reached the end of our survey of the main currents in 19th-century disciplinary linguistics. In this episode, we’re joined by Floris Solleveld from the Catholic University of Leuven, who’s going to give us another perspective on that century by talking to us about his work. Up until now in this podcast series, we’ve been travelling to exotic locales to meet our experts in their natural habitats. Unfortunately, the coronavirus pandemic has made it impossible to travel to Leuven for this episode. Instead, for this interview, we’re fallen back on the internet, or cyberspace, or the information superhighway, as it was known at the time. This is a late 20th-century computer networking technology which allowed instant audiovisual contact between people all over the world. While this sort of video telephony had long been a dream of 20th-century science fiction, it was only with the pandemic of 2020, two decades into the 21st century that people started to embrace this technology rather than just meeting in person. So Floris, what was the character of language scholarship in the humanities more generally in the 19th century? In this series, we have already talked a little bit about how 19th-century language scholars emphasized the novelty of what they were doing, that there were frequent proclamations of a revolution in the language sciences. You’ve examined this question yourself in quite a bit of detail. Do you think that there was a decisive break in the study of language and the human world in the 19th century, and could it be described as a scientific revolution? FS 02:15 Hi, James. Well, thanks for having me here. And well, yes, I mean the question to what extent you can speak of a scientific revolution in the humanities is a question that I have pondered on for some six years, and my general, unspectacular answer is: Kind of. A lot of things happened, a lot of things changed, around 1800. There is a lot of revolutionary rhetoric surrounding it, and whether you call it a scientific revolution depends on your theoretical perspective and on your personal preferences, but what happens in linguistics actually is quite drastic. What you really see is a sort of breaking of paper trails, which is a really good indication that something really drastic happens, if people stop using work from a previous period, stop quoting from it, and also stop using material from [without] quoting it. And that is actually what kind of happens in 19th-century linguistics. They’re really not much using 18th-century work anymore, and indeed there is a staple of revolutionary rhetoric surrounding it. Friedrich Schlegel is the outstanding example. The man is a serial proclaimer of revolutions. I mean, even as a student, he proclaims a revolution in the study of antiquity. Then he invents the Romantic movement, and then he proclaims an Oriental renaissance in Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. And most of his proclamations actually get picked up, although not exactly in the way that he intended them. I mean, he is not the guy who founds modern classical philology. His Oriental renaissance actually turns out to become the basis of comparative linguistics rather than the basis of a spiritual rejuvenation of the West, but I mean, to get that instead is not a crass failure either. But then also, if you look at that in retrospect, which is what happens in the 19th century as the discipline develops, you see that people actually look back on it in those terms, but there is a bit of a grey area. For instance, the first guy to actually speak of a scientific revolution in the study of language is Peter Stephen Du Ponceau. And what does he cite as an example? He doesn’t cite Schlegel. He cites Adelung, Mithridates, which is the text that people now classically use to contrast the previous paradigm and new historical-comparative linguistics, but Adelung was still used as a source of data, so in that regard, Adelung is basically the only or one of the few and far that actually still are used as source of information. JMc 05:05 Do you think that even though there are all of these proclamations of revolutions and people are not citing their predecessors, do you think that that really represents a break in continuity between the way people were doing the study of language in the 19th century and their predecessors and also a break in the way that they thought about language, the sort of philosophy of language and the philosophy of science that lies behind the discipline of linguistics? FS 05:33 Yes, I do think so. I mean, and not just in having this sort of historical-comparative perspective, which of course is very preeminent in 19th-century linguistics, but also, for instance, in the realization that there are these different language families, each with their own character, or with the idea that you can actually analyze language structures in different ways, because these different language families really have different organizational principles. Or also what you see as a result of that is, for instance, the mapping of sound systems or the analysis of different ways of ordering particles. I mean, you actually already see Humboldt splitting up Polynesian languages morphologically in Über die Kawi-Sprache. You already see Richard Lepsius drawing up diagrams of sound systems in the presentation of his phonetic alphabet, and that is the sort of analysis of language which really doesn’t happen in the 18th century. So yes, I do think that there is this sort of drastic discontinuity, and you also see that the term “linguistics” actually comes up in this period. Actually, the fun thing again is that the first people to actually use the term “linguistics” are late 18th-century German compilers who very much work within an early modern compilatory style of working, so in that regard, okay, you know, you never really have a clean break, but then scientific revolutions aren’t like political revolutions where you storm the Bastille or you storm the Winter Palace and you chop off the king’s head and you say it’s a revolution and nobody doubts it. With scientific revolutions, you always have this sort of unclarity like, okay, what is the measure of a complete conceptual break? And this is one reason why there has been a lot of scepticism about the notion of scientific revolutions in the history of science, mainly. In the history of scholarship, the question has been addressed far less, and why some people want to get rid of the phrase. Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park talked about getting rid of that “ringing three-word phrase.” Steven Shapin said that “There was no such thing as the Scientific Revolution, and this is a book about it.” And that sort of sums up the communis opinio among historians of science. So within the humanities, I think the history of linguistics stands out for this sort of really radical conceptual break and break in ways in which material is organized and knowledge is being produced. So for the humanities at large, my answer is more like kind of, maybe a qualified yes, but linguistics really is one of the strongest arguments in favour of that. JMc 08:23 Okay. So would you say that accompanying the scientific revolution in linguistics, that there was a fundamental change in the sociological constitution of the field, and in scholarship more generally, in the 19th century? So for the scholarly community up until the end of the 18th century, it’s usual to talk about the Republic of Letters. Do you think that this was superseded in the 19th century by clear-cut university-based disciplines, or do you think that there was continuity from this earlier idea of the Republic of Letters? FS 08:55 So the Republic of Letters is a container notion for the learned world, which perceives itself as an independent commonwealth, hence republic, res publica, of letters. And “letters” here is an early modern container term for learning at large; “letters” really means what it means in the name-shield of the Faculty of Letters. And three things actually hold that community together, which is (a) a correspondence network reinforced by learned journalism, (b) a symbolic economy, and (c) the sense of an academic community. Now, these things, these three aspects, they actually persist. We still perceive ourselves as part of an imagined community. We still correspond with each other. We still trade in information and prestige, and we don’t get rich, generally. So to that extent, that sort of infrastructure persists. Now, still, the notion of Republic of Letters pretty much fades out from use in the early 19th century. I’ve traced that, and it is pretty much a sad story of how the term goes out of use. Some people try to reinvent it — doesn’t work. And there are very clear explanations for that. First of all, the notion of “republic” is appropriated by the French Revolution, gets different connotations. The notion of “letters” changes, or “literature” becomes a term for literature as an art form instead for learning at large. We still speak of the literature, you know, in our field, and that is sort of a remnant of that early modern use. And also, people now address their peers, or they address the nation, if they address a wider public, and they don’t address the learned community in that sense anymore. So it didn’t make that much sense for 19th-century scholars anymore to appeal to the Republic of Letters, and it did make, for instance, for late 17th-century Huguenot journalists who reinvented the notion, it did make sense for the parti philosophique, who appropriated (or rather, violently took over) the Republic of Letters in the mid-18th-century. It did make sense also for German academics who were trying to position themselves in the 18th century. But then this model of an amateur community being superseded by professionalism, that story has to be seriously qualified, because scholarship already is concentrated at universities in the German lands in the late seventeenth and eighteenth century. And that is actually what gives the German-speaking countries an edge in the 19th century, because then it turns out that universities are a much more effective model for concentrating learning than they seem to be in the late early modern period, whereas what you see happening in the French- and English-speaking world is that this concentration of scholarship at universities goes a lot slower. It’s actually only in the second half of the 19th century, and especially after 1870, that this model really becomes so predominant that amateur or independent scholarship becomes the great exception. 1870, of course, in France, it means the end of the Second Empire because they lose the Franco-Prussian War, and then they reshape it into the Second Republic. In Britain, 1870 is not such a big break, but you see from the 1860s onward that there is a huge wave of new university foundations, so-called red brick universities, and that really leads to a change in the academic landscape. There had been new university foundations before, King’s College, London University College, Durham University, but those were more like additions to the Oxbridge duopoly and the Scottish big four or big five. And now what happens with red brick universities is, you really see an intensification of academic research. If you look at the number of university staff and students from 1700 to 1850, it’s pretty constant. There are some serious interruptions when the Jesuit Order is banished or when the French Revolution closes all the universities or when half the German universities die in the period between 1795 and 1818, but on the whole, it’s pretty constant. From the second half of the 19th century onward, it expands exponentially. So yes, the notion of Republic of Letters goes out of use in the early 19th century, but no, it’s not as if there is this clean break from an amateur learned community to institutional professional scholarship within well-delineated disciplines. But I do want to add a footnote to that, because Ian McNeely recently wrote an article about Humboldt’s Über die Kawi-Sprache as the last project of the Republic of Letters. JMc 13:43 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. FS 13:44 Because he says that Humboldt then pieced his information together from all kind of previous language gathering exercises like Adelung, like Hervás y Panduro, like the British colonial administrators in Southeast Asia, particularly Marsden, who then fed all that information into Humboldt’s coffers and then Humboldt, as a retired statesman and independent scholar, writes this big compendium which really still radiates the ghost of this imagined learned community. Now, that is not untrue, but again, this is McNeely’s schematism that he thinks of the Republic of Letters as a sort of reified scholarly community rather than as a notion that you use strategically to present your own situation. And if you look at how the languages of the world are mapped throughout the long nineteenth century, then quite a lot of these people actually are not university-based scholars, so there is a process of institutionalization around historical-comparative linguistics. A small part of that is about linguistics proper and about Sanskrit, but a much larger part is about German studies, French studies, Slavonic studies a bit later, English studies, so Germanistik, Romanistik, which is then informed by Indo-European comparative linguistics. But if you look at people who mapped the languages of India, the languages of Australia, the languages of Oceania, or the languages of the Americas, those are to a large part colonial administrators, people coordinating missionary networks. And those people do not operate anymore within what they would describe as a Republic of Letters. George Grey in Cape Town and Auckland did not think of himself as a citizen of the Republic of Letters. George Grierson mapping the languages of India did not think of himself as a citizen of the Republic of Letters. Well, maybe Peter Stephen Du Ponceau in Philadelphia (who, after all, was born in the 18th century and who still basically thrives on this correspondence network), maybe he thought of himself as a citizen of the Republic of Letters. I don’t know, but… JMc 15:56 But how did they think of themselves, and how were they seen by the newly emerging caste of professional linguists in universities? Was their work received in the centre of disciplinary linguistics, you know, in Indo-European comparative linguistics? Did it feed into that, or were they doing just something separate that was still considered to be an amateur project? FS 16:18 Well, no, what you see is that they do take on board professional expertise. So George Grey, again, is the outstanding example, because what does he do when he becomes Governor of South Africa and sets forth his language-gathering project which he already had been doing in Adelaide and Auckland? He hires a German philologist with a PhD (actually the first guy to actually get his PhD on African languages) to organize his library and to put the stamp of scientific approval on what George Grey had been doing. JMc 16:51 And that was Wilhelm Bleek. FS 16:53 And you see… Yeah, Wilhelm Bleek, that was. JMc 16:54 Yeah. FS 16:55 You also see it with George Grierson, who writes this – or coordinates – The Linguistic Survey of India and who himself tries to avoid some sort of strong institutional foothold, although he has affiliations, so as to retain some sort of independence, but he hires an assistant, Sten Konow, who is university-based. He gets honorary doctorates, he goes to orientalist congresses, and several of these people mapping the languages of the world, they get the Prix Volney. Peter Stephen Du Ponceau wins the Prix Volney. Did Sigismund Koelle win the Prix Volney? No, he didn’t. Oh, yes, he did. So there is this sort of interaction between this broader ethnolinguistic project and the more narrow discipline formation within linguistics, and you also see that some tools, especially phonetic alphabets, get developed within this broader network rather than within this narrow academic sphere. And of course, I mean institutionally, Indo-European historical-comparative linguistics is predominant because they have institutional firepower. If you look at who holds the chairs in Germany (where indeed there are chairs in these fields much earlier onward), it’s largely Sanskritists and Germanists, and if you look at the number of people who are actually engaged in this mapping of the languages of the world, so the number of people involved in a secondary sense that they supply information for it runs in thousands, but the number of people who actually put together these collections and make comparative grammars and language atlases — that’s a dozen, two dozen. It’s really not such a big community. JMc 18:46 Okay. Was this community of language scholars, did they work largely in isolation from other fields that were developing at the time, or are there interactions between linguistics and other sciences such as, I don’t know, ethnography, psychology, history even? FS 19:02 Yeah. Well, one of the greatest interactions that you haven’t mentioned yet actually is with geography. One way of literally mapping the languages of the world is through language atlases, and the people who actually invent the language atlas are geographers. It’s Adriano Balbi working in Paris who also makes a Atlas ethnographique du monde (An ethnographic atlas of the world), which is actually an overview of the languages of the world, and it’s Julius Klaproth, who is a self-taught Sinologist, who then turns to studying the languages of Asia and who also is a geographer, literally a map maker. So the Bibliothèque Mazarine — or is it the Bibliothèque Nationale? Anyway, they have hundreds or even thousands of Julius Klaproth’s map designs. For Julius Klaproth, there really is this strong intersection between linguistics and geography, but indeed ethnology is the most direct sister of linguistics within this project of what I call the mapping of the world, because, indeed, language is one of the clearest denominators of ethnic boundaries on a non-political level. So everyone who studied languages in the 19th century was aware that, okay, you can also learn a language if you are not part of that people, but generally, a people and the language community are overlapping unities. Well, of course, this notion of “people” was involved with all kind of projections of their own, especially in German, Volk, but if you want to make distinctions between different peoples, so really if you want to know, okay, there are a lot of people in this region, in this continent, and we want to know what the main differences between them are and how we should relate to them, then language really is the most [common] denominator. What you also see is that, indeed — and this, of course, is one of the dark heritages of the 19th-century colonial project — is that that classification is then reinforced or formulated in terms of physical anthropology, in terms of theories of race. But then one of the remarkable things here is that, again, these people are aware that there are such things as miscegenation, both on a linguistic and on a racial level, and there also is actually far less consensus about racial classification than there is about linguistic classification. This is surprising, but people nowadays tend to talk about racial theory in the 19th century as if it is this one big dark thing, and it is pretty dark — I wouldn’t want to deny that — but it’s not one thing. There is actually like half a dozen conflicting racial theories, and they are aware that they are leaking on all sides, so there are theories that simply say, okay, we divide these people into different colours. Black, white, red, yellow, and maybe also brown. Or we divide them into different facial forms. Or we divide them into hair growth. That’s actually the most comical one, so that’s actually Ernst Haeckel who comes up with that who says like, okay, well, colour is an arbitrary standard because it actually changes depending on the climate. Well, physical proportions are a continuum, but actually the different hair types are discrete sets, so we divide people into people with sleek hair, and people with curly hair, and people with woolly hair. JMc 22:35 And I believe that’s the basis of the classification that Friedrich Müller… FS 22:38 Yes, so then you really have these wollhaarigen Sprachen, which really doesn’t pass the giggle test in some regards. JMc 22:46 I guess also, too, that by the end of the 19th century, people who were trying to come up with sort of rigorous scientific definitions for racial theory found that it didn’t stack up and abandoned it. FS 22:58 What you see indeed is that there is a growing awareness, at least within the scientific community, that these distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, but then still the practice continues. Physical anthropology continues indeed until after World War II. What you see is that racial theory, because it is “natural science” (quotation marks) actually has this sort of appeal as a sort of more rigid quantitative approach, and even after Franz Boas actually starts actively not just noticing that the categories leak, but gathering lots of anthropometric data with the express aim of showing that anthropometry is not the right way to quantify people, even after that it continues. I mean, another interesting example is Pater Wilhelm Schmidt, the guy who basically represents Catholic ethnolinguistics, who writes an atlas of the world’s languages, does the classification of Australian Aboriginal languages that still kind of holds, and reorganizes the collections of the Propaganda Fide into the Vatican Museum of, Missionary-Ethnological Museum. So he’s firmly convinced you should look at culture, not race, but he says you should do that because ethnology is a separate scientific discipline. But he also keeps treating racial theory as a fully bona fide scientific approach. So there is this very funny – or, funny, well, it depends on your sense of humour – there is this very paradoxical outcome that he actually writes a tract Rasse und Volk in the 1920s, and then after the Nazis take over, he reformulates it into a tract: Rasse und Volk. Ihre allgemeine Bedeutung, ihre Geltung im deutschen Raum. That’s “Race and People: Their General Meaning and Their Significance in the German Area.” This book gets banned by the Nazis because he says, yes, we have racial theories, but no, they are irrelevant for understanding what a people is and what a language is. So, I mean, Pater Wilhelm Schmidt is not my hero – let’s be clear about that – but he does show a parting of the ways in this program. JMc 25:17 Thanks very much, Floris, for hooking up with us by Zoom to talk about linguistic scholarship in the long nineteenth century. FS 25:24 Yeah. Thank you very much, James. I mean, this is really a wonderful contribution that you’re making to the linguistic community, keeping us together over a distance in these dark times and reminding us of the past, of course, as an imagined community we’re also imagining ourselves to be part of.

In this episode, we examine some of the major critiques directed against the Neogrammarians and see what they tell us about the state of linguistics around the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century. We focus in particular on the arguments made by Hugo Schuchardt and Karl Vossler. https://hiphilangsci.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/hiphilangsci_010_ep.mp3 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts Archive DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4767874 References for Episode 10 Primary Sources Osthoff, Hermann and Karl Brugman (1878), ‘Vorwort’, Morphologische Untersuchungen 1: i-xx. archive.org Schmidt, Johannes (1870), Die Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der indogermanischen Sprachen, Weimar: Böhlau. archive.org Schmidt, Johannes (1887), ‘Schleichers Auffassung der Lautgesetze’, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung 28: 303–312. archive.org Schuchardt, Hugo (1928 [1870]), ‘Über die Klassifikation der romanischen Mundarten’, in Schuchardt and Spitzer (1928), pp. 166–188. Schuchardt, Hugo (1885), Über die Lautgesetze. Gegen die Junggrammatiker, Berlin: Oppenheim. Hugo Schuchardt Archiv (English and French trans. available from the Hugo Schuchardt Archiv. Text included in Schuchardt and Spitzer (1928), pp. 51–107.) Schuchardt, Hugo and Leo Spitzer, eds. (1928), Hugo Schuchardt-Brevier: ein Vademecum der allgemeinen Sprachwissenschaft, 2nd ed., Halle (Saale): Niemeyer. Vossler, Karl (1904), Positivismus und Idealismus in der Sprachwissenschaft, HeidelBerg: Winter. archive.org Vossler, Karl (1905), Sprache als Schöpfung und Entwicklung, Heidelberg: Winter. archive.org Wenker, Georg (1877), Das rheinische Platt, Düsseldorf: Self-published. archive.org (Map and further information available from regionalsprache.de) Secondary Sources Alter, Stephen G. (2005), William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. See Chap. 9. Bourdeau, Michel (2018), ‘Auguste Comte’, in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2018 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/comte/ Amsterdamska, Olga (1987), Schools of Thought: The development of linguistics from Bopp to Saussure, Dordrecht: Reidel. See Chap. 6. Maaß, Holger (2003), ‘Karl Vosslers Sprachphilosophie und die romanische Philologie des 19. Jahrhunderts. Eine wissenssoziologische Betrachtung’, in Traditionen der Entgrenzung. Beiträge zur romanistischen Wissenschaftsgeschichte, eds. F. Estelmann, P. Krügel and O. Müller, pp. 43–55, Frankfurt: Peter Lang. Putchke, Wolfgang (2001), ‘Die Dialektologie, ihr Beitrag zur historischen Sprachwissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert und ihre Kritik am junggrammatischen Programm’, in History of the Language Sciences, vol. 2, eds. Sylvain Auroux, E.F.K. Koerner, Hans-Josef Niederehe and Kees Versteegh, pp. 1498–1512, Berlin: de Gruyter. Ringer, Fritz K. (1969), The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German academic community, 1890–1933, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

In this episode, we introduce the Neogrammarians, the dominant school of linguistics in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. https://hiphilangsci.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/09/hiphilangsci_009_epg.mp3 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts Archive DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4767863 References for Episode 9 Primary Sources Brugman, Karl (1876a), ‘Nasalis sonans in der indogermanischen Grundsprache’, Studien zur griechischen und lateinischen Grammatik 9: 285–338. archive.org Brugman, Karl (1876b), ‘Zur Geschichte der Stammabstufenden Declinationen. Erste Abhandlung: die Nomina auf -ar- und -tar-‘, Studien zur griechischen und lateinischen Grammatik 9: 361–406. archive.org Brugman, Karl (1897), ‘Zum Gedächtniss W. D. Whitney’s’, The Whitney Memorial Meeting, Boston: Ginn and co, pp. 74–81. archive.org Curtius, Georg (1876), ‘Nachwort’, Studien zur griechischen und lateinischen Grammatik 9: 468. archive.org Leskien, August (1876), Die Declination im Slavisch-Lithauischen und Germanischen, Leipzig: Hirzel. archive.org Osthoff, Hermann and Karl Brugman (1878), ‘Vorwort’, Morphologische Untersuchungen 1: i-xx. archive.org Paul, Hermann (1920 [1880]), Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte, Halle an der Saale: Niemeyer. archive.org (English trans.: (1891), Principles of the history of language, trans. H. A. Strong, London: Longmans, Green and co. archive.org) Verner, Karl (1877), ‘Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung’, Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung 23: 97–130. archive.org Secondary Sources Amsterdamska, Olga (1987), Schools of Thought: The development of linguistics from Bopp to Saussure, Dordrecht: Reidel. See Chaps. 4 and 5. Morpurgo Davies, Anna (1998), History of Linguistics, vol. 4: Nineteenth-century Linguistics, London: Longman. See Chap. 9.

In this episode, we look first at the critiques of Schleicher’s “physical” and Steinthal’s “psychological” theory of language put forward by the American linguist William Dwight Whitney. We then turn to Whitney’s own conception of language as a “human institution” and its intellectual background. https://hiphilangsci.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/hiphilangsci_008_epi.mp3 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts Archive DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4767853 References for Episode 8 Primary Sources Lyell, Charles (1830–1833), Principles of Geology: being an attempt to explain the former changes of the Earth’s surface, by reference to causes now in operation, 3 vols., London: John Murray. Lyell, Charles (1863), The Geological Evidences of the Antiquity of Man, London: John Murray. archive.org Steinthal, H. (1875), ‘Antikritik. Gegen Whitney’, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft, 8: 216–250. archive.org Whitney, William Dwight (1867), Language and the Study of Language, London: Trübner and Co. archive.org Whitney, William Dwight (1873a), ‘Schleicher and the physical theory of language’, Oriental and Linguistic Studies, Vol. I, pp. 298–331, New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co. archive.org Whitney, William Dwight (1873b), ‘Steinthal and the psychological theory of language’, Oriental and Linguistic Studies, Vol. I, pp. 332–375, New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co. archive.org Whitney, William Dwight (1874), ‘The elements of English pronunciation’,Oriental and Linguistic Studies, Vol. II, pp. 202–276, New York: Scribner, Armstrong and Co. archive.org Secondary Sources Alter, Stephen G. (2005), William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Christy, Craig T. (1983), Uniformitarianism in Linguistics, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Morpurgo Davies, Anna (1998), History of Linguistics, vol. 4: Nineteenth-century Linguistics, London: Longman. See especially pp. 207–212. Nerlich, Brigitte (1990), Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener, London: Routledge. See especially Part I.

In this interview, we talk to Dr Clara Stockigt about missionary grammars in Australia and their links to the academic linguistic scholarship of the time. https://hiphilangsci.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/hiphilangsci_007_int.mp3 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts Archive DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4767849 References for Episode 7 Primary Sources Bleek, Wilhelm H. I. (1858), The Library of His Excellency Sir George Grey, K.C.B Philology, Australia, Vol. II, Part I, Australia, London: Trübner and Co. Flierl, J. (1880), Dieri Grammatik [Comparative grammar of Diyari and Wangkangurru], unpublished ms., Lutheran Archives, Adelaide, Box 22 Immanuel Synod–Bethesda Mission, 306.510. Gabelentz, Hans Conan von der (1861), ‘Über das Passivum: Eine sprachvergleichende Abhandlung’, Abhandlungen der philologisch-historischen Classe der Königlich-Sächsischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, 8, pp. 449–546. Grey, George (1839), Vocabulary of the dialects spoken by the Aboriginal races of South-Western Australia, Perth: The author. (Repr. London: T & W. Boone, 1840). Grey, George (1841), Journals of two expeditions of discovery in North-West and Western Australia: During the years 1837, 38, and 39, 2 Volumes, London: T & W. Boone. Grey, George (1845), ‘On the languages of Australia, being an extract from a dispatch from Captain G. Grey, Governor of South Australia, to Lord Stanley’, The Journal of the Royal Geographical Society of London, 15, pp. 365-367. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1797917 Kempe, F. A. H. (1891), ‘A grammar and vocabulary of the language spoken by the Aborigines of the Macdonnell Ranges, South Australia’, Transactions of the Royal Society of South Australia, 14, pp. 1–54. Leonhardi, Moritz von (1901), Letter to C. Strehlow 10/09/1901 written in Germany, Strehlow Research Centre, Alice Springs, 1901-1-2, The NT Interpreter and Translator Service. Lepsius, Karl R. (1855), Das allgemeine linguistische Alphabet: Grundsätze der Übertragung fremder Schriftsysteme und bisher noch ungeschriebener Sprachen in europäische Buchstaben, Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz. Lepsius, Karl R. (1863), Standard alphabet for reducing unwritten languages and foreign graphic systems to a uniform orthography in European letters, London: Williams & Norgate. Meyer, Heinrich A. E. (1843), Vocabulary of the language spoken by the Aborigines of the southern portions of the settled districts of South Australia, … Preceded by a grammar, Adelaide: James Allen. Müller, Friedrich (1867), Reise der Österreichischen Fregatte Novara um die Erde in den Jahren 1857, 1858, 1859: Linguistischer Theil, Abteilung III, Australische Sprachen, Vienna: K.-und-K. Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, in commission bei K. Gerold’s Sohn, pp. 239–266. Müller, F. (1882), Grundriß der Sprachwissenschaft, Vol. II: Die Sprachen der Schlichthaarigen Rassen, Theil 1: Die Sprachen der Australischen, der Hyperboreischen und der Amerikanischen Rasse, Vienna: Hölder. Müller, F. Max (1854), Letters to Chevalier Bunsen on the classification of the Turanian languages, London: A & G. A. Spottiswoode. Pott, August Friedrich (1884–1890), ‘Einleitung in die allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft’, Internationale Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Leipzig: F. Techmer. (Repr. 1974. E. F. K. Koerner, ed., Einleitung in die Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft [1884-90], with Zur Litteratur der Sprachenkunde Europas [1887], Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Prichard, James C. (1847), Physical History of Mankind, Vol V., London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper. Royal Geographical Society (Aug., 1885), ‘System of Orthography for Native Names of Places’, Proceedings of the Royal Geographical Society and Monthly Record of Geography, New Monthly Series, 7, pp. 535–536. Schürmann, Clamor W. (1844), A vocabulary of the Parnkalla language spoken by the natives inhabiting the western shores of Spencer Gulf. To which is prefixed a collection of grammatical rules hitherto ascertained by C.W. Shürmann [sic], Adelaide: George Dahane. Strehlow, Carl F. T. (1907–1920), Die Aranda-und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien, Vols. 1–5, Frankfurt am Main: Städtisches Völkerkunde-Museum. Symmons, Charles (1841), Grammatical introduction to the study of the Aboriginal language in Western Australia, Perth: The author. (Repr. Perth: The Western Australian Almanac, 1842.) [= Grammar of the language spoken by the Aborigines of Western Australia.] Threlkeld, Lancelot E. (1834), An Australian grammar: Comprehending the principles and natural rules of the language, as spoken by the Aborigines in the vicinity of Hunter’s River, Lake Macquarie, &c., New South Wales, Sydney: Stephens & Stokes. Taplin, George (1879), The folklore, manners, customs, and languages of the South Australian Aborigines, Adelaide: E. Spiller, Government Printer. Secondary Sources Dixon, Robert M.W. (2010 [1980]), The Languages of Australia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simpson, Jane (2019), ‘Why women botanists outnumbered women linguists in nineteenth century Australia’, History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences. https://hiphilangsci.net/2019/05/01/women-botanists-women-linguists/ Stockigt, Clara (2015), ‘Early descriptions of Pama-Nyungan Ergativity’, Historiographia Linguistica 42.2–3: 335–377. Stockigt, Clara (2017), Pama-Nyungan morphosyntax: lineages of early description, University of Adelaide doctoral thesis. http://dx.doi.org/10.4225/55/5926388950cdc Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc 00:09 Hi. I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. In previous episodes, we’ve talked rather extensively about how European linguists in the 19th century tried to come to terms with the great diversity of the languages of the world. In today’s episode, we take a peek at some of the sources from which these scholars derived their knowledge of non-Indo-European languages. To introduce us to this topic, we’re joined by Dr. Clara Stockigt from the University of Adelaide. Clara’s a specialist in the history of language documentation in Australia. She’s in Europe at the moment tracking down manuscript sources kept in a number of archives. We’ve met up here in Leipzig, where we’re quite literally sitting across the way from the Nikolaikirche. As always, you can find the full bibliographic details of all the texts we mention today up on the podcast page at hiphilangsci.net. Before we get started, we have to note that our discussion today focuses rather narrowly on the technical details of grammatical description of Australian languages and the intellectual networks within which the authors of early grammars operated. We therefore miss the broader, and in many ways much more important, story of settler colonialism in Australia and the world more generally and how this was intertwined with scientific research. This is a topic that we’ll address in another episode. So Clara, to put us in the picture, could you tell us which languages were the first to be described in detail in Australia? CS 01:51 So the languages that were described were the ones that initially, that were spoken around the colonial capitals, so you had Missionary Threlkeld writing a grammar of the language spoken near Newcastle, which is reasonably close to Sydney. The languages spoken close to Adelaide on the coast were described by Lutheran missionaries in the 1840s. Charles Symmons, who was the Protector of Aborigines in Western Australia, described the language spoken close to Perth, so in the very early eras–era–you have a pattern where the languages spoken to the colonial capitals were described. And then–but those languages, those missions, didn’t last very long, and the languages, the people, dispersed quite quickly. And then the Lutherans established missions in South Australia among the Diyari and the Arrernte, and at those missions, you sort of had this intergenerational tradition of linguistic description where Aboriginal people and the missionaries worked alongside each other in what was an economic unit. JMc 02:57 So were the languages that were described in these centres, did they all belong to a single family? How many language families are there in Australia? CS 03:07 So we have the Pama-Nyungan family, which covers most of the Australian continent, and so all of the languages that we’re talking about, having been grammatically described in the 19th century, belonged to this Pama-Nyungan family of languages, which is sort of a higher-order overarching umbrella into which there are different languages. I think about 250 Pama-Nyungan languages are said to have been spoken in Australia at the time of colonisation. JMc 03:33 And so what was the motivation of the missionaries to study these languages in Australia? CS 03:39 Okay, so as everywhere around the world with missionaries, they described the language so that they could begin to preach in the language and convert the people to Christianity. There was this idea that if people could hear the Gospel in their mother tongue, they would necessarily be converted to Christianity. And they also learnt languages, especially at the Diyari mission and at the Arrernte mission. The Lutheran missionaries in Central Australia, they learned languages to prepare vernacular literacy material so that Aboriginal people could become literate in their own languages and use the hymn books in the schools and the books of prayers that they were also printing in Diyari and in Arrernte. It’s clear that many missionaries wanted to show that, they wanted to describe the complexity of the languages in order to show that the people speaking the languages were intelligent, but this itself could be seen as a missionary motivation, because you can’t, from their point of view, you can’t covert a people to Christianity unless they’re intelligent, but by proving their intelligence, you are also saying that these people were possible, it was possible to convert these people to Christianity, so there’s a bit of a double bind there. And also, missionary grammarians in Australia realised that their work was going to preserve the languages that they were describing. You know, there was a perception that Australian languages and Aboriginal people were disappearing very quickly in the aftermath of European settlement. Lancelot Threlkeld, who was Australia’s earliest grammarian, who wrote a first complete grammar in 1834, he perceived that he had actually outlived the last speakers of the language he described in the 1820s and 1830s. JMc 05:36 “Disappearing” sounds a bit passive and euphemistic. How did the missionaries, people like Threlkeld, how did they describe the situation themselves? Did they use such— CS 05:47 They used the word ”disappearing”. JMc 05:48 Okay. CS 05:49 Yeah. “Vanishing”. JMc 05:51 It seems a bit euphemistic, doesn’t it? Do you think that that is how someone like Threlkeld genuinely felt about it, or do you think he was more interested in not offending his European readership? CS 06:05 I think he genuinely felt Australian populations were being decimated and dying out. And, of course, the 19th-century records collected by the missionaries are increasingly important today in reconstructing Australia’s pre-invasion linguistic ecology because of the high rate of extinction of Australian Indigenous languages since colonisation and also, or because a large proportion of Australian Indigenous populations today now speak English, or Aboriginal English, or creoles as their first language. JMc 06:40 And were missionaries just writing for other missionaries? Did they intend their grammars to be read only by other members of their missionary society? CS 06:48 Some missionaries did, especially the ones who just wrote their grammars as German manuscripts, but those who knew that the work was going to be published often had a little section in the introduction saying that they hoped the work would be interesting, would be of value, to the interested philologist, so there was a definite sense that the missionaries were aware that their linguistic knowledge was valuable to readers outside the field, yeah. They were courting a relationship with European philologists. JMc 07:23 So what kind of experience did these missionaries have in grammar or in learning foreign languages which might have given them exposure to grammatical description of other languages? CS 07:38 So the missionaries who wrote grammars of Australian languages had received different degrees of linguistic training in preparation for mission work. Those trained at the Jänicke-Rückert schools, or at Neuendettelsau in Germany, or at the Basel Mission institute in Switzerland are said to have received a rigorous linguistic training with exposure to 19th-century grammars of Latin, and Greek, and Hebrew. JMc 08:02 And Hebrew as well as Latin and Greek, so that’s a non-Indo-European language, of course, so structurally quite different from Latin and Greek. CS 08:06 Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. JMc 08:10 Yeah, so they would have been familiar with languages that have a structure not the same as their own native language. CS 08:17 That’s right, but only some of the grammarians had looked at Hebrew. JMc 08:20 Okay. CS 08:20 Yeah. JMc 08:21 So it was this minority thing. CS 08:22 Yeah. I think so. Yeah. JMc 08:23 Yeah. Okay. CS 08:25 On the other hand, other missionary grammarians, such as the Congregationalist George Taplin and Missionary Threlkeld of the London Mission Society, had received little formal training, and grammars written by the Protectors of Aborigines were founded in a well-rounded education and a knowledge of schoolboy Latin. So an assumption that a rigorously trained grammarian who had studied a greater number of classical languages would make better analyses of Australian linguistic structures than grammarians with lesser training is actually not upheld when we compare the quality of the description with what is known about a grammarian’s training. JMc 09:04 Okay, and why do you think that might be? CS 09:06 Well, it’s a bit odd. It might be because the sample size in Australia is reasonably small, but the fact that it appears to have little bearing on the quality of a grammatical description, probably because the strength of an individual description has more to do with the length of time and the type of exposure that a grammarian had with the language and probably also just to do with his inherent intelligence and aptitude. JMc 09:35 Okay. Although, you’d think that you’d need to have some sort of knowledge of, or at least terms that you could attach to the various grammatical categories that you identify in the language, like you’d need some sort of framework that you could use as a scaffolding to even begin making your description. CS 09:53 So I think just a basic knowledge of Latin, a very basic knowledge of Latin, was enough to kind of get you there. JMc 09:56 Yeah, is enough. Yeah. CS 10:00 Yeah. JMc 10:01 Sort of bootstrapping. CS 10:02 Yeah. And some missionary grammarians in Australia also had previous exposure to the structure of other exotic languages or non-European languages like Hebrew. Early Lutherans trained at the Jänicke-Rückert school were probably also aware of descriptions of Tamil because of missionary work in India. JMc 10:19 Okay, which is, of course, a Dravidian language, so another very different language, different kind of structure. CS 10:21 Yeah. JMc 10:25 And I guess we should probably point out that we’re using this term “exotic” a bit, but that’s a category that the missionaries would have used themselves to describe these unfamiliar languages. CS 10:35 Yeah. The missionaries in Australia tended to use the word “peculiar”. JMc 10:38 “Peculiar”. Okay. CS 10:39 Yeah, as opposed to “exotic”, but yeah. JMc 10:41 Yeah. CS 10:43 Missionary Threlkeld had worked in Polynesia, so he had some knowledge of the description of Polynesian languages from the mission field, and the Basel-trained missionary Handt had worked in Sierra Leone, so the way in which these experiences may have influenced the early description of Australian languages requires a lot more research, I think. Nobody’s really looked into that too much. JMc 11:05 Okay, so this is an unexplored area of missionary linguistics. CS 11:09 I think so, and especially the connection between the early description of languages in Polynesia and in Australia, because there were strong connections with missionaries from the London Missionary Society. JMc 11:21 So how did these people writing grammars and word lists of Australian languages approach them, would you say? CS 11:27 Okay, so as was the case with the description of other exotic languages— JMc 11:30 Or peculiar languages, as the case may be. CS 11:31 Or peculiar languages, yeah. Eurocentric linguistic understanding skewed the 19th-century representations of Australian linguistic structures. When we look at the attempts to represent the sound systems of Australian languages, we see that 19th-century linguists were presented with really significant challenges. Consonants in Australian languages typically show few articulatory manners and an absence of fricatives and affricates, but extensive places, extensive sets of place of articulation contrasts, some having two series of palatal and two series of apical phonemes for stops, nasals, and laterals. And it was difficult for European ears to distinguish these sounds, let alone to decide on a standardised way to represent them. So before the middle decades of the 20th century, the orthographic treatments of Australian phonologies grossly underrepresented phonemic articulation contrasts, and all sources just fell well short of the mark. And I think it’s this type of failure that has contributed to the outright dismissal of the early descriptions of Australian languages by some later 20th-century researchers. JMc 12:43 Okay. So do you think, even though in the orthographies that a lot of these earlier people in the field doing descriptions of Australian languages, even though the orthographies that they might have designed for these languages were insufficient, do you think that they still understood the principles of how the phonology of those languages worked, or do you think it just completely went past them? CS 13:05 I think they understood that there was a greater level of complexity or there were things going on that they weren’t grappling with, and they were frustrated with the inconsistencies in the system. So in the 1930s, when people started to look back at the earlier 19th-century sources, they could see that there was a great inconsistency, and even though early grammarians often aimed towards a uniform orthography and stated that they had established, that they were following the conventions established by the Royal Geographic Society, they really just were not getting anywhere near an adequate method of representing the languages, and I don’t think they understood what was going on, necessarily. JMc 13:47 So those are the phonological features of the languages. What about in terms of the grammar? CS 13:51 Yeah. Okay, so missionary grammarians, by and large, opted to scaffold their developing understanding of Australian languages within the traditional European descriptive framework that they were familiar with from their study of classical languages. And as a consequence, missionary grammarians in Australia tended to attempt to describe features that were just not present in Australian languages, including indefinite and definite articles, the comparative marking of adjectives, passive constructions, and relative clauses signalled by relative pronouns. JMc 14:24 So do you think that the missionaries were actually implying that those categories were universals and were projecting them into the languages they were describing, or do you think it was intended more like a heuristic, like as a learner’s guide, like they were writing for an audience that might want to express the equivalent of a passive construction in their own language in this Australian language, and so the grammar is saying, “If you had this kind of structure in a European language, you would then use this”? CS 14:55 That’s exactly what they were doing. So on the other hand, grammarians who became reasonably familiar with an Australian language encountered an array of foreign (or, as they called them, “peculiar”) morphosyntactic features that were not originally accommodated within the descriptive model, and they invented new terminology and descriptive solutions in order to describe these peculiarities. And so they were able to account for Australian features like the function, and—the marking and function of ergative case, large morphological case systems of Australian languages, sensitivity of case marking to animacy, systems of bound pronouns, inalienably possessed noun phrases, and inclusive and exclusive pronominal distinction and the morphological marking of clause subordination, so all of these features were described in the earliest descriptive era in Australia. And some early Australian grammarians were certainly aware that the traditional grammatical framework was inadequate to properly describe Australian structures. In 1844, for instance, Lutheran missionary Schürmann advised that grammarians of Australian languages should “divest their mind as much as possible of preconceived ideas, particularly of those grammatical forms which they may have acquired by the study of ancient or modern languages.” JMc 16:18 Wow, so that’s a direct quote from Schürmann.. CS 16:20 Yeah. JMc 16:20 Okay. CS 16:21 And that’s 1844, so a reasonably early perception, I think. But nevertheless, these missionary grammarians appear unwilling to wean themselves off the framework designed to accommodate classical European languages, even when they knew that the framework was less than adequate. JMc 16:36 Okay. CS 16:37 And this is probably because the traditional framework conveyed peculiar structures in a way that was most accessible and easy for the reader to understand, as you were suggesting earlier. JMc 16:46 Ah, okay. Yeah. CS 16:49 So these grammarians who perceived that the framework was inadequate still managed to describe foreign linguistic structures by subverting the traditional framework. Section or chapter headings that are built into the traditional framework that accommodated European structures that were not found in Australian languages sometimes provided a useful, vacant slot into which these newly encountered peculiarities could be inserted into the description. So an example here, just to get a bit technical, is the description of the case suffix marking allative function, which tended to be underrepresented in the early grammars because allative function is not marked by the morphological case systems of European languages. JMc 17:34 Okay, so allative is like going to a place. CS 17:37 Yeah. Yeah. That’s right. But there was a group of grammarians in Australia who exemplified allative case marking under the heading “correlative pronouns”, which is an unnecessary descriptive category when it’s applied to Australian languages. So under this heading, “correlative pronouns”, we see noun phrases translated as “from X in ablative case” and “to X in allative case”, but there’s no suggestion that the morphology that was described under this heading, “correlative pronouns”, was in any way pronominal. And similarly, while grammarians happily accommodated the large morphological case systems of Australian languages within an early chapter of the grammar headed “Nouns” by presenting case paradigms of up to 11 cases, these same grammarians presented the same morphology again in a later section of the grammar under a final chapter heading headed “Prepositions”. A contradiction in describing suffixing affixes under the word class heading “preposition” doesn’t appear to have perturbed the grammarian. Newly encountered Australian features tended to be accounted for in sections of the grammar that conventionally conveyed a Europeanism that was perceived as functionally equivalent to the Australian feature—in this instance, nouns marked for cases that needed to be translated by an English prepositional phrase being described as a preposition. And other instances of this type of substitution process in which the traditional framework was colonised by foreign structures include the construal of ergative morphology as marking passive constructions, the depiction of bound or enclitic pronouns as verbal inflections for number and person, and the description of deictic forms as third-person neuter pronouns. JMc 19:36 Okay, and how widespread is this representation of ergative morphology as a kind of passive construction? Like how many different scholars do that? CS 19:47 Quite a few. Even though they made a good account of ergative morphology when they’re talking about case, either conceiving of the ergative case as a second nominative or a type of ablative case, but often when it comes to the description of the passive or the part of the grammar where you’re expected to describe passive functions, there will be ergative morphology given in there as well. JMc 20:10 What connections were there between the people in the field writing descriptions of Australian languages and linguistic scholars in Europe and other parts of the world? So were there active networks of communication between the field and the metropolitan centres, and did these language descriptions feed back into the development of linguistic theory? CS 20:31 Generally not. I think connections between missionary grammarians in Australia and Europe were quite limited. Australian linguistic material tends to be absent from 19th-century comparative philological literature, and European philologists commonly mention a scarcity, or they’re frustrated about a scarcity, of Australian linguistic data. There’s no reference to Australian languages in Pott (1884 to 1890), nor in Friedrich Max Müller (1861 to 1864), although there is a reasonably comprehensive discussion of Australian material in the final volume of Prichard’s Physical History of Mankind, Volume 5, 1847. JMc 21:11 Okay, and that’s quite early, 1847. CS 21:13 Yeah. JMc 21:13 So what material did he have to work with? CS 21:16 He had the published, the grammars that had been published at that stage, which were from South Australia and New South Wales, so there was a relatively small amount of material, but he had looked at what was available at that time, which makes it odd that these later compilations of linguistic material from around the world don’t reference the Australian material. JMc 21:38 So were these grammars, these Australian grammars, were they published grammars, or were they manuscripts? CS 21:43 The ones that he referred to were published grammars, so there was a wave of publications of materials in the 1830s–1840s, and then not a lot of published material until towards the end of that century. JMc 21:58 And were they published in Australia or in Europe? CS 22:00 They were published in Australia. JMc 22:02 Interesting. Okay. CS 22:02 Yeah, generally by colonial authorities. JMc 22:05 The missionary grammarians themselves, was there contact between them, like out in the field, or did they work alone mostly? CS 22:13 Yeah, they pretty much worked alone, not only from developments in Europe, but also in intellectual isolation from each other. Many early grammarians appear to have written their grammars without any knowledge of previous descriptions of Australian languages, and where schools of Australian linguistic thought did develop or where ideas about the best way to describe Australian languages were handed down to sort of future grammarians, you see a regional pattern of ideas about the best way to describe Australian languages developing. And this occurred within different Christian denominations which were ethnically and linguistically distinct and which had their headquarters in different pre-Federation Australian colonial capitals. JMc 22:58 Okay, and what were the main regions? CS 23:01 So we had a school of description developing in New South Wales, which was, the earliest grammars of Australian languages were written there, and then the school of description developing in South Australia mostly with the Lutheran missionaries, and then a later descriptive school developing in Queensland. So this decentralised nature of the development of linguistics in Australia hampered improvements to the understandings and descriptive practices in the country, but also to the movement of ideas in and out of the country. But just as some of the early grammarians had flirted with the interested philologist in the introductory passages, the linguistic knowledge of some grammarians was actively sought by some scholars outside the country. The pathways through which ideas about Australian languages were exchanged remain largely untraced, although there has been focused interest on the enduring communication between the Lutheran missionary Carl Strehlow, who worked with the Arrernte populations in Central Australia, and his German editor, Moritz von Leonhardi. And this relationship kept Strehlow abreast of early 20th-century European ethnological thinking, although linguistics played a relatively small part of their intellectual exchange. JMc 24:14 Okay, and when was Carl Strehlow working? CS 24:17 He was working with the Arrernte from I think 1898, or… Yeah, 1896, possibly, until his death in 1921. JMc 24:25 Okay, so this is right at the end of the 19th century. CS 24:28 Yeah, in the beginning of the 20th century. Yeah. But other interactions deserve more scholarly attention, including the interaction between Wilhelm Bleek, who was the German philologist based in South Africa and who, in 1858, catalogued Sir George Grey’s philological library, and missionary George Taplin, who was in South Australia, who himself collated comparative lexical material of South Australian languages, so there’s an interesting exchange between these two people that I think would be worthy of further investigation. JMc 25:03 Yeah. And of course, George Grey was a sort of wandering colonial official, wasn’t he, so he had previously been in South Australia before he went to South Africa. CS 25:11 Yeah. And in New Zealand as well, I think, and he–it was George Grey who supported the work of the Lutheran missionaries in South Australia in those very early years. JMc 25:22 Yeah. CS 25:22 Other lesser-known exchanges between Australia and Europe are Hans Conan von der Gabelentz’s and Friedrich Müller’s reframing of Australian ergative structures as passive, which were both based on a grammar written by the Lutheran missionary Meyer in 1843. JMc 25:40 Okay. CS 25:41 And these were given in Gabelentz’s Über das Passivum in 1861 and Müller’s Grundriß der Sprachwissenschaft in 1882. JMc 25:50 Okay. Do you think that that is a fair interpretation of Hans Conan von der Gabelentz? Because I guess his Über das Passivum is really an early typological work, and he’s talking essentially about a functional category and looking at how it is realised in what we would now call the different voice systems of languages around the world. So he doesn’t just have Australian languages in there, for example. He also has Tagalog and numerous other diverse languages of the world. So do you think it’s fair to say that he was reframing the ergative as a passive, or rather, he just used “passive” as a term, as a sort of typological term, to describe this kind of voice structure in the languages of the world? CS 26:37 No, I actually do think he reframed the structure and he reinterpreted the material that Meyer had presented in a way that Meyer had not intended and I don’t think is a fair representation of the structure in an Australian language in order to support his theory. JMc 26:55 Okay. And how representative was the situation in Australia in comparison with other places that were subject to European colonialism in this period? So especially settler colonialism. So the comparison, I guess, would be with South and especially North America and South Africa, and parts of the Pacific, like New Zealand. CS 27:19 I think there’s a lot more work to be done in comparing what occurred in these different areas, but I think the situation in Australia does differ quite a lot. No 19th-century descriptive linguist in Australia managed to truly bridge the divide between being a missionary or field-based linguist and academia, so Australia has no scholars equivalent to Franz Boas in North America or Wilhelm Bleek in South Africa. Channels of communication between Europe and Australia were much less developed than between Europe and other colonies. JMc 27:53 Okay. Why is that? Just because it’s so far away, or… CS 27:54 Yeah. Possibly because it’s so far away, and I think because there was—linguistics as a discipline wasn’t centralised, and we just didn’t happen to have the type of, like we didn’t have a Wilhelm Bleek here or a Franz Boas. There wasn’t a centralised development of ideas in the country and we have this regional development sort of haphazard regional ad-hoc development of ideas in different mission fields that weren’t really feeding into a central body that was communicating with Europe. And I think also the exchange of ideas was largely unidirectional flowing out of the country rather than into the country, so for instance, the presentation of sound systems of Australian languages in systematic diagrams that set out consonant inventories in tables, mapping place of articulation against manner of articulation, occur reasonably regularly and early in European publications commencing with Lepsius in 1855, who presented the phonology of Kaurna in such a sort of gridded system. Also, Friedrich Müller in 1867 did a similar thing, and later European works right up until the 1930s were representing Australian phonologies in this way, but such presentations appear not to have been read by any grammarian in Australia, or if they were read, they weren’t understood and they weren’t assimilated into Australian practice. The earliest reasonable graphic representation of consonants made by an Australian researcher didn’t occur until Arthur Capell’s 1956 work entitled A New Approach to Australian Languages. I think the slow speed with which phonological science entered Australia is illustrative of what could almost be seen as a linguistic vacuum in the country before about 1930. JMc 29:50 Okay. A linguistic vacuum. Okay. So I guess Capell had a university position, didn’t he, so I guess it’s this academic influence that you’re pointing to. CS 29:56 He did. Yeah. JMc 30:00 Yeah, yeah. CS 30:00 Which commenced around about the 19—very early in the 1930s you had the first dissertations of Australian Aboriginal languages being written within the Department of Classics at the University of Adelaide and within the Department of Anthropology at the University of Sydney, but it wasn’t until a few decades later that you had linguistic researchers within academic institutions working on Australian languages. JMc 30:25 Okay. Up until now, I thought that Australian linguistics burst forth fully formed from the brow of Bob Dixon, but… CS 30:33 Some would have us believe that. JMc 30:34 Okay. So thank you very much for coming all the way to Leipzig and telling us all about the situation in Australia with missionary linguistics. CS 30:46 Absolute pleasure, James. Thanks for inviting me.

In this episode, we look first at August Schleicher’s proposal for a linguistic “morphology” and its intellectual background in nineteenth-century biology. We then compare Schleicher’s approach to the scheme of language classification developed by H. Steinthal within Völkerpsychologie, or “psychology of peoples”. https://hiphilangsci.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/hiphilangsci_006_ep.mp3 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts Archive DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4767841 References for Episode 6 Primary Sources Darwin, Charles (1861 [1859]), On the Origin of Species, 3rd ed., London: John Murray. Google Books Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von (1877 [1817–1824]), ‘Zur Morphologie’, Goethe’s Werke, vol. 33, ed. Salomon Kalischer, Berlin: Dümmler. archive.org Haeckel, Ernst (1866), Generelle Morphologie der Organismen, 2 vols., Berlin: Georg Reimer. archive.org: vol. 1, vol. 2 Humboldt, Wilhelm von. (1905 [1822]), ‘Über das Entstehen der grammatischen Formen und ihren Einfluss auf die Ideenentwicklung’, Wilhelm von Humboldts gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, pp. 285–313, ed. Albert Leitzmann, Berlin: Behr. archive.org (English trans.: 1997, Wilhelm von Humboldt: Essays on language, ed. and trans. Theo Harden and Daniel J. Farrelly, Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.) Lazarus, M. and H. Steinthal (1860), ‘Einleitende Gedanken über Völkerpsychologie, als Einladung zu einer Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft’, Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 1: 1–73. Schleicher, August (1859), ‘Zur Morphologie der Sprache’, Mémoires de l’Académie Impériale des Sciences de St.-Petersbourg I:7, 1-38. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Schleicher, August (1860), Die Deutsche Sprache, Stuttgart: Cotta. archive.org Steinthal, H. (1860), Charakteristik der hauptsächlichsten Typen des Sprachbaues, Berlin: Dümmler. archive.org Secondary Sources Alter, Stephen G. (1999), Darwinism and the linguistic image: Language, race and natural theology in the nineteenth century, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Belke, Ingrid, ed. (1971), Moritz Lazarus und Heymann Steinthal: die Begründer der Völkerpsychologie in ihren Briefen, Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck). Borsche, Tilman (1989), ‘Die innere Form der Sprache. Betrachtungen zu einem Mythos der Humboldt-Herme(neu)tik’, Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachdenken. Symposion zum 150. Todestag, ed. Hans-Werner Scharf, pp. 47–65, Essen: Reimer Hobbing. Klautke, Egbert (2013), The mind of the nation: Völkerpsychologie in Germany, 1851–1955, New York: Berghahn. See in particular Chap. 1. Lehmann, Christian (2015 [1982]), Thoughts on grammaticalization, Berlin: Language Science Press. Open access Richards, Robert J. (2002), The Romantic conception of life: Science and philosophy in the age of Goethe, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. See in particular Chap. 11. Richards, Robert J. (2008), The tragic sense of life: Ernst Haeckel and the struggle over evolutionary thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. See in particular Chap. 5 and Appendix 1, a brief history of morphology. Trautmann-Waller, Céline (2006), Aux origines d’une science allemande de la culture. Linguistique et psychologie des peuples chez Heymann Steinthal, Paris: CNRS.