History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences

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.

In this episode, we look at the expansion of comparative-historical linguistics around the middle of the nineteenth century. We focus in particular on the figure of August Schleicher, the great consolidator of the field, and his “materialist” philosophy of science. https://hiphilangsci.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/hiphilangsci_005_epx.mp3 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts Archive DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4767838 References for Episode 5 Primary Sources Bleek, Wilhelm (1862–1869), A Comparative Grammar of South African Languages, 2 vols., London: Trübner and Co. Google Books: Vol. I, Vol. II Bopp, Franz (1841), Über die Verwandtschaft der malayisch-polynesischen Sprachen mit den indisch-europäischen, Berlin: Dümmler. archive.org Caldwell, Robert (1856), A Comparative Grammar of the Dravidian or South-Indian Family of Languages, London: Harrison. archive.org Diez, Friedrich Christian (1836–1844), Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen, 3 vols., Bonn: Weber. Vol. I, Vol. II, Vol. III Gabelentz, Hans Conon von der (1861–1873), ‘Die melanesischen Sprachen nach ihrem grammatischen Bau und ihrer Verwandtschaft unter sich und mit den malaiisch-polynesischen Sprachen untersucht’, Abhandlungen der Königlich-Sächsischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Leipzig, Philologische-historische Classe, 3: 1–266, 7: 1–186. Google Books: Part I, Part II Lepsius, Richard (1861), ‘Über die Umschrift und Lautverhältnisse iniger hinterasiatischer Sprachen, namlentlich der Chinesischen und der Tibetischen’, Abhandlungen der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, 1860: 449–496. Google Books Miklosich, Franz von (1852–1875), Vergleichende Grammatik der slavischen Sprachen, 4 vols., Wien: Braumüller. Schleicher, August (1861–1862), Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, Weimar: Böhlau. archive.org: Vol. I, Vol. II (English trans.: (1874-1877), A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin Languages, trans. Herbert Bendall, London: Trübner. archive.org: Part I, Part II) Schleicher, August (21873 [1863]), Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft, Weimar: Böhlau. archive.org (English trans.: (1869), Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language, trans. Alex V. W. Bikkers, London: John Camden Hotton. archive.org) Schleicher, August (1865), Über die Bedeutung der Sprache für die Naturgeschichte des Menschen, Weimar: Böhlau. archive.org Schleicher, August (1868), ‘Eine fabel in indogermanischer ursprache’, Beiträge zur vergleichenden Sprachforschung 5: 206-208. archive.org Vogt, Carl (1854 [1847]), Physiologische Briefe für Gebildete aller Stände, Gießen: Ricker’sche Buchhandlung. archive.org: Vol. I, Vol. II Zeuß, Johann Caspar (1853), Grammatica Celtica, 2 vols., Leipzig: Weidmann. archive.org: Vol. I, Vol. II Secondary Sources Beiser, Frederick C. (2014), After Hegel: German philosophy 1840–1900, Princeton: Princeton University Press. See Chap. 2. Chakravartty, Anjan (2017), ‘Scientific Realism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/scientific-realism/ Gregory, Frederick (1977), Scientific Materialism in Nineteenth Century Germany, Dordrecht: Reidel. McElvenny, James (2018), ‘August Schleicher and materialism in 19th-century linguistics’, Historiographia Linguistica 45: 1-2, 133-152. Green open access version Morpurgo Davies, Anna (1998), History of Linguistics, vol. 4: Nineteenth-century Linguistics, London: Longman. See Chap. 7. Powell, Eric A. and Andrew Byrd (2013), ‘Telling Tales in Proto-Indo-European’ [includes Byrd’s recording of Schleicher’s fable], Archaeology. https://www.archaeology.org/exclusives/articles/1302-proto-indo-european-schleichers-fable

In this episode, we talk to Jürgen Trabant about Wilhelm von Humboldt. https://hiphilangsci.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/hiphilangsci_004_int.mp3 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts Archive DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4767830 References for Episode 4 Primary sources 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.) Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1994), Mexikanische Grammatik, ed. Manfred Ringmacher, Paderborn: Schöningh. Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1997), Essays on Language, trans. Theo Harden and D. Farrelly, Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Humboldt, Wilhelm von (2012), Baskische Wortstudien und Grammatik, ed. Bernhard Hurch, Paderborn: Schöningh. Secondary sources Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt and Markus Messling (2017), ‘Wilhelm von Humboldt’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/wilhelm-humboldt/ Trabant, Jürgen (1986), Apeliotes oder der Sinn der Sprache, Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachbild, München: Wilhelm Fink. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (French trans. Humboldt ou le sens du langage [1992], avec François Mortier et Jean-Luc Evard, Liège: Mardaga.) Trabant, Jürgen (2012), Weltansichten: Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachprojekt, München: C.H. Beck. Trabant, Jürgen (2015), Wilhelm von Humboldt Lectures, Université de Rouen. https://webtv.univ-rouen.fr/channels/#2015-wilhelm-von-humboldt-lectures Trabant, Jürgen (2020), ‘Science of Language: India vs America: the Science of Language in 19th-Century Germany’, Doing Humanities in Nineteenth-Century Germany, ed. Efraim Podoksik, 189–213, Leiden: Brill. Transcript by Luca Dinu JMc 00:10 Hi. I’m James McElvenny, and you’re listening to the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast, online at hiphilangsci.net. Today, we’re joined by Jürgen Trabant, Emeritus Professor of Romance Languages at the Free University of Berlin. He’ll be talking to us about Wilhelm von Humboldt, who we’ve encountered a couple of times so far in this podcast series, most extensively in the previous episode. Jürgen is the author of numerous works on Humboldt in several languages. You can find a selection of his greatest hits listed up on the podcast website at hiphilangsci.net. So, Jürgen, what would you say is the foundation of Humboldt’s philosophy of language? In the previous episode, we discussed briefly what you have called Humboldt’s “anti-semiotics”. Could you tell us about what this is and how it fits into the philosophical landscape of Humboldt’s time? JT 01:09 I think, yeah, mentioning the anti-semiotics of Humboldt is very interesting, and it goes to the very heart, to the very philosophical heart, of Humboldt’s language philosophy, because he was—in that point—he was anti-Aristotelean, because the semiotic conception of language was for centuries linked to the European reception of the Interpretatione of Aristotle. Aristotle had the idea that languages are pure means of communication, hence signs, what he called signs. And he, Aristotle, introduced the term “sign”, semeion, into the history of language philosophy. And the idea was that, “Here are the humans. They are everywhere the same, and they think the same everywhere, and when their thoughts, they create ideas, their thoughts, universally in the same way. And when they want to communicate those thoughts, they use signs. They use sounds which are signs and which are completely arbitrary,” or as Aristotle says, kata syntheken. And hence we have this idea that words and languages are arbitrary signs, which is then taken up by Saussure of course—but in a different way, by the way. And what not Humboldt only, but what the Europeans together realize, in mainly in the 18th century, 17th, 18th century, that languages, words are not signs in that way, but that languages create thought in a different way. So this was a catastrophic insight, for instance, for the British philosophers, for Bacon, for Locke, and they realized that the vulgar languages, or the languages of extra-European people more so, that they created thought in a different way. So the Europeans realized that it was difficult to say what the Christians wanted to communicate in, let’s say, Nahuatl or Otomi, so in American languages, and hence they realized that the languages create different thought. And this is the idea Humboldt takes up through Leibniz, mainly, and which he then transforms into his language philosophy and which he transforms also into his linguistic project, because what is his linguistic project and at the very centre is exactly inquiry into the diversity of human thought. And this is why his title’s also Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues, On the Diversity of Human Language Construction. So I think the anti-semiotics is, yeah, leads us to the very centre of Humboldt’s linguistic philosophy. JMc 04:11 Okay, and in terms of the immediate context, the immediate philosophical context in which he was working, do you think that Humboldt’s thought, came out of a particularly German tradition or that it was sort of pan-European? JT 04:24 I would say the discovery of the different languages being different thought, that was pan-European, but it was everywhere, mainly in the British world as well as it was seen as a catastrophic insight because it, of course, then communication’s still more impossible than after the Tower of Babel. Now we have really different thought systems, and the German side of it that Leibniz transformed this idea, this insight, into a celebration of diversity. Leibniz said it’s la merveilleuse variété des opérations de notre esprit, the marvellous variety of the operations of our spirit, of our mind, and this celebration of diversity is what Humboldt takes up. He was educated by, yes, Leibnizian philosophers. His teacher was a Leibnizian, and his first education, yes, was very much formed by this, yeah, by this Leibniz, Leibnizian joy of individualism, of diversity, of wealth also of being diverse. And then, of course, he became a Kantian, which is which is another story, but Kant then, in a certain way, is the general background for his construction of a philosophy of language, but the, I would say, the very idea of creating a new linguistics, yes, it’s Leibniz, and it’s Herder, and hence it is very German because it’s this celebration, this joy of diversity, I think, which is which is the German contribution to the history of linguistics, I would say, and hence to linguistics, because only, I would say, only if you see that languages of the world are different worldviews, that they create different different semantics, different insights, then the research into those languages becomes a worthy thing. Otherwise, why would you research into languages which, if they are only means of communication? JMc 06:47 And do you think that—I mean, Hans Aarsleff has made the case that Humboldt’s time studying in Paris played an important role at least in turning his attention to language, if not in shaping his outlook, but do you think that plays a significant role at all in Humboldt’s thinking? JT 07:04 No, we, I mean, would say, we, the German scholars, researched this for a couple of time. Aarsleff invented this legend, and there, there have been DFG projects on his idea, and I think we we really found that this was not the case, I mean that Humboldt was not a German ideologist, un idéologue allemand, but that he, of course he was also already, he was 30 years old when he came to Paris, and he was a complete Kantian, and he tried to convince the French philosophers of his Kantian insights. And the idea that that Humboldt is a French philosopher is completely absurd, and I think this was proven by, yeah, by years of research into that idea. But what is certainly right is that Humboldt discovered in Paris, yes, his his linguistic interest, but not via les idéologues, but via his encounter with the Basque language, so he encountered this very strange—before that he was, he had already written about about language. But then he finds this very strange language, and his question, I think, is, how can you think which, such a strange language, which is completely different from what he knew from the Indo-European languages, from Hebrew, so these were the languages he knew, and then he goes into that strange language. He travels to the Basque language. He travels to his New World, in a certain way, yeah, and then he is fascinated by it, by languages, and he becomes a real linguist trying to get into the structure of languages. Then, as you know, his brother brings American languages, American grammars and dictionaries to Rome. JMc 09:01 So Alexander von Humboldt. JT 09:03 Alexander von Humboldt, yeah. He—this is also very important—Alexander brings these twelve books, yeah, which I consider as the very first moment into real comparative descriptive linguistics, so he brings these books to Europe, and Schlegel reads them first, and then after Schlegel, because Wilhelm doesn’t have the time to read them, but when he has got the time in the twenties, he studies these books, and he tries to to describe those American languages and their really different structural personality. So yes, and I think this is also very important, because I think Humboldt is really not a philosopher from the very beginning. He is a real linguist, and from his linguistics, he goes into philosophy, because then we have to consider his first formation. He, when he was young, he was looking for something: “What can I do?” And he was not a poet, and he discovered that he was not a philosopher, and philosophy was done by Kant, and he believed in Kant. Kant is his master and the master of Germany, but what he discovered and where he was really good at was anthropology, what’s essentially called anthropology. What is anthropology? Anthropology is the description and the study of the concrete manifestations of humanity—not philosophy, not the universal, but the concrete, historical, particular, individual manifestations of humans. And this is what he starts first with. He goes to Paris in order to write a book on, yeah, an anthropological study of France. This is what his project is, and then he discovers languages, and he finds that in the very centre of the anthropos, of the human, we have language, language as the creation of thought. And I think this is very important, and then when he studies languages, he all, at the same time, he writes or he tries to develop his philosophy. May I add something to to this idea? Because it’s very interesting. If you look at what Humboldt really published, you can, he published very few things during his lifetime. He actually published practically some of his speeches at the Berlin Academy. We forget the book on on the Basque because it’s not very Humboldtian, but he publishes eight discourses at the Academy, but he presents I think something like 18 or 17 topics at the Academy here. So he is 50 years old, he has nothing published, and then he starts publishing stuff. And what does he publish? He publishes linguistics, linguistic descriptions, grammatical problems on Sanskrit and so on and so forth, on the American languages, and then, of course, at the end of his life, on the Pacific Austronesian languages, so what he presents, really, to the public is linguistic things, but what he does not publish, but what he is working at, is, are his philosophical, the philosophical part of it, because “I have to justify, why am I doing this? Why am I studying languages? And hence I have to develop a philosophy of language,” which is published only when he is already dead. I mean, in the first volume of his main work on the Kawi-Sprache. JMc 12:47 Yeah. Okay, so that’s that’s a good connection to our next question, which is, how would you say does Humboldt’s concrete study of language, of human language and languages, particular languages, relate to his overall philosophy, in particular the distinction that Humboldt makes between the “construction” or the “organism” of a language and its “character”? JT 13:13 Yeah. Yeah. That is a very, very important and very, very, very great question. I think this, we have to say first what this opposition is. Studying the construction or the structure, as he says in French, he calls den Bau, he calls it structure, charpente, in French, so it’s the term “structure” which comes up here. And he says, yeah, we have to study the structures of the languages. He calls also these structures, he calls them also “organism”. We have to do a systematic study of languages as structures. This is the first step, and then he says, yeah, but this is only the dead skeleton, das tote Gerippe, of languages, but languages are not a dead skeleton. Languages are spoken. They are really, they are action. They are energeia. They are activity, and hence, he says, we have to continue. We have to continue to—to really see what languages are, we have to look at them in action, in speech, in the literature. And hence he adds to the description of the construction, he adds another chapter on the character. He says if we really want to to grasp the very individuality of languages, we have to look into literature, and hence he joined, and this is interesting, he joins linguistics, and he says so, Linguistik, to philology, Philologie. So for him, linguistics, structural linguistics, and the, yeah, the history of that language in its texts are two parts of language study. And hence what is so interesting, I think, in the 19th century, because this dichotomy in the 19th century is also very strong, so the philologists, so those are the Latinists, and so they are immediately against linguistics, because linguistics, all that, becomes a natural science, it becomes structural, it becomes very technical, and the philologists, they want to stay with their texts, of course. And Humboldt sees both together, and he wants them not to be separate, but two chapters, in a certain way, of language studies. But then, of course, in the 19th century, these things get, and are, separate. Steinthal is the perhaps the last one who tries, again, to think these two together. He has what he called Stilistik. Stilistik is actually the study of the character of languages. But in I would say in the history of linguistics, the 19th century is then not a century of character, but it comes up in the 20th century then and afterwards it so there are linguists who think, yeah, that language is something living, is an activity, and that we have to study the active usage of language, but I would say this comes then in the 20th century with people like Vossler or so, with so-called Idealism, and which is then considered by the linguists of the 19th century as non-linguistic. JMc 16:51 And just a quick follow-up on what you said. So you were you were saying that sort of that Humboldt has these two compartments, the structural and the character, but is it not the case that Humboldt felt that the character was more important than the structure, like he calls it the Schlussstein, the keystone. JT 17:08 Yeah. Yeah. It’s the Schlussstein, but it’s not, more importantly, it’s the, yes, the final aim would be the description of the character, but he never succeeds in describing the character in his grammar on, in his Nahuatl grammar, which is the only grammar he really finished and he really nearly published also, which Manfred Ringmacher only published in the nineties. There, he has a chapter on the character, but the chapter is very weak because it does not have texts. It does not have Nahuatl texts, or very few, only translations, and hence he can’t grasp the character. Hence this chapter on the character is rather deceptive, and when you look for what Humboldt is thinking of when he talks of character, he says, yeah, it’s very, it’s a beautiful chapter, yeah, and we have to study the literature and how the people talk, and then he has one footnote where he refers to a history of the Greek literature and says, yeah, something which we find there in that history of Greek prose, I think it’s even, this might be a description of the character of the Greek language. And it’s very hidden, but at the same time, it’s also very true, because what is the description of an individual? The description or the scientific description of an individual is his or her story, her history or his history, so there is no definition of an individual, but in order to to say scientifically something on an individual, you have to write his or her history. And this, I think, is the wisdom of that footnote in Humboldt, but he himself, he never succeeds in writing such a description of character. He himself, yeah, he writes grammars, hence of the dead skeleton, and writes sketches of other American Indian languages. What is also important to know is that we only know this, we know only the linguistic work of Humboldt, we know it only now, because this was the idea of Mueller-Vollmer when he saw the material which were not published, and he had the correct intuition that we have to join the linguistic descriptive stuff of Humboldt, and we have to publish it, because this was completely unpublished, to the philosophy, because he is known and seen as a philosopher of language, but he as I would like to repeat, he was a real linguist, yeah, and he tried to deal with linguistic structure, and perhaps, if I may add something also on the difficulty of this, the American languages of which he had some knowledge, came in grammars which were formed according to the Latin or Spanish grammar. So you had paradigms you see like rosa, rosae, rosa, rosae, etc., and of course, the Spanish then, or the Spanish priests who wrote those descriptions, they followed the Latin, European, Indo-European Spanish grammar, and hence we have descriptions which do not at all render the real character, of the real individual, even of the individual structure of those languages. So in a certain way, those descriptions even destroy the individuality of the American Indian languages, and Humboldt was very much aware of that problem. And what he tries, he tries to, in the Nahuatl Grammatik, he really tries to get through those, yeah, Indo-European descriptions of Nahuatl, for instance, and to show what categories, what grammatical categories are working in Nahuatl, what is the structure of that language. JMc 21:32 Yeah. JT 21:32 So I think this is really, but we did not know this of Humboldt. The Nahuatl Grammatik was not published until ’94, and nobody knew Humboldt as a as a descriptive linguist. JMc 21:49 So linguists at the time were much more interested in the in this dead skeleton of the languages and took absolutely no interest in the character, and as you were saying yourself, Humboldt never really succeeded in developing his linguistics of character himself. JT 21:57 Yes. Yeah. JMc 22:04 Why do you think that might be? JT 22:06 This has also political reasons because because, of course, the German linguists, like Grimm and Bopp, they were also reconstructing the past of the nation, and of Europe, and hence they were, the Grimms dealt with the German, Germanic languages. I mean, they called their their grammar Deutsche Grammatik, but which is a Germanic grammar. It’s a comparative grammar of the Germanic languages, not at all a German grammar. And here comes Bopp, and what does he do? He compares the Indo-European languages. He does not go beyond, and he even tries to to integrate non-Indo-European languages into the Indo-European family, like the Polynesian, for instance. He writes against Humboldt. He seems to, he really wants to, actively wants to integrate the Austronesian languages into the Indo-European family, and Humboldt’s trying to show just the contrary. So I think yes, Germany, Europe were the aim, the final aim of historical linguistics, and the other guys who dealt with non-Indo-European languages, they were the minority. I mean, to us today, they are unknown, but I think they were a minority. They mostly they were Orientalists, Sinologists, and so dealing with oriental languages, Chinese, Egyptian, but they were not at the very centre. JMc 23:50 But a figure like Schleicher, for example, was at the very centre mid-century, mid-19th-century, and of course Schleicher developed his theory of morphology, which is essentially a kind of typology from a present-day perspective and does have pretensions to accounting for the structure of all languages. JT 24:09 All languages. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Of course. This, but here, I would say, yes, here we have, do not have the European or German theme anymore, but here we have the scientific theme, so we have Darwinism, and of course the influence of natural sciences is very strong here, hence we have to create, like Darwin did for the species, we have to develop a tree for the development of all languages of mankind. Yes, that is true, and hence, yes, but morphology was always at the very centre. I mean, morphology, this is what what Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, discovered when he said we have to look at the Struktur. He uses the term Struktur, innere Struktur, for the first time, and we have to look at the Struktur and not at the vocabulary for the comparison of languages. And this is what what what Bopp does immediately when he writes a Konjugationssystem. It’s on Konjugation. It’s not on semantics. It does not compare, as Pallas for instance did, words, lexicon, as the basis of his comparative approach, but he then already goes into Konjugation, and then, of course, the Grimms do, they go into Deutsche Grammatik. First, they write the Deutsche Grammatik before they go on to the Wörterbuch. Yeah. And then, of course, after the Grimms, everybody in in Europe writes comparative grammars—grammar of the Romance languages, grammar of the Slavic languages, and so on and so forth—so this becomes a real, a huge success. After the Grimms, Bopp and then all the others do comparative grammars, and hence the focus is on, yes, on morphology, and hence they’re, and morphology means also they’re not dealing so very much with the meaning of those morphemes, but they’re more with the form, with the material form of morphemes. JMc 26:22 Yeah. That’s very true. I mean, Schleicher says himself that he can’t penetrate into the inner form of languages. He just sticks to the surface. Okay, and so this, this brings us to the last question, which is about Humboldt’s term “inner form”. So, I mean, this is probably one of the most iconic Humboldtian terms, “inner form”, but Humboldt used the term only in passing himself, and later scholars, right up to the 20th century, have used it in myriad different senses. So why do you think this term has captured people’s imaginations in the way that it has, and what do you think the significance of the term was for Humboldt himself? JT 27:05 Yeah. Let’s start with the with the with the first part. Yeah. It comes up in the Kawi-Einleitung after after writing some chapters on the external form, äußere Form, or the Lautform. He writes a chapter on inner form, innere Sprachform, and what does he, what is innere Sprachform? What does he talk about in this chapter? He talks about semantics of words, and he talks about semantics of grammatical categories, so this is innere Form. Innere Form is, just means the meaning, and then he goes on and talks about the conjunction of meaning and sound, so the next chapter after the chapter on innere Sprachform is about both going together. So, and I think the term innere Sprachform, by the readers of Humboldt, has been exaggerated, certainly, but, no, but no, but I think they they saw something really correct in the end, because this is the very centre. Once more, think of my first answer to your first question. I think that going into semantics and into the meaning of categories of morphemes into the meaning, this is the inner form. This is inner form, so, and this is really what is the very centre of Humboldt’s dealing with languages, because he wants to show la merveilleuse variété des opérations de notre esprit, yeah, the marvellous variety of variety of the operations of our mind. And mind is the inner form, so I think this this, even if the chapter is very short only on inner form, I think the readers of Humboldt were correct in focusing on this term, on yeah, because this is the very novelty, also, I think of his approach to look not on the variety of the sounds. This was clear, that languages are different sounds. This was clear from Aristotle on, and this material, materiality, was clear, from antiquity on, but and here comes Europe once more—Bacon, Locke, Leibniz, and Herder, Humboldt—and they see no, it’s not only sound. It’s the meaning. It’s the mind. It’s the inner form, and I think therefore, I think this yeah, the focus on inner form is really justified. JMc 29:50 Yeah. Okay. Although I guess, yeah, meaning and semantics, I guess that those are potentially also sort of anachronistic terms, because, I mean, if you think of how semantics is done today, like truth-functional semantics, as an idea that there is something objective that exists, so it’s, yeah, it’s something much more mystical, even, perhaps, talking about the operations of the mind. JT 30:02 No, not so not so very much. No no, because for instance, in his first discourse at the Academy, where he tries to find an answer, but he proposes, “So now we have to describe all the languages of the world. We have to do vergleichendes Sprachstudium, descriptive-comparative, descriptive Linguistik.” JMc 30:14 No. Okay. JT 30:33 And then he asks, why do we, shall we do it, and then at the end, he comes, he talks about semantics of words, and he says, “Yeah, of course, the words referring to to feelings, to interior operations of the mind, they differ more from language to language. Words for exterior objects, they differ less. However, they differ. They differ. Also, a sheep might be something different in the, let’s say, in Nahuatl and in French or so.” So I think there is this focus on the meaning, which he calls Begriff, by the way. He does not talk about Bedeutung. His term is Begriff, and Begriff here can be different in different languages. JMc 31:20 So you might call, you might render that as “concept” in English, do you think? Yeah. JT 31:22 Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I would say concept. But mind, that concept was like Begriff, also, after Hegel and rationalism, so it’s perhaps too rationalistic. Begriff is just, perhaps the better word is Vorstellung, because it’s less rationalistic, because this is exactly what the mind does. The mind does create Vorstellungen in in—this is how Humboldt describes it. The mind, I mean the world goes through the senses into the mind, and the mind then creates Vorstellungen, Begriff, but which are immediately connected to sound, so they’re never only conceptions, only Begriffe, only concepts. They’re immediately words. JMc 32:11 So for our listeners that are, that might be trapped in English, as Anna Wierzbicka would put it, we might go for, say, “representation” or “image” for Vorstellung, do you think? JT 32:19 Why not? JMc 32:20 Yeah. Why not? JT 32:21 No, but no yeah, well not because, image is also good because because the word, as Humboldt says, is between image and sign. Sign is the completely arbitrary thing with the universal concept we had. Image is something concrete, which, yeah, which depicts the world, and the word is something in between. It’s a special, it has a special structure, special position between sign and image, and hence, yeah, he said so. Sometimes the word can be an Abbild, an image, and sometimes it can also be used as a sign, but this is because it is in between, in between the sign and the image. And perhaps one word on this problem: right in the chapter on the innere Form, he adds that, yeah, we might compare the word, or the work of the mind creating a language, with the work of an artist. So that is exactly what he is thinking. He says the languages work like artists, you see, and hence they create images. JMc 33:40 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Excellent. Well, thank you very much for this conversation. JT 33:46 Thank you very much for this, for the interesting questions.

In this episode, we look at language classification in the first half of the nineteenth century and at some key ideas in the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt. https://hiphilangsci.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/hiphilangsci_003_epr.mp3 Download | Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Google Podcasts Archive DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.4767813 References for Episode 3 Primary Sources Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de (1746), Essai sur l’origine des connoissances humaines, 2 vols., Amsterdam: Mortier. Bibliothèque Nationale de France (English trans. Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge [2001], ed. and trans. Hans Aarsleff, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) Herder, Johann Gottfried von (1772), Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, Berlin: Voß. archive.org (English trans. ‘Treatise on the Origin of Language’, Herder: Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Michael N. Forster, pp. 65–164, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.) 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.) Humboldt, Wilhelm von (1905 [1820]), ‘Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Beziehung auf fie verschiedenen Epochen der Sprachentwicklung’, Wilhelm von Humboldts Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 4, ed. Albert Leitzmann, pp. 1-34, Behr: Berlin. archive.org (English trans. ‘On the comparative study of language and ist relation to the different periods of language development’, Wilhelm von Humboldt: Essays on Language [1997], ed. T. Harden and D. Farrelly, pp. 1–22. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.) Locke, John (1975 [1690]), An essay concerning human understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schlegel, August Wilhelm (1818), Observations sur la langue et la littérature provençales, Paris: Librairie grecque-latine-allemande. archive.org 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) Secondary Sources Aarsleff, Hans (1982), From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the study of language and intellectual history, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Trabant, Jürgen (1986), Apeliotes oder der Sinn der Sprache, Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachbild, München: Wilhelm Fink. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek Trabant, Jürgen (2012), Weltansichten: Wilhelm von Humboldts Sprachprojekt, München: C.H. Beck. Stang, Nicholas F. (2018 [2016]), ‘Kant’s Transcendental Idealism’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2018 Edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2018/entries/kant-transcendental-idealism/

Discover the origins of comparative-historical grammar in the 19th century, focusing on the enlightening work of Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm. Their innovative methodologies reveal connections between Sanskrit and Indo-European languages. Explore the evolution of etymology and how the Grimm brothers shaped German national identity through their research. Uncover the broader intellectual movements that influenced their groundbreaking studies in language, law, and literature.

Discover the fascinating pre-history of comparative-historical grammar, tracing its roots in modern linguistics. Learn about the monumental shift in the 19th century as scholars like Sir William Jones and Friedrich Schlegel transformed linguistic study into a scientific endeavor. Delve into the philosophical underpinnings of language meaning, highlighting insights from thinkers such as John Locke and Leibniz. This exploration reveals how early efforts laid the groundwork for understanding language connections across cultures.