Change in Language

CHANGE IN LANGUAGE

Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener

LINGUISTIC THOUGHT

SERIES

Series Editor: Talbot J.Taylor, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, Virginia

Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure Roy Harris and Talbot J.Taylor

Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein Roy Harris

Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener Brigitte Nerlich

CHANGE IN

LANGUAGE

Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener

BRIGITTE NERLICH

ROUTLEDGE

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This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge

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© 1990 Brigitte Nerlich

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Nerlich, Brigitte, 1956–

Change in language: Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener.— (Routledge history of linguistic thought series) 1. Linguistics. Bréal, Michel Julius Alfred, 1832– 1915. Wegener, Philipp, 1848–1916. Whitney, William Dwight,

1827–1894 I. Title 410′.92′2

ISBN 0-203-19175-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-33077-3 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 415 00991 X (Print Edition)

DEDICATION

To Anita, my sister Simone, my friend

Abbreviations

vii

Introduction

viii

PART ONE

WHITNEY AND BRÉAL

1

THE BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

2

2

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

8

3

EVOLUTION, TRANSFORMATION, OR ‘THE LIFE AND _{GROWTH OF LANGUAGE’?}

₃₇

4

LANGUAGE, ITS NATURE AND ITS ORIGIN

50

5

THE MYSTERY OF LANGUAGE-CHANGE

67

6

LAWS OF LANGUAGE-CHANGE

79

7

LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY

93

8

LANGUAGE AND THE SPEAKING SUBJECT

104

PART TWO

WEGENER

9

WHITNEY AND BRÉAL, PAUL AND STEINTHAL, AND THEIR _{RELATION TO WEGENER}

₁₁₁

10

THE BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

114

11

THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LANGUAGE

120

Conclusion

140

References

141

ABBREVIATIONS

CLG Saussure (1916) Cours de linguistique générale, Paris: Payot. CLG/E ibid., critical edition.

CLG/H ibid., English edition. CLG/N ibid., edition of notes.

DL Whitney (1874) ‘On Darwinism and language’, North American Review 119, 61– 88.

ES Bréal (1897) Essai de sémantique (Science des significations), Paris: Hachette. FF Bréal (1866) ‘De la forme et de la fonction des mots’, Revue des cours littéraires

de la France et de l’étranger (29 December), 65–71.

HM Bréal (1887) ‘L’histoire des mots’, Revue des deux Mondes 82 (1 July), 187–212. IL Bréal (1868) Les idées latentes du langage, Paris: Hachette

LGL Whitney (1875) The Life and Growth of Language: an outline of linguistic science, New York: D.Appleton.

LI Whitney (1875) ‘Are languages institutions?’, Contemporary Review 25, 713–32. LN Bréal (1891) ‘Le langage et les nationalités’, Revue des deux Mondes 108, (1

December), 615–39.

LSL Whitney (1867) Language and the Study of Language: twelve lectures on the principles of linguistic science, New York: Charles Scribner.

OLS Whitney (1873) Oriental and Linguistic Studies. The Veda; the Avesta; the science of language, New York: Scribner, Armstrong.

Ph Whitney (1885) ‘Philology, part 1: Science of language in general’, Encylopaedia Britannica, Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black.

SL Bréal (1879) ‘La science du langage’, Revue scientifique de la France et de l’étranger (26 April), 1005–11.

US Wegener (1885) Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens, Halle a.d. Saale: Max Niemeyer.

WS Wegener (1921) ‘Der Wortsatz’, Indogermanische Forschungen 39, 1–26.

To make language, the intent to signify must be present. (Whitney: 768) Ph*

The history of nineteenth-century linguists is relatively well known, including much of the work of William Dwight Whitney, Michael Bréal and Philipp Wegener. However, what is not so familiar and yet deserves to be, is that these three linguistics tried to solve the mystery of language-change in new ways. This is crucial for a better understanding of linguistics in the nineteenth century and for a better understanding of language and language-change per se. Despite their different intellectual and vocational backgrounds, and the different countries in which they worked (the United States, France, and Germany), Whitney, Bréal and Wegener converge upon a single point in their respective solutions to that problem: it can only be solved if linguists stop regarding language as an autonomous entity, or, in the fashion of that time, an organism that lives and dies independently of the users of the language, and instead start to focus on the actions, as advocated by Whitney, and the mind of the language users, as stressed by Bréal, together with the situation in which they use it, as recommended by Wegener.

This book is presented in two parts. Part one points out the similarities and differences between the approaches of Whitney and Bréal, two linguists working in the tradition of comparative

* Whitney Ph: 768 (for ‘Philology, part 1: Science of language in general’) and I shall refer to those works which are quoted very often in abbreviated form, e.g. Bréal FF: 12 (for the article ‘De la forme et de la fonction des mots’). To those works for which translations exist I shall refer in the following mode: e.g. Bréal ES: 112/285, where the first page number refers to the French edition, the second to the English translation. All the other quotations will be given in the standard form, e.g. Müller 1861:14. A list of the abbreviations is provided at p. ix.

philology, but criticizing it from within, especially through their rejection of linguistic ‘naturalism’ (e.g. Schleicher), and linguistic ‘mysticism’ (e.g. Schlegel, Grimm and those who wanted to find the Indo-European ‘Ursprache’) (cf. Bréal 1891, LN: 619; 1873a). These similarities are grounded in their mutual acceptance of the Humboldtian dictum that linguistic origin and change are not based on different principles (also known as uniformitarianism in geology and linguistics; cf. Christy 1983). From this springs their interest in the origin and evolution of language, especially on the semantic level where sense is created all the time. This mutual interest culminates in their defence of the speaker, his/her will and intentions, which they regarded as the true forces of language change.

dialogue between speaker and hearer and their collaborative construction of meaning, taking into account the situation, and the mental representations that the interlocutors have of it, as well as their reference to mental schemata and other cognitive structures. Wegener thus completes the work, begun by Whitney and Bréal, fulfilling the promises hidden in their oeuvres: to demonstrate that speakers and hearers are the true language-makers.

This demonstration is far more revolutionary and modern than that of Hermann Paul, who could also have been chosen as the third in that group of linguists working towards the establishment of a new science of linguistics. However, Wegener’s importance in this construction-work is clearly shown by the fact that Paul relied heavily on Wegener’s Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens (1885) when he remodelled his theory of semantic change in the second edition of his Principien der Sprachgeschichte (1880), published in 1886. It would be a rewarding task to give a full description of Paul’s contribution to a theory of language-change. In this book he will often be evoked, but rather as an éminence grise, looking at the performance of the three main actors on the linguistic stage.

All in all, I would like to reconstruct the contributions of Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener to general linguistics, a discipline that for them was an historical and psychological science, two points of view that were lost in the linguistic revolution of the twentieth century. Whitney and Bréal both regretted the fact that general linguistics, or the philosophy of language, had been so carelessly neglected by German thinkers. In Wegener they would have found somebody to fill this need. Was Aarsleff correct when he wrote: ‘The radical innovations that occurred during the later decades of the nineteenth century [cf. Whitney and Bréal] did not occur in Germany, where the new development, though important, stayed closer to accepted institutional forms’ (Aarsleff 1979:64)? In their obituaries of Whitney, Brugmann and Leskien (1897), the leaders of the neogrammarian movement, praised Whitney’s ‘Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte’ (Language and the Study of Language, 1867). It is no coincidence that, in translation, the title of Whitney’s book is the same as Paul’s Principien der Sprachgeschichte, a book that Bréal announced as a contribution to ‘la sémantique’ (cf. ES: 307/281) and that others regard as the bible of the neo-grammarians.

The overlap between French, German, and American thought is demonstrated by another coincidence. In his obituary of Whitney, Brugmann talks about Whitney’s contribution to the study of Sanskrit and, more importantly, to the elucidation of the ‘Grundfragen des Sprachlebens’ (1897:95)—this is the title of Wegener’s 1885 book which is discussed in Part two of this study. Paul and Wegener were the counterparts of Whitney and Bréal in Germany, all four contributing to the radical innovation of linguistic theory that took place during the second half of the nineteenth century.

complains about the ever-increasing literature in general linguistics and confesses that he did not try to keep up with it when writing his book Die Sprachwissenschaft (cf. 1891:52). I hope that the reader of this history of linguistics will forgive me if I too have overlooked particular representatives of the linguistic scene surrounding Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener.*

Part One

WHITNEY AND BRÉAL

If language is a direct emanation of the mind, or an organic product, a sort of excretion of the bodily organs, so that a word, in any one’s mouth, is an entity having a natural and necessary significance, (…) than one set of opinions on all theoretic points in linguistics will follow; but another and a very different one, if words are only signs for ideas, instruments with which the mind works, and every language therefore an institution, of historic growth.

(Whitney 1873:94)

Chapter One

THE BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL

BACKGROUND

William Dwight Whitney was born in the United States in 1827 and died there in 1894, having travelled on a number of occasions to Germany, the homeland of Indo-European and historical-comparative linguistics. His major theoretical works were written in the 1860s and 1870s. Michel Bréal was born of French parents at Landau in Rhenish Bavaria in 1832, but lived and worked most of his life in France, where he died in 1915.

Like Whitney, who, in 1850, went to Germany and spent three winter terms there studying with Albrecht Weber, Franz Bopp, and Richard Lepsius in Berlin, and two summers with Rudolph Roth in Tübingen, Bréal went to Berlin in 1857 to study Sanskrit under Bopp and Weber. Both Whitney and Bréal introduced German ideas and the values of a new scientific method to their respective places of research and instruction: Yale and Paris.

AN OVERVIEW OF WHITNEY’S LIFE AND WORK

William Dwight Whitney* was born into a family that provided a congenial background for scholarly work. Most important was his relationship with his brother Josiah Dwight Jr. William’s attention was first directed towards natural sciences. In the summer of 1849 he was in charge of botany, the barometrical observations, and the accounts of the United States survey of the Lake Superior region of Michigan conducted by his brother, and in the summer of 1873 assisted in the geographical work of the Hayden expedition in

* This sketch of Whitney’s life and work is based on Seymour ([1894] 1966:399–426) Smith

(1910–11:611–12), Silverstein (1971:xii–xiii), and Hockett (1979).

and in 1878 spent several months there completing his Sanskrit Grammar (1879). In September 1879, Whitney was in Paris, where he met, as recorded in his diary, ‘M. Regnier & attended meeting of Academy, seeing Laboulaye, Bréal [emphasis added] Bergaigne, Gaston Paris, Henry, Thurot, Mariette and many others’ (in Joseph 1988:209). At the beginning of the year he had also met Saussure in Berlin.

Whitney’s scholarship was internationally acknowledged. He received the Prussian order pour le mérite for science and arts, and in 1870 the Berlin Academy of Sciences awarded him the first Bopp prize for the most important contribution to Sanskrit philology during the preceding three years.

In addition to his teaching and writing on Sanskrit, comparative philology, general linguistics, etc., he held various offices in the American Oriental Society, to which he was elected in 1850, and was instrumental in the formative years of the American Philological Association (founded 1869), the Spelling Reform Association (1876), the Modern Language Association of America (1883), and the American Dialect Society (1889). He received popular recog-nition for his editorship of the Century Dictionary of English (1889–91 1st edition, 1897, 2nd edition).

After Whitney’s death in 1894, the First American Congress of Philology, held on 28 December 1894, was dedicated to his memory. C.R.Lanman had invited foreign scholars to write short essays on Whitney, and these were read at the Congress. The Festschrift, edited by Lanman, was published in 1897 as a special issue of the Journal of American and Oriental Studies. Among its contributions from Ascoli, Barth, Henry, Jolly (the translator of LSL), all praising Whitney as a famous Indian, Oriental and Sanskrit scholar, were a rather undistinguished piece by Bréal and, more importantly, two letters by Brugmann and Leskien. Saussure had started a draft essay but then abandoned the project (cf. extracts of his notes in CLG/N translated into English, in Jakobson 1971).

Whitney’s most famous students and followers included Charles R.Lanman, Hanns Oertel, and Leonard Bloomfield. Lanman, who later became Professor of Sanskrit at Harvard University, was one of the first linguists to use the word ‘semantics’, introduced by Bréal in 1883. On 27 December 1894, he gave a paper to the American Philological Association entitled ‘Reflected meanings; a point in semantics’ (cf. Read 1948:79). Even more semantically oriented was Hanns Oertel, who tried to construct a psychologically-based semantics in his Lectures on the Study of Language (1902), which were dedicated to Whitney. In the introduction of his first book, An Introduction to the Study of Language (1914), Bloomfield expressed his wish to follow in Whitney’s footsteps.

The bibliography of Whitney’s work, published in the Journal of American and Oriental Studies in 1897, has 366 entries.

AN OVERVIEW OF BRÉAL’S LIFE AND WORK

Bréal* did not begin his career as a naturalist but as a mythologist, and we shall see how this gave rise to different approaches to the life and growth of language. He studied in Weissenburg, Metz, and Paris and entered the Ecole Normale in 1852. In 1859 he gained a post in the Department of Oriental Manuscripts at the Bibliothèque Impériale (now the Bibliothèque Nationale). While there he wrote

* This sketch of Bréal’s life and work is based on Meillet (1916; [1930], 1966) and the

biographical note in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition (1910–11:481).

his two theses, which he defended in 1863: De Persicis nominibus apud scriptores graecos and Hercule et Cacus (1863a and b). His work in the Bibliothèque Impériale must have provided him with excellent opportunities to immerse himself in mythological studies, for which he became renowned. His bibliographer in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1910–11:481) writes that among his works, which deal mainly with mythological and philological subjects, may be mentioned L’Etude des origines de la religion Zoroastrienne (1862), for which he was awarded a prize from the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres; Hercule et Cacus (1863b), his second thesis; Le Mythe d’Oedipe (1864), and Les Tables Eugubines (1875). Some of these were later reproduced in his Mélanges de mythologie et de linguistique (1877). He also wrote a dictionary of Latin etymology (1885) and a Latin grammar (1890). But the work he is most famous for today is his Essai de Sémantique (Science des significations) (1897), the result of three decades’ research.* Bréal established his reputation as a comparative philologist on the strength of his translation, with introductions, of the second edition of Bopp’s Comparative Grammar (1833–52, 1st edition; 1857–61 2nd edition) (1866–74).

His linguistic career proper began in 1864 when he was appointed to teach comparative grammar at the Collège de France, where a chair of Sanskrit had existed since 1814. Meillet writes of this beginning of a new era:

There had been chairs of comparative grammar in the arts faculties before; however, their subject areas had not been the science one calls nowadays by that name, but general grammar. For the first time comparative grammar in the modern sense of this term was taught in France.

(Meillet [1930] 1966:440)

In 1866 he was awarded the title of professor. This was the first occasion that German-style comparative grammar had been taught in France. Previously, Oriental studies and speculations on general grammar had prevailed. In 1875 he became a member of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, in 1879 Inspecteur général of public education for higher schools, an office he held until its

* 2nd edn 1899, 3rd edn 1904, 4th edn 1908, 5th edn 1911, 6th edn 1913, 7th edn 1924. It has been translated into English by Mrs H.Cust with a preface by Postgate (1900), reprinted in 1964 with a preface by J.Whatmough.

to which they would always stay attached. When Bréal gave his inaugural lecture on comparative grammar at the Collège de France in 1866 (Bréal FF), he used the occasion to point out the strengths but also the main weaknesses of this kind of linguistics (as he does in his introduction to his translation of Bopp). He regards as strengths the attention to facts, observation of data, etc., and as weaknesses its tendency to ‘naturalism’ on the one hand and to ‘mysticism’ on the other. The main representative of the first movement was Schleicher, who tried to reduce language to a natural organism. The main exponent of the second tendency was Friedrich Wilhelm Schlegel, who tried to explain the nature of language by going back to a mythical ‘Ursprache’, rather than to the study of the history and use of language (cf. LN: 616). In Bréal’s opinion, these two approaches to language corrupt the effective and methodologically sound approach to linguistic facts fostered by Bopp. It is important to note that Bréal voices his criticism in the name of the speaker (‘l’homme’), the sole creator and repository of sound and sense, that is of language, a factor in language evolution that most of the comparative philologists sought to exclude from their ‘scientific’ enterprise.

Bréal did not only try to re-organize the university system, he also strove to heighten the awareness of secondary school teachers to the importance of language studies, especially modern languages (cf. Bréal 1872; 1873b; [1876b] 1877:347–73; 1882; 1893b). It was for this reason too that he was engaged in the movement to establish phonetics as a linguistic discipline. Indeed, he inaugurated the first phonetic laboratory at the Collège de France in 1897 (cf. Bréal 1897).

His most celebrated students were Ferdinand de Saussure, who taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes from 1881 to 1891, and Antoine Meillet, who took over the Chair of Comparative Grammar at the Collège de France after Bréal’s retirement in 1905.

SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES

Whitney, as the ‘creator’ of general linguistics at Yale and Bréal as one of the founders of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris spread German linguistic thought in their respective countries, giving it at the same time a twist in the direction of a general and more semantically-oriented science. But even though Whitney influenced German thought, and while his insights were integrated into what became the second linguistic revolution after Bopp, when Brugmann and Osthoff published their neo-grammarian manifesto in 1878, Bréal did not join this new movement. He elaborated instead his own principles of semantics, qualified by Meillet, one of his students, as ‘so personal’ (cf. 1916:16). In his biographical note Meillet admits that certain aspects of Bréal’s Essai could seem ‘reactionary’. However, the merits of this new type of semantics were quickly recognized and put to use in the Anglo-American world, notably by two of Whitney’s students, Oertel and Lanman. Bréal’s Essai, translated into English in 1900, is still not translated into German. This might be due to the fact that Germany had a strong and rather different semantic tradition of its own: semasiology (cf. Hey’s 1898 review of Bréal’s Essai). But there was one leading linguist in Germany who recognized the value of Bréal’s attempt to establish a theory of semantics: Hermann Paul. In the second edition of his Principien (1886) he acknowledged the similarity of interest between himself and Bréal; both were interested in semantic, and not only phonetic or morphological, change, and both stressed

the active role of speaker and hearer in language change (cf. Paul 1880, 4th edn 1909:74– 5, note 1).

That Bréal failed to exert an influence on German thought was certainly not due to a lack of courtesy or willingness to engage in dialogue on his part. Whitney, by contrast, was much more violent in his attacks on German linguistic science, as one can see from the following statement:

In Germany itself, where the methods of comparative philology have received an elaboration and a definite and fruitful application elsewhere unequaled and unapproached, linguistic science remains far behind; opinions are still in a state almost to be termed chaotic, and one comparative philologist of rank and fame after another comes forward with doctrines that are paradoxical or wholly indefensible.

(1873, OLS: vi)

Whitney was particularly infuriated by the works of Max Müller, August Schleicher, and Heymann Steinthal, especially their naturalism, organicism, and metaphysical psychologism. He declared: ‘Physical science on the one side, and psychology on the other, are striving to take possession of linguistic science, which in truth belongs to neither’ (LGL: v).

Whereas Bréal would have wholeheartedly subscribed to the rejection of physicalism or naturalism (sometimes called by him ‘materialism’; cf. 1873a) in linguistics, he would not have been so harsh in respect of psychology, and here one can detect one of the major differences between Whitney and Bréal. United in their critical view of the state of the liberal arts, they differ in their search for new scientific models. Bréal adopts, to some extent, a psychological approach; Whitney, on the other hand is strongly influenced by Lyell’s geological principles (cf. Lyell 1830–3; 1863; also Christy 1983). Approaching the subject from different directions, Bréal and Whitney converge again when they stress that explanation in linguistic science is based on what Whitney called ‘uniformitarianism’. According to this doctrine, based on Lyell’s principles of causation in geology, the laws of change (intellectual laws for Bréal, laws of human action or behaviour for Whitney) that can be ‘seen’ at work now, are the same as those that worked in the past—they structure language-change in general. Bréal and Whitney also converge in their views of language as a social institution and as an instrument of communication and interaction.

The slight differences in orientation—Bréal’s psychologism and Whitney’s geologism—can be traced back to Whitney’s and Bréal’s early influences. Whereas Whitney was a linguist by profession and a naturalist by inclination, Bréal was a mythologist by inclination and a linguist by profession. His two theses, submitted in 1863, were devoted to mythological subjects. But from 1864 onwards Bréal ceased referring to his mythological studies as well as to his affinities with Max Müller in the field of comparative mythology. In his obituary Meillet makes it quite clear why this sudden change came about:

Adalbert Kuhn, also endorsed by Max Müller; alongside comparative grammar, founded by Bopp and built on solid principles, making steady progress since its creation, Adalbert Kuhn had wanted to create a comparative mythology. But the common sense of the young author [Bréal] was too strong [my emphasis] to let him dwell on such vain hypotheses. After a short time he abandoned this kind of work and never went back to it; and while Max Müller remained faithful to the mirages of comparative mythology, where he wasted his beautiful talent, M.Bréal began to deal with the solid realities of linguistics and produced a lasting work in linguistics.

(Meillet 1916:11)

These words could have been written by Whitney who detested Max Müller more than any other linguist.

Although Bréal seems to have consciously set aside his interest in mythology for the sake of his linguistic career, some of the basic insights into the origin and nature of language can be traced back to these early essays. He rejected the view that myths and fables are the result of either reasoned or spontaneous creation (cf. Bréal [1863b] 1877:2). In his opinion this interpretation was an ill-conceived attempt to reconstruct the origin of myths, just as the belief in a spontaneous creation is a misdirected attempt to explain the origin of language. The question mythologists should ask is: ‘what was the reason for which each sign was attributed the value it had?’ (1877:3).

In Bréal’s view ‘primitive’ men did not symbolize the world in their myths; they described it. Symbols are only an ulterior refinement of language. In the beginning men named things to the best of their abilities and they explained the world likewise. From these primitive acts of what Whitney would call ‘name-making’, the full complexity of language evolved very slowly. Bréal’s favourite examples are the names for the ‘sun’, which was first designated after some salient quality or another (cf. 1877:5–6), and then became a centre of proliferation for names of gods and goddesses. This explanation of myth is important to the understanding of Bréal’s thoughts on language in so far as it is in full accord with the uniformitarian explanation of the origin and change of language. As Whitney wrote: ‘Men are always making language’ (1880:14). Name-making today proceeds in basically the same way as name-making then: ‘It is intentionally that we establish a parallel between the origin of mythology and the origin of language, the question is basically the same’ (Bréal [1863b] 1877:6). In both cases we witness a proliferation of myths or names, based on improvisation, which then undergoes selection. Not only have the origin of language and the origin of myths a similar explanation, linguistic phenomena, such as synonymy and polysemy, can be explained in a way similar to the study of the multiplication of mythical names. Bréal’s aim was the demythologization of mythology as well as of linguistics.

Chapter Two

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

During their full and productive lives, Bréal and Whitney made many friends and in the case of Whitney, many enemies too. The reactions to the work of their scholarly friends and enemies, and my account of their relationship with them, will provide a framework in which Bréal’s and Whitney’s own work can then be situated—and better understood.

BRÉAL AND WHITNEY—SCHLEICHER AND BOPP

It is well known that by 1860 German linguistics was dominant in Europe (cf. Terracini 1949:74). August Schleicher’s Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen (1861; English transl. 1874–7), was conceived and received as the apotheosis of comparative grammar, founded by Bopp in 1816. His main followers in the English- and French-speaking countries were Max Müller in Oxford, Abel Hovelacque (cf. Whitney’s review of Hovelacque [1876] 1876), and Honoré Chavée (1867) in Paris (cf. Auroux 1982). Like Schleicher, they regarded linguistics as a natural science, language as an organism, and the life of language as one of growth, decay, and death—albeit with some variations on the theme. Schleicher, Müller, and Hovelacque formed, so to speak, an international cartel of naturalistic linguistics.

Schleicher was the unquestioned authority on comparative linguistics until the end of the 1860s, an assessment shared by Bréal and Whitney, at least in their public statements. In his first popular book on general linguistics, Language and the Study of Language (1867), derived from his 1864 Smithsonian Lectures, and repeated as regular courses to the Lowell Institute in Boston (LSL: v), Whitney declared that it was his duty and pleasure to admit his special obligations ‘to those eminent masters in linguistic science, Professors Heinrich [sic] Steinthal of Berlin and August Schleicher in Jena, whose works I have had constantly upon my table, and have freely consulted, deriving from them great instruction and enlightenment, even when I have been obliged to differ most strongly from some of their theoretical views’ (vi–vii).* Soon after Schleicher’s death in 1868 this friendly critique changed to severe opposition. In Whitney’s obituary of Schleicher we find:

He is, namely, a vehement champion of the paradox that a language is a ‘natural organism’, growing and developing by internal forces and necessary laws; and his statement and defence of this doctrine are so bold and extreme as to be selfrefuting. He was not unskilled as a naturalist, and his studies in natural history, by some defect in his logical constitution, seem to have harmed his linguistics.

Bréal expressed similar views, though less harshly (1866 FF, and 1868a; both essays are reproduced in Bréal 1877). In his Essai he wrote:

There are few books which, in small compass, contain so many paradoxes as the little volume in which Schleicher gives his ideas on the origin and development of languages. Though, being a botanist and Darwinian, he usually keeps his mind clear and methodical, he betrays in his work habits of thought appropriate to some disciple of the mystics. For instance, he places the epoch of the perfection of languages in the remote past, before all history. As soon as a people makes its entry into history (he says), and begins to have a literature, decadence, irreparable decadence, appears. Language, in fact, is developed inversely to the progress of mind.

(ES: 5/4–5)

Naturalism and mysticism, these popular currents of linguistic thought, contradicted Bréal’s profound belief in the progress of language and the human race. Whitney’s fight against these tendencies

* He refers to Schleicher (1860) and Steinthal (1860).

was based on a somewhat different ideology: his belief in the power of common sense and inductive reasoning.

However, Schleicher’s impact in France was equal to that in the Anglo-American world. The Compendium (2nd edition) won the prestigious Volney Prize in 1867 (cf. Bréal’s preface to Schleicher 1868 [Bréal 1868b], reprinted in Tort 1980:58). Although disagreeing with Schleicher’s naturalism in general, Bréal wrote a preface to the French translation of Schleicher’s two essays: ‘Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft’ (1863) and ‘Ueber die Bedeutung der Sprache für die Naturgeschichte des Menschen’ (1865): La Théorie de Darwin et la science du langage. De l’importance du langage pour l’histoire naturelle de l’homme, translated by M. de Pommayrol, Paris 1868 (cf. the re-issue by Tort 1980, where Bréal’s preface is reprinted, pp. 57–91). However, by 1870 the methodological crisis of linguistics ‘made in Germany’ was widespread and was highlighted by the outbreak of the war between Germany and France in 1870. It was only resolved by the neo-grammarians, who, although introducing the speaker (cf. Osthoff and Brugmann 1878:xii) and stressing the importance of a new kind of general linguistics, or ‘Prinzipienwissenschaft’, made the attachment of linguistics to the paradigm of natural science even more entrenched. ‘Not satisfied with a mere collection or taxonomy of regularities, of the sort that Grimm and his associates had noticed, the neo-grammarians claimed that the laws of phonemic change admit no exceptions. Hermann Paul asserted in 1879, “Every phonemic law operates with absolute necessity: it as little admits of an exception as a chemical or physical law”’ (quoted in Gardner 1985:197).

Simultaneously Whitney and Bréal were trying to develop a quite different methodological consciousness for the problems of general linguistics, an awareness that would only be introduced into Germany rather late in the twentieth century, via Saussure. After Humboldt German linguists had relegated the philosophy of language to a dusty corner of pre-scientific speculation and linguistics became more and more data-oriented. Osthoff and Brugmann declared, for example:

Only that comparative linguist who forsakes the hypothesis-laden atmosphere of the workshop in which Indogermanic rootforms are forged, and comes out into the clear light of tangible present-day actuality in order to obtain from this source information which vague theory cannot ever afford him, can arrive at a correct presentation of the life and the transformations of linguistic forms.

(Quoted by Robins [1967] 1979:184–5)

Although Whitney would accept the claim for the study of living languages, he would still have criticized the lack of philosophical insight manifested in this passage. This anti-philosophical attitude was, in fact, one of the main grounds on which Whitney had earlier attacked linguists such as Müller and Schleicher. Steinthal was far too metaphysical for Whitney’s taste as will become clear in Whitney’s review of Steinthal’s Abriss der Sprachwissenschaft (1871) (Whitney 1872b; cf. OLS: 332–75).

The only authority that Whitney and Bréal always respected, although not agreeing with him on every point, was Franz Bopp. In an article on Whitney, Rocher points out that ‘Whitney was, over the years, a staunch defender of Boppian orthodoxy in comparative grammar’ (1979:11). ‘He clung to the last to Bopp’s theory that collocation, agglutination, and integration, had been the exclusive means by which Indo-European had created new forms’ (ibid.: 11–12). He also clung to Bopp’s inductive, positivistic method. In short, Rocher concludes: ‘Whitney’s conservatism in comparative philology is in sharp contrast with his innovative contributions to general linguistics’ (ibid.: 11). This is not altogether true: Whitney conceived general linguistics as the basis, the sound foundation of comparative philology. He was not so much against renewal in comparative philology, as against the naturalistic excesses that bore the same name:

Comparative philology and linguistic science, we may say, are two sides of the same study: the former deals primarily with the individual facts of a certain body of languages, classifying them, tracing out their relations, and arriving at the conclusions they suggest; the latter makes the laws and general principles of speech its main subject, and uses particular facts rather as illustrations.

(LGL: 315)

In an article on material and form in language, Whitney praised Bopp for his attention to facts and his feeling for scientific deduction (1873:94f.). And in Bopp’s obituary he writes: ‘to him belongs the peculiar and transcendent honor of having inaugurated and given development to a new science’ (1868:47).

The theories of general linguistics [in the sense of ‘general grammar’], the general overviews, the big historical surveys, all these noble considerations that we like so much in France, would wear out or would move away from the truth, if we were to look disdainfully at the study of the facts of language, and if we were to give up using for ourselves the instrument of verification and control, which is at the same time the instrument of discovery: I mean observation.

(Bréal 1864b:22–3)

Unlike Whitney who wanted to give comparative linguistics a sound philosophical basis in general linguistics, Bréal wanted to encourage French general linguists to be more methodical, to pay more attention to facts and observations. When Bréal translated Bopp, his intention was to supplement French general linguistic theories, especially those put forward by the General Grammar movement and by the Idéologues (e.g. Beauzée, Condillac, Destutt de Tracy, etc.), with a sound methodological instrument of induction and verification. But Bréal, like Whitney, wanted to make sure that philosophical grounding and accurate observation of linguistics facts should go together. What they did not want was to introduce another medley of highly speculative thoughts about the life and growth of language, especially by those who regarded languages as natural or physical objects and not as products of the activities of men and women. Bréal was in fact the first successfully to introduce Bopp’s comparative linguistics into France and to rouse the French from their dogmatic slumber. But he would not follow the new developments in comparative linguistics initiated by Schleicher, taken up with enthusiasm by Hovelacque and Chavée in France, and promulgated by the Revue de linguistique et de philologie comparée, a rival of the Bulletin de la Société linguistique de Paris (cf. Auroux 1982). Gradually, Bréal turned away from comparative philology to establish a new discipline of his own: semantics. The term was coined in 1883 (cf. Bréal 1883:133) and the results of Bréal’s research into semantic issues, started in 1866, were finally published in his Essai. Whitney, though interested in facts of semantic change, never tried to unify his remarks on this subject into one theoretical oeuvre, and never used the term ‘semantics’, as did his students Lanman and Oertel, in imitation of Bréal.

To summarize: Whitney and Bréal stood up against two trends in comparative linguistics: the older ‘mysticism’ (romanticism) (cf. Schlegel, but also Steinthal) and the younger ‘naturalism’ (cf. Schleicher, Müller). Both regarded languages as human institutions, brought about, maintained and modified by speakers, their will and their needs. Terracini writes: ‘Whitney, to whom any romantic solution was alien, resorted to one that had been prevailingly adopted in the philosophy of language of the 18th century: language is a human institution’ (1949:91).

BRÉAL, WHITNEY AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

Terracini’s quote suggests another point of convergence between Whitney and Bréal: they both appear to turn for help to the philosophers of the eighteenth century and their methodological followers in the nineteenth century. Terracini speculates about Whitney’s affinities with Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer. Bréal writes in his

Essai that ‘Our forefathers of the school of Condillac, those ideologists who for fifty years served as target to a certain school of criticism, were less far from the truth when they said, in simple and honest fashion, that words are signs’ (ES: 277/249)—they are not organisms and they do not live and die like organisms, a view held by a forerunner of Bréal in the field of semantics, Arsène Darmesteter (1887). In another passage Bréal makes it even more clear where his preferences lie:

Our philosophers of the 18th century regarded language as the invention of human intelligence, at first destined for the most simple needs of life, then gradually used for higher purposes: they would have been quite astonished if they could have foreseen the systems and doctrines which were to flourish during the following century. What would Voltaire for example have thought if he had heard that language is a living organism, independent of the human will? …what would have been the surprise of these authors had they been assured that language obeys fatal and necessary laws?

(LN: 615)

Hans Aarsleff points out the similarities between Bréal’s thought and that of thinkers like Locke and Rousseau in his analysis of Bréal’s 1879 article on the science of language. Comparing words to coins, ‘Bréal repeated’, as Aarsleff writes, ‘Locke’s observation that our thinking and speaking routinely runs on words rather than concepts and things…. This is a way of saying that what matters to the speaker is the current value system; its history or origin is at that point irrelevant, though the study of it may yield another kind of knowledge’ (Aarsleff 1979:85). Aarsleff also reports Bréal’s reference to Rousseau in relation to the subject of mind and language. Rousseau had written in Emile that reason is common to mankind, but that each language has its own particular genius, cause, or effect of the different national characters (cf. Aarsleff 1979:86). This view is fully endorsed by Bréal (cf. LN). Finally, one must mention Bréal’s reference to the eighteenth-century discussions of the origin of language, a problem that German thinkers believed they had given a final solution by establishing a proto-language and quantifying its roots. This idea is fundamentally opposed to Bréal’s belief in the gradual evolution of language and its progress, a belief he inherited from ‘Condillac, de Maupertuis, de Condorcet, de Volney’ (Bréal 1893a:11).

BRÉAL, HIS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

(meaning). Comparative grammar, even Bopp’s, had focused exclusively on wordforms, disregarding to a large extent their function in the syntagm or articulated group (1887, HM: 200–1), the sentence or the act of speech. Bréal claims that a new historical, not comparative, grammar (cf. FF: 66) should embrace the study of phonetics and morphology—of form—as well as that of meaning—of function. And words have meaning and function only in the use intelligent human beings make of them. Hence they should not be studied in isolation, like fossils of a bygone age:

When reading the great works by Mr Bopp and Mr Schleicher, one sometimes has the impression that they describe a fourth realm of nature…one thing follows from the other, everything is explained without any personal agent interfering in any visible way; one could sometimes believe that one is actually reading a treatise on the geology of the grammatical world or that one is observing a series of crystallizations of speech.

(FF: 67)

In this passage Bréal turns against two major models of comparative grammar: geology and chemistry. As we have seen in the quote from Hermann Paul (p. 14), the notion of exceptionless laws stems from there. Bedazzled by the results and the strength of these and other natural sciences, comparative grammar had totally overlooked the human agent, responsible for that evolution of language, which they so impartially ‘observed’. But as Bréal writes in one of his key statements: ‘The description of human language should not lead us to forget the human being, who is at the same time its beginning and its end, because everything in language derives from him and is addressed to him’ (FF: 67).

Gaston Paris

This view of language as an instrument of human dialogue was endorsed and perfected by one of Bréal’s friends and colleagues, most famous for his contributions to the field of medieval literature, Gaston Paris. In his review of Arsène Darmesteter’s book La Vie des mots étudiée dans leurs significations (1887:1st English edition 1886) (Paris [1887] 1906), he criticizes the influence of Schleicher on Darmesteter’s thought (cf. his 1868 review of Schleicher [1868]), and warns against the use of such dangerous metaphors as ‘organism’, ‘birth’, ‘death’, etc. He observes that:

The cause of the development of language does not reside in itself but in the human being, in the physiological and psychological laws of human nature; hence the development of language differs essentially from the development of species, which is the exclusive result of the interaction between the essential conditions of the species and those of the environment.

Like Bréal, he regards semantic change as governed by laws of the intellect, rather than those of nature. Even more than Bréal, Paris insists on the fact that language is a ‘social function’, based on the dialogical interaction between speaker and hearer in a specific situation, who try to achieve mutual understanding. By stressing the dialogical nature of linguistic interaction Paris goes beyond Bréal and almost echoes Wegener. Whereas Bréal speaks of a dim but persistent will that governs language-change (ES: 7/7), Paris describes the process of language-making and language-change as a series of experiments, carried out by the speakers, that can succeed or fail, but that in the long run govern language evolution:

Every dialogue is a series of experiments, of one mind trying to reach another in order to know if the acoustic sensation that one of the interlocutors gives the other produces in him the psychological state that the first wishes to bring about…in really difficult cases, as when the one who speaks uses a new or strange word, or gives a particular, rare or uncertain meaning to a well known word, …he requires an explicit assurance that he has been understood…that’s the most simple scenario; but a language is not only used between two persons: it is a means of intelligent commerce between sometimes quite big groups of human beings; in order for a word with its different meanings to be really part of the language, it must have become understandable to at least a large part of those who speak the language, and this is only possible after an almost endless series of small and partial experiments. The starting point for the emergence of a new meaning of a word is always the individual; but the individual initiative can only be successful, if there exists a logical and easy to grasp relationship between the existing meaning and the meaning one wants to add to it…the new meaning is only born by the merger of two, then several minds. This explains the cautious and slow evolution of word-meaning; less than anywhere else does nature jump here. The leaps to which our quick sensations or perceptions make us prone are checked by the ever present awareness of the necessity to be understood.

(1906:287–8)

The account of the evolution of meaning, based on the reciprocity of speaker and hearer and their interaction in context, is very similar to that of Wegener and Paul. It seems likely that Paris had read the second edition of Paul’s Principien (1886) shortly before he wrote his review of Darmesteter. And it was in that edition that Paul had incorporated some insights of Wegener’s 1885 Investigations into the Fundamental Questions of the Life of Language, especially those concerning semantic change. Paris refers to the Principien in a footnote (1906:285), but does not give the date of the edition he refers to.

Arsène Darmesteter

written the first important book on semantics published before the Essai, unfortunately in a naturalistic language. None of the reviewers, neither Bréal, Paris, nor Victor Henry (1887b) fails to point out this weakness. But they do not overlook Darmesteter’s achievements either. His conception of semantics constitutes a progress over Schleicher because he does not want to describe the birth, life, and decay of languages as organisms for the sake of typology or classification. He regards words themselves as organisms struggling for survival. This is much more in tune with Darwin’s theory than Schleicher’s ‘Darwinism’. Unlike Schleicher he does not express views about the perfection or imperfection of languages, the Ur-languages being more perfect than their decaying ‘descendants’. The struggle for life goes on all the time, in all languages, and on all levels of language. His theory of the life of language is directly comparable to that of Whitney, whose LGL (French transl. 1875, especially chapter 5) he refers to at the beginning of his book.

As Simone Delesalle has recently devoted an article to Darmesteter (Delesalle 1987), I shall only summarize some essential points. His book originated from lectures given in London in 1886, and I shall use this English version in what follows. He divided his lectures into three parts:

1 how words are born,

2 the society of words (or, as in the French edition, how words live together), and 3 how words die.

The first part deals with neologisms and figures of speech, and with the process of semantic radiation or concatenation, accounting, for example, for the fact that a metaphor (e.g. leaf) spreads through the lexicon. The second part describes how word-meanings influence each other syntagmatically or paradigmatically and change through their interaction. Bréal too will deal with phenomena such as contamination (e.g. French ne— pas) on the syntagmatic level, and will give special attention to paradigmatic reactions between words in his treatment of synonyms. The third part of Darmesteter’s book examines the linguistic and non-linguistic causes of word-death, that is to say, it deals with the struggle of words for survival and their ‘natural selection’, as well as with their death brought about by the dying of the referent. Although Darmesteter uses Darwinian metaphors extensively, his conception of language is not biologistic like Schleicher’s. He wants to discover the psychological processes underlying language-change. And the struggle for life among words that he describes is as much a struggle between words as between ideas. In his psychologism, Darmesteter is a direct forerunner of Bréal, who makes it quite clear that Darmesteter, though using the wrong metaphors, is working in the right field—semantics—and applying the right method—psychology.

Abel Hovelacque

La Linguistique (1876), written by Abel Hovelacque ten years before La Vie des mots must have struck Bréal as much more damaging to linguistic science. Hovelacque defines linguistics as a ‘natural science’ and philology as an ‘historical science’ (1876:1)— definitions that are directly borrowed from Schleicher (cf. Schleicher 1860). In a more extensive definition of linguistics and of the subject matter of linguistics he writes:

It is possible to give a definition of linguistics; the study of the constitutive elements of articulated language and of the various forms that these elements take on or might take on. In other words, if you like, linguistics is the double study of phonetics and of the structure of the language.

(Hovelacque 1876:4)

The object of linguistics is ‘language in itself and for itself (ibid.: 7). This is precisely the definition of linguistics that Bréal rejects from 1866 onwards. In his obituary of Bréal, Meillet provides a good summary of this central idea contained in all of Bréal’s writing:

In presenting language as the result of human activity and of the efforts made by human beings to express themselves clearly and easily, the author escapes the danger of treating language in itself and for itself, like some sort of object [my emphasis].

(1916:16–17)

Hovelacque’s definition of linguistics and its subject matter is deficient in two respects: not only does it overlook that elements—forms—have functions and are used and changed by speakers, it also neglects the fact that elements are integrated into a system. This latter deficiency was ultimately put right by one of Bréal’s students, Ferdinand de Saussure. Saussure, however, like Hovelacque, neglected in part the human as user and constructor of the linguistic systems and structures. It is therefore no accident that the editors of the CLG summarized Saussure’s central insight in the last sentence of the CLG in a way reminiscent of Schleicher and Hovelacque: ‘the only true object of study in linguistics is the language, considered in itself and for its own sake’ (CLG/H: [317] 230). The human being, ‘l’homme’, only re-entered linguistics with Emile Benveniste (1966/English edition 1971: part V).

Another error committed by Hovelacque was to describe the life of language as a cycle of birth, growth, decay, and death. Variations in sound and sense for him constitute signs of linguistic decay (cf. Hovelacque and Vinson 1878:10), whereas Darmesteter and Bréal consider them as manifestations of the normal, everyday life of language. Bréal makes this most clear in his critique (1887, as part of the Darmesteter review) of Littré’s Pathologie du langage, an essay that Bréal himself re-published a year later, for its ‘charm’, under the more appropriate title Comment les mots changent de sens (1888).

We come to the conclusion that in linguistic matters, there is one rule that dominates all the others. Once a sign is found and adopted for an object, it becomes adequate to the object. You can shorten it, reduce it materially; it will always keep its value. On one condition however, that the usage by which the sign is attached to the signified object remains uninterrupted…. But what the great French scholar [Littré] calls pathology constitutes in fact the normal development of language, it happens every day.

Both Whitney and Bréal opposed the view according to which the life of language is one of growth and decay. Where Bréal declared that ‘It is not only at the beginning of mankind that particular languages are created; we create them at every moment, because all the changes that affect them are our own work’ (FF: 71), Whitney claimed:

The nature and uses of speech, and the forces which act upon it and produce its changes, cannot but have been essentially the same during all the periods of its history, amid all its changing circumstances, in all its varying phases; and there is no way in which its unknown past can be investigated, except by the careful study of its living present and recorded past, and the extension and application to remote conditions of laws and principles deduced by that study.

(LSL: 184)

Hovelacque was criticized by not only Bréal and Whitney, but even by a linguistic ‘Darwinist’ such as Darmesteter. In his review of Hovelacque’s La Linguistique (1876), he concedes that linguistics belongs to the natural sciences, but he would have liked to read more about how the elements of a language change and evolve:

He should have shown that linguistics is a science which belongs to the psychological sciences, on the one hand, to the physiological sciences on the other; that language is determined by two kinds of laws, physical laws (phonetics) and psychological laws. The latter belong to the domain of morphology, syntax and the transformation of word-meanings.

(Darmesteter 1876:369)

Without using the term ‘semantics’ which was not introduced by Bréal until 1883, Darmesteter here is advocating a psychological study of semantic facts, at the sub-word level, the word level, and the level of syntax, just like Bréal in 1897 and Paul in 1880. All three—Darmesteter, Paul, and Bréal—were looking for the essential principles that govern semantic change and sought them in the domain of psychology. This was also the route taken by Wegener.

Victor Henry

Another linguist, mentioned by Bréal in his Essai (ES: 5/4, n.1), and a correspondent of Whitney (cf. Henry 1897:87f; cf. Henry 1896:5), Victor Henry, was deeply concerned with the controversy surrounding the notion of the ‘life’ of language. It is one of the antinomies which mar linguistic science that one can say at one and the same time: language lives and language does not live. Like Bréal and Paris, he protested against the unreflected use and abuse of biological metaphors, a view that he too had expressed earlier in a review of Darmesteter’s book (1887). In his Antinomies linguistiques (1896) he tries to tackle some of the fundamental problems of linguistics by laying bare the antinomic structure of some of its basic assumptions. This essay, written in the tradition of Kant and Humboldt, can be regarded as one of the first books on general linguistics written in this period, thereby fulfilling one of Whitney’s most ardent wishes: the

promotion of the science of language. It constitutes something like a ‘critique of the faculty of language’ (cf. Chiss and Puech 1987:172), by trying to establish the conditions of the possibility of a general science of language. Three chapters deal with three antinomies concerning: (1) the nature of language, (2) the origin of language, and (3) the relationship between language and thought. Whereas the first two chapters are principally a critique of linguistic ‘Darwinism’, the third chapter is directed against Bréal’s intellectualism. Henry argues that there is no place for consciousness or ‘the will’ in language-change as Bréal argued, but that all procedures of language-change are used and implemented unconsciously. (In 1901 he wrote a book on the linguistic ‘unconscious’, cf. for more details Chiss and Puech 1987.)

In the first chapter he poses the questions: What is a language?, What is the life of language, the life of words? As to the first question he writes that a Persian and a Hindu, a Russian peasant and a dairy farmer in the German ‘Unterwald’ speak the same language—historically speaking: this is one side of the antinomic pair of answers to the first question. At the same time, one must concede, that a Frenchman and a Briton, and even Parisians from different quarters or classes in Paris do not speak the same language; that is the other side of the antinomic pair of answers. Even more: no one speaker speaks the same language as any other. Only if one keeps this antinomy in mind, and does not carelessly brush it aside, can one write about languages, language families, dialects, etc.

As to the life of language, Henry is even more direct. Languages do not live as organisms, but they live and evolve in every act of speech. We can continue to speak about the life and the evolution of language as long as we know that this façon de parler does not force us to find in language the essential characteristics of life: birth, growth, and death (cf. 1896:10). The growth of language is not governed by irresistible natural laws. New words are ‘born’ through the initiative of the individual speaker who unconsciously applies intellectual procedures (ibid.: 11) that remain constant through the ages (ibid.: 13). The new word ‘bicycle’ does not unfold like a flower; it is created according to certain morphological and semantic procedures that are also at work in the creation of words such as ‘bicentenary’ (and these procedures are even applied ‘retrospectively’ on to a totally arbitrary word-creation, such as ‘bikini’): all this without any conscious or voluntary effort. Keeping this in mind, one is again allowed to write about the ‘life’ of language. Henry even encourages linguists to write about the life of words, because words are ‘really’ born, live, and die in a ‘metaphysical’ sense (cf. Thomas 1897:174f.). But, because of these ambiguous connotations of the word ‘life’, Bréal preferred to speak about the ‘transformation’ of language (cf. ES: 5f).

WHITNEY, HIS FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

Following the publication of Schleicher’s Compendium (1861), Bréal had slowly moved away from comparative philology to create a new branch of linguistics: semantics. For Whitney, too, the publication of this book, together with Max Müller’s lectures on linguistics (1861, etc.), had been a decisive turning-point. His anti-Schleicherian stance was reinforced by the publication of Schleicher’s two treatises on Darwinian linguistics (1863, English transl. 1869; 1865).

an unacknowledged struggle to gain popularity in his own right (the structure of his books and the examples used strongly resemble both the form and the content of Müller’s books), Whitney attacked Schleicher and Müller for two reasons: Schleicher was too good a comparative linguist and there was a danger that people reading his books would not only accept and absorb the hard data and formulas, but also the philosophy underlying them, which for Whitney was an unacceptable hybrid of Hegelianism and Darwinism. As for Müller, the reasons for opposing him were the converse: he was too bad a linguist, a dilettante, who bewitched the public with his fluent style, but whose philosophy of language was as wrong as Schleicher’s. Both Schleicher and Müller held that linguistics was a natural science and both ignored the speaker in the linguistic inquiry, that is they denied, destroyed, so to speak, his free will.

Another of Whitney’s victims was Steinthal, who did not regard linguistics as a natural science, who did not regard language as an organism, and who stressed the importance of the speaking subject and of society in his psychology of language. He had derived his philosophy of language not from Hegel or Darwin, but from Humboldt. This, in Whitney’s eyes, was his error. Whitney regarded Humboldt as one of the most impractical and unreadable philosophers of language.

Whitney’s own philosophy of linguistics, thus opposed to Schleicher’s, Müller’s, and Steinthal’s, was a pragmatic, inductive, and realistic philosophy. This will become clear in his critiques of these three writers. All three were accused of not contributing to the science of language on the one hand, and to the philosophy of language on the other. Having no sound philosophical foundation, the science of language they wanted to establish was built on sand.

His experience with the works of Schleicher, Steinthal, and Müller (the German-born professor at Oxford) made him sceptical about the merits of German linguistics in general:

In Germany itself, where the methods of comparative philology have received an elaboration and a definite and fruitful application elsewhere unequaled and unapproached, linguistic science remains far behind; opinions are still in a state almost to be termed chaotic, and one comparative philologist of rank and fame after another comes forward with doctrines that are paradoxical or wholly indefensible.

(OLS: vi)

But while Germany is the home of comparative philology, the scholars of that country…distinguished themselves much less in that which we have called the Science of language.

(LGL: 318)

The science of language is an historical one, and not as German scholars seem to believe, a natural one. Regarding philosophy of language, he wrote: ‘Germany is the home of philology and linguistic study; but the Germans are rather exceptionally careless of what we may call the questions of linguistic philosophy, or are loose and inconsistent in their views of such questions’ (LI: 715). He believed that there ‘needs to be, perhaps, a radical stirring up of the subject, a ventilation of a somewhat breezy, even gusty, order, which

shall make words fly high, and dash noisily against one another, before agreement shall be reached’ (ibid.). This is exactly what Whitney tried to do by introducing some philosophical principles into linguistics, such as the arbitrariness and conventionality of signs, the definition of language as a social institution and an instrument of thought and communication, the stress on the speaker and his/her will to speak and to act so as to satisfy his/her most basic needs. He also insisted that change is a fundamental property of language. Its study should not be reduced to the atomistic listing of changes of isolated linguistic forms, but broadened so that it could embrace the general principles of change. The life and growth of language for him is a dialectical process, governed by two forces: the conservative force, governing the transmission of language from generation to generation, and the alterative force that makes it continually change through use (cf. LGL: ch. 3). These forces give language its particular semiotic character: continuity in alteration. In effect Whitney prefaces what Saussure will call the most fundamental principle of semiotics (cf. CLG/E: 169, 171):

So far as language is handed down from generation to generation by the process of teaching and learning, it is stable, and by this means it does remain nearly the same; so far as it is altered by the consenting action of its users, it is unstable, and it does in fact change.

(LI: 719)

By defining language as intelligent behaviour, Whitney elegantly avoids falling into one of the antinomic traps, noted by Victor Henry. Behaviour that must be learned can also be altered; signs that are by nature conventional are alterable (cf. LGL: 48).

However, it was not until Saussure, who did not try to overhaul linguistics radically, but whose followers used his ideas to challenge other linguists, that most of the philosophical principles discussed earlier became established in linguistics. If Saussure had published his obituary of Whitney, written in 1894, this revolution in linguistics arguably would have occurred earlier. Saussure could have joined forces with Whitney, with whom he shared not only a philosophy of language and most of its principal axioms, but also a certain animosity against German linguistics. He wrote:

For all time it will be a subject for philosophical reflection that during a period of fifty years linguistic science, born in Germany, developed in Germany, cherished in Germany by innumerable people, has never had the slightest inclination to reach the degree of abstraction which is necessary in order to dominate on the one hand what one is doing, on the other hand why what one is doing has a legitimacy and a raison d’être in the totality of sciences; but a second subject of astonishment is to see that when at last this science seems to triumph over her torpor, she winds up with the ludicrous attempt of Schleicher, which totters under its own preposterousness. Such was the prestige of Schleicher for simply having tried to say something general about linguistics, that he even today seems an unrivaled figure in the history of linguistics.

Grandiose rhetoric! That it remains unpublished is a mixed blessing.

Schleicher and the physical theory of language

Anna Morpurgo Davies writes in her major contribution to the history of nineteenth-century linguistics that ‘Schleicher’s work had brought the organic view of language (in the ontological sense) to the point where compromise was no longer possible’ (1975:638)—and Whitney was certainly not a man for compromises. What was so peculiar about Schleicher and so infuriating for men like Whitney, Bréal, and Saussure? Morpurgo Davies provides a masterly summary of Schleicher’s peculiarities and achievements:

According to most histories of linguistics a rather curious combination of approaches and results marks Schleicher’s contribution to the study of language. His system seems to embrace a Hegelian belief in a process of prehistoric growth followed by historical decay, a Darwinian theory of evolution, a greater rigour in the application of sound laws, the Stammbaumtheorie, and finally an interest in the reconstruction of Ursprachen. Together with this goes his claim that linguistics, or Glottik, is a natural science and not a form of historical knowledge (a task reserved to philology) and that all languages may be classified into three classes (isolating, agglutinative and inflectional).

(Morpurgo Davies 1975:633)

We have seen that Whitney started to attack Schleicher’s concept of language and linguistics as soon as Schleicher was dead. But his criticism was set out most clearly in an article written in 1872 and reprinted in the Oriental and Linguistic Studies (1873). Whitney opens his critique by a quote from Schleicher’s book Die Deutsche Sprache:

Languages are natural organisms, which without being determinable by the will of man, arose, grew, and developed themselves, in accordance with fixed laws, and then again grow old and die out; to them, too belongs that succession of phenomena which is wont to be termed ‘life’. Glottik, the science of language, is accordingly a natural science; its method is on the whole and in general the same with that of the other natural sciences.

(1860:6f.)

For Whitney everything is wrong with this definition of language and of linguistics. Language is not a natural organism, but the cultural and historical product of men’s action, an institution (OLS: 316). Like all human action, speech is voluntary, an ongoing process by which language as a product comes into being and is changed. There are no fixed laws that structure language from without, but procedures of change and variation that structure language from within and work ‘in lively phrase’ (OLS: 305). The constant everyday actions of speakers keep language ‘alive’. Language has thus no life of its own; it lives only through its speakers. This is a continuous process that has nothing to do with birth, growth, and decay. Finally, linguistics is not a natural science, but an historical and