Change in Language

CHANGE IN LANGUAGE Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener

  Brigitte Nerlich was formerly a Junior Research Fellow in Linguistics at Wolfson College Oxford, and is now a Research Fellow in History of Linguistics at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of La Pragmatique: Tradition ou révolution dans l’histoire

  de la linguistique française? (1986), the editor of the Anthologie de la linguistique allemande au XIXe siècle (1988), and she was guest editor of a special issue of Lingua: ‘Linguistic evolution’ (1989).

ROUTLEDGE HISTORY OF 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 Linguistics in America 1769–1924

  Julie Andresen

CHANGE IN LANGUAGE

  Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener

BRIGITTE NERLICH ROUTLEDGE LONDON AND NEW YORK

  First published 1990 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE

  This edition published in the Taylor Francis e-Library, 2005.

  Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc.

  29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001

  © 1990 Brigitte Nerlich All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or

  reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from

  the publishers. 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)

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data also available

DEDICATION

  To Anita, my sister Simone, my friend and David, my husband

CONTENTS

  Abbreviations

  vii

  Introduction

  viii

PART ONE WHITNEY AND BRÉAL

  1 THE BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

  FRIENDS AND ENEMIES

  3 EVOLUTION, TRANSFORMATION, OR ‘THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LANGUAGE’?

  4 LANGUAGE, ITS NATURE AND ITS ORIGIN

  5 THE MYSTERY OF LANGUAGE-CHANGE

  6 LAWS OF LANGUAGE-CHANGE

  7 LINGUISTIC CREATIVITY

  8 LANGUAGE AND THE SPEAKING SUBJECT

PART TWO WEGENER

  9 WHITNEY AND BRÉAL, PAUL AND STEINTHAL, AND THEIR RELATION TO WEGENER

  10 THE BIO-BIBLIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND

  11 THE LIFE AND GROWTH OF LANGUAGE

  Conclusion

  References

  Index

ABBREVIATIONS

  CLG Saussure (1916) Cours de linguistique générale, Paris: Payot. CLGE ibid., critical edition. CLGH ibid., English edition. CLGN ibid., edition of notes. DL

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

  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. Full bibliographical data can be found in the References.

INTRODUCTION

  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: 112285, 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, hisher will and intentions, which they regarded as the true forces of language change.

  Part two examines the work of Wegener, who is gaining increasing attention from theoreticians and historians of communicational linguistics, constructivism, and psychology of language. Unlike Whitney and Bréal, he gives prime importance to the Part two examines the work of Wegener, who is gaining increasing attention from theoreticians and historians of communicational linguistics, constructivism, and psychology of language. Unlike Whitney and Bréal, he gives prime importance to the

  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: 307281) 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.

  In her seminal article on language classification in the nineteenth century, Anna Morpurgo Davies writes that the standard history of linguistics ‘sees the period between the later 1830s and the ’70s as a period of increased philological knowledge of the various languages, of greater interest in phonetics, of more solid etymologizing and of slow progress towards the concept of a sound law in the stricter sense’ (1975:631). This standard history overlooks the mounting literature on general linguistic questions and the interest in theoretical questions noticeable during this part of the nineteenth century. One has only to think of such writers as Max Müller, William Dwight Whitney, Archibald

  Henry Sayce, Hermann Paul, Heymann Steinthal, Philipp Wegener, Michel Bréal, Abel Hovelacque, and many, many others. One of these, Georg von der Gabelentz, actually 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.

  On the possibility that both Bréal and Whitney may have used the works of Madvig (1875) as a

  source of inspiration, see Aarsleff (1979:72ff.).

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)

  Change in language 2

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).

  Colorado. His interest in the study of Sanskrit was first prompted in 1848 by Josiah who had brought back from Europe a Sanskrit grammar. After a brief course at Yale with Professor Edward Elbridge Salisbury (1814–1901), then the only trained Orientalist in the United States, Whitney went to Germany where he remained from 1850 to 1853. He collaborated with Rudolf von Roth on the editio princeps of the Atharva Veda Saṃhitā (1855–6), and from this collaboration came his contribution to all the Atharvan material to the seminal Petersburg Lexicon of Sanskrit (1852–75), edited by Roth and Otto von Böhtlingk. In 1861 he received his doctorate from the university of Breslau. In 1864 he was appointed professor of Sanskrit at Yale where he also taught French and German until 1867, as he did at Sheffield scientific school until 1866. When his chair in Sanskrit was funded by his former teacher, Professor Salisbury, to prevent him moving to Harvard, this teaching became voluntary. In 1869 Whitney also became Professor of Comparative Philology. For many years he presented a senior elective course in general linguistic science at Yale, based on his experience as a lecturer on the subject and on his general books Language and the Study of Language (1867) and The Life and Growth of Language (1875). Whitney returned to Germany several times during his tenure at Yale,

  The bio-bibliographical background 3

  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 CLGN 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

  Change in language 4

  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.

  abolition in 1888; and in 1890 he was made Commander of the Legion of Honour.

  Like Whitney he held various offices outside the university. Most importantly in 1868

  he became Secretary of the Société de linguistique de Paris (founded in 1863) an office

  he held until his retirement in 1905. In this function, and as the founder of the Ecole des Hautes Etudes (1868), created by Victor Duruy, he attempted to re-organize French linguistics along the lines of the German university system, without at the same time importing all of German linguistic thinking—which for Bréal had become far too obsessed with naturalistic models of language. Bréal chose to translate Bopp rather than the by then better known and spectacular Compendium written by Schleicher (1861), for reasons that will become clear below. By 1866, both Bréal and Whitney had started to recognize the shortcomings of the comparative paradigm in which they had grown up but

  The bio-bibliographical background 5

  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

  Change in language 6

  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:

  At the beginning of his career Bréal was strongly influenced by his teachers in Berlin. His first publications were attached to the ideas of

  The bio-bibliographical background 7

  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.

  Change in language 8

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.

  Whitney (1869:70)

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  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: 54–5)

  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:

  Change in language 10

  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).

  Bréal, too, remained a faithful follower of Bopp’s linguistics. One has only to think of his decision to translate Bopp rather than Schleicher—and that in 1866, the high-point of Schleicher’s popularity, a popularity that he must have regarded as somewhat threatening, as Whitney did Max Müller’s. Bréal emphasized the importance of Bopp’s method. In his first lecture at the Collège de France (‘De la méthode comparative appliquée à l’étude des langues’) he writes:

  Friends and enemies 11

  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

  Change in language 12

  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: 277249)—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

  Following the overview of Bréal’s and Whitney’s affinities and dislikes, we now turn to a closer consideration of their particular enemies and friends. Bréal’s grievances over nineteenth-century linguistic ‘systems’ were expressed most forcefully in his 1866 lecture on comparative grammar, given at the Collège de France (cf. Bréal FF, reprinted in Bréal 1877:243–66). The title of this course (to which he referred in 1868b in his preface to Schleicher’s treatise as a critical review of Schleicher’s work), ‘De la forme et de la fonction des mots’, denotes a departure from the normal comparative grammar framework. It states that words do not only have a form (sound), but also a function

  Friends and enemies 13

  (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: