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On The Disappearance Of August Schleicher In The Writings Of The Neogrammarians

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Koerner E. F. K.

Lingua Posnaniensis

2008

vol. 50

143-162

Historians of linguistics have long since learned that a certain distrust of what authors say in their programmatic statements is a healthy attitude. This applies in particular to statements made by those who have obvious agenda. Let us assume that not unlike Chomsky in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the Indo-Europeanists of the circle around August Leskien (1840–1916), notably Karl Brugmann (1849–1919), saw themselves as ushering in a revolution of their field of study. Much has been said about the ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ and how it was brought about. Hereby the manner played a not insignificant role in which the linguistic community was treated. In his plenary address at the Eleventh Congress of Linguists held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in August 1962 and his subsequent elaborations in his book Cartesian Linguistics of 1966, Noam Chomsky made every attempt to dissociate himself from his immediate predecessors, notably those whose ideas he had inherited, and tried to make the world believe that his sources of linguistic inspiration hark back to much earlier periods, from the authors of the Grammaire générale et raisonnée of 1660 to Hermann Paul’s Principien of 1880 (cf. KOERNER 2002: 151–209 and references therein). In Chomsky’s narrative an important place was assigned to Wilhelm von Humboldt’s linguistic work, in particular his famous phrase “Die Sprache muss unendlichen Gebrauch von endlichen Mitteln machen” [Language must make unlimited use of limited means], since this was supposed to show Humboldt as a generativist avant la lettre. The Leipzig Junggrammatiker of the mid-1870s saw themselves in a comparable situation of revolutionizing their discipline. As a result, scant or no reference was made to the preceding generation of historical linguists, except for citation of passages that they would find fault with. On the other hand, authors who were not their teachers and whose work was less than central to their own pursuits could be referred to as leading to their program. In the present paper, I have chosen the concept of ‘analogy’ which, next to the neogrammarian insistence on the rigorous application of ‘Lautgesetze’ (“sound laws”), was one of the two main pillars of their argument in matters of linguistic change. It is shown that while Wilhelm Scherer (1841–1886) book Zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (Berlin, 1868) was selected for special praise in Osthoff and Brugmann’s ‘manifesto’ of 1878, in particular for his use of ‘false analogy’ in the explanation forms that did not follow the run of regular phonetic change, the Neogrammarians were entirely silent on the contribution of August Schleicher (1821–1868), in whose Die Deutsche Sprache (Stuttgart, 1860) and subsequent editions of 1869 and 1874 they could have found much more explicit statements concerning the workings of the analogy principle in language history. The attempt is made to set the record straight.

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1 Lingua Posnaniensis

1 Koerner E. F. K.

1 2008

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On The Disappearance Of August Schleicher In The Writings Of The Neogrammarians