Beyond Pure Reason by Gasparov Boris;

Author:Gasparov, Boris;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LAN009000, Language Arts and Disciplines/Linguistics, PHI001000, Philosophy/Aesthetics
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-09-25T04:00:00+00:00

Diachrony and History

FIVE

TOWARD IMMUTABILITY: CONSTRUCTING THE PAST

Reconstruction or Construction? The Saussurean Revolution in Comparative Linguistics

The only book Saussure published in his lifetime appeared in 1878 in Leipzig under the title Mémoire sur le système primitif des voyelles dans les langues indo-européennes.1 The book received instant, albeit somewhat controversial recognition. While hailed in the Francophone world as an achievement of revolutionary proportions that in one stroke ended the supremacy of the “Germans,” Saussure’s Mémoire largely displeased his teachers.2 Karl Brugmann, Saussure’s principal mentor—whose two-volume compendium of Indo-European comparative phonetics and morphology (followed by three volumes of comparative syntax by Berthold Delbrück) would eventually become the definitive accomplishment of nineteenth-century comparative linguistics—though praising the author’s knowledge, criticized his approach as “speculative,” something that went against the grain of the staunch positivism of the Leipzig school.3

By the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Indo-European comparative linguistics could claim enormous achievements in describing patterns of similarities and differences between related languages and formulating the ensuing laws of their historical change. Applying those laws in reverse would supposedly allow one to arrive at the state of related languages avant la lettre, i.e., at their unrecorded prehistoric past form, all the way back to the proto-language of their common origin. The Leipzig school particularly distinguished itself by the uncompromising strictness of its methods of historical reconstruction—a scientific severity that earned its adepts the nickname of Junggrammatiker (by analogy with the “young Turks”). According to the Leipzig doctrine, for a “phonetic law” (i.e., a pattern of phonetic change) to be worthy of the name, it had to be formulated as a universal law that brooked no exceptions, similar to the laws of nature.4

Nineteenth-century historical linguistics rejected with scorn all the speculations about the “origin of language” with which the previous century had been so preoccupied. Yet it retained the latter’s faith in the existence of some initial point, at least as far as a given family was concerned, from which all the languages in that family had sprung, as from a single stem. This monolithic projection of the protolanguage in turn created an illusion that reconstructing the Ursprache in full, as the ur-people spoke it, was a task within the reach of a few generations of scholars; linguists liked to compare this process to the reconstruction of prehistoric biological species from scattered fossils. Adolphe Pictet’s panoramic depiction of the material and spiritual culture of the “Indo-European people”—an effort Saussure later called, diplomatically, the “best of its kind”—fully reflected this mindset. Saussure was less kindly disposed toward August Schleicher’s Indo-European “compendium” (1866)—overall, a significant advance upon Bopp’s—which gained notoriety for the “Indo-European fable” “The Sheep and the Horses” (“Avis akvâsas ka”), whose reconstruction—complete with vocabulary, grammar, metrics, and ur-plot—Schleicher placed at the beginning of the book as concrete evidence of how close science had ostensibly come to the full reconstruction of a language spoken by the “Indo-Germanic” people ten to twelve millennia ago.

By the 1870s the spectacular successes achieved by comparative studies mostly applied to the reconstruction of IE consonants.

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