Amsterdam Classics in Linguistics, 1800–1925 (vols. 1–18, 1999–2013)

This volume brings together the most important general linguistic writings by Mikołay Kruszewski (1851-1887), whom Roman Jakobson described as “one of the greatest theoreticians of language among the world linguists of the late nineteenth century”. Apart from reissuing a revised version of the late Robert Austerlitz’ translation of the theoretical introduction of Kruszewski’s Master’s thesis on morphophonemic alternation in Old Slavic, first published in German in 1881, the bulk of the present volume consists of the first translation ever, by Gregory M. Eramian, of Kruszewski’s doctoral thesis, Outline of Linguistic Science, supervised by J. Baudouin de Courtenay and submitted in Russian at the University of Kazan in 1883, which until now has been available only in German translation, published in Techmer’s “Zeitschrift” (Leipzig, 1884-1890; reprinted Amsterdam, 1973). Together with a detailed introduction, a full list of Kruszewski’s writings, a bibliography of secondary sources, including a reconstruction of the major works consulted by Kruszewski, and detailed indexes of biographical names, subjects & terms, and languages cited for examples, the present volume provides Western scholars with a solid textual and contextual basis for a proper reassessment of the ideas of arguably the most outstanding 19th-century linguistic thinker.

In Die Sprachen Europas in systematischer Uebersicht (Bonn 1850) Schleicher works out a naturalistic conception of language and a research program inspired by the methods of the natural sciences, in particular botany and geology. It does not only provide a general exposition of Schleicher’s views, of the sharp lines he is drawing between linguistics and philology, of the concept of ‘Sprachengeschichte’ in contradistinction to ‘Sprachentwicklung’, of the methodology of linguistic research, but also – often overlooked – with an attempt at language typology. Inspired by proposals made by Friedrich and August Wilhelm Schlegel and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Schleicher tries to provide a material, scientific basis for language classification. In addition to this edition, the volume contains an introductory article.

Contains:

The Darwinian Theory and the Science of language (1863) by August Schleicher, translated from the German by Alexander V. W. Bikkers.

On the Significance of Language for the Natural History of Man (1865) by August Schleicher, translated from the German by J. Peter Maher.

On the Origin of Language (1867) by Wilhelm H. I. Bleek, edited with a preface by Ernst Haeckel, translated from the German by Thomas Davidson.

This is a reprint of the third edition of Tytler’s Principles of Translation , originally published in 1791, and this edition was published in 1813. The ideas of Tytler can give inspiration to modern TS scholars, particularly his open-mindedness on quality assessment and his ideas on linguistic and cultural aspects in translations, which are illustrated with many examples.

In the Introduction, Jeffrey Huntsman sets Alexander Fraser Tytler Lord Woodhouselee and his ideas in a historical context.

As the original preface states: “It will serve to demonstrate, that the Art of Translation is of more dignity and importance than has generally been imagined.” (p. ix)

Über den Umlaut (1843) and Über den Ablaut (1844) grew out of a review of Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik by Holtzmann, in which he also made an excursus into Bopp’s theory of vowel gradation in Sanskrit. Holtzmann was the first to observe the correlation of guṇa and accent. At the same time he noted that loss (or absence) of the accent could mean loss or shortening of a vowel. Observations which, be it in a different form, eventually found their way into a unified theory of Indo-European vowel gradation.
The two German texts are presented here in fac simile format, together with an introductory article.

This volume presents a fac simile edition of Friedrich Schlegel’s Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier. Ein Beitrag zur Begründung der Altertumskunde (Heidelberg, 1808). It is preceded by an introductory article by Sebastiano Timpanaro ‘Friedrich Schlegel and the beginnings of Indo-European linguistics in Germany’.

New edition, prepared with a bio-bibliographical account of Hehn and a survay of the research into Indo-European prehistory by James P. Mallory.

It was Hehn who for the first time combined the tools of comparative linguistics and the direct historical approach in order to discover the origins of domesticated animals and cultivated plants in the ancient world, tracing their diffusion from one culture to another. Hehn abandoned his contemporaries’often idealized and nationalistic image of the ancient Indo-Europeans, seeking instead to reconstruct early Indo-European society in agreement with the ethnological research of his day.

This volume contains August Friedrich Pott's Einleitung in de Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, which appeared between 1884 and 1890 in F. Techmer's Internationale Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (Leipzig). In addition, the volume contains Pott's Zur Literatur der Sprachenkunde Europas (Leipzig 1887), the obituary by Paul Horn (Göttingen 1888), and a preface to this new edition by E.F.K. Koerner.