Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 2, Issue 2, 1975

A review of the dissemination of information among linguists and the epis-temological basis of the transformational movement leads to the suggestion that the decade from the early 1960's to the early 1970's was a decade of private knowledge for persons engaged in the theoretical study of human languages. This decade of private knowledge was not caused directly by Chomsky's disavowal of empiricism and his espousal of rationalism. Rather, it was caused indirectly by the shift from empiricism to rationalism and the subsequent attempt to base the data for theory building on native speaker intuition. The period of private knowledge in linguistics will probably continue until there is a shift in the epistemological basis of transformational thought.

Jeremiah Curtin (1835-1906) was one of the outstanding linguistic field-workers of the 19th century, though much of his material remains in manuscript form. His scholarly reputation rests primarily on his activity as folklorist and translator of the works of Henryk Sienkiewicz (1846-1916), the Nobel Prize-winning novelist. Curtin was born in Detroit and brought up in the wilds of Wisconsin, where his parents, immigrants from Ireland, made a farm. Leaving home at 21, he worked his way through Harvard, learning new languages at every opportunity. After a brief period as a junior diplomat in St .Petersburg, he worked as a journalist and eventually joined the Bureau of American Ethnology as a field worker. His assignments took him to the Seneca, to various tribes in Oklahoma and to California and Oregon, where he gathered folktales, myths, and other linguistics materials from many languages of aboriginal America. Returning to Europe on numerous occasions, Curtin gathered and published folklore from Eastern Europe and Ireland; in addition, he continued his studies of the languages of the Caucasus, of India and Persia. Work in Siberia resulted in two volumes about the Mongols. Throughout much of the latter part of his life he continued his translations from the Russian and Polish.

John Brinsley (1566-C.1630) seems to have been the first English scholar to publish a comprehensive language-teaching course for students of Latin. His first textbook, which appeared in 1612, was a lengthy discussion of teaching method; it was followed by a grammar, and by translations of Latin texts of varying degrees of difficulty, arranged in a special format to assist private study. His last publication was a dictionary devoted to the kind of vocabulary relevant to the practical needs of the early 17th century, when Latin was still the language of the professions. So valuable did English schoolmasters find his works — which also stressed the necessity of studying the vernacular — that they were reprinted two or three times, and one (the grammar) reached a fifteenth edition. But they did not attain the continuing success which they deserved, because they were superseded from the 1630's by the textbooks of Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670) which were more specifically directed towards the growing scientific interests of the seventeenth century. Although the name of Brinsley has long been known to historians of education, no comprehensive account has previously been given of his writings or of his biography. This study is an attempt to supply more detailed information about both, and to assess his importance in the history of applied linguistics.

Recent scholars disagree over whether Berkeley's theory of meaning constitutes a radical departure from Locke in the direction of current philosophy of language or offers no real alternative to the semantics of Locke's Essay concerning Human Understanding. Berkeley agrees with Locke that linguistic meaning consists in the transmission of ideas from speaker to hearer by means of words, but he does not accept the Lockean account of this transmission. Specifically he departs from Locke at two fundamental points: he insists that ideas themselves have meanings and stand in need of interpretation, and he holds that the meanings of ideas may vary with the contexts in which they occur. To accommodate Berkeley's principle of contextual meaning the account of communication must relate not individual ideas to individual words but strings of ideas to strings of words. Words and ideas, moreover, are not isomorphic as Locke implies they are: Berkeley indicates in particular the cases of general terms and names for spiritual substances, for neither of which corresponding ideas can be discovered. To accommodate such cases within the general theory that meaning depends upon corresponding ideas an encoding process must be introduced into the account of the verbal transmission of ideas, a process whereby verbal structures including such terms as universals and names for spirits can be related to different ideational structures in which no such terms appear. The conclusion is that Berkeley accepts from Locke the fundamental principle that meaning depends upon corresponding ideas in the mind but that he holds this relation of correspondence to be much more complex than Locke allowed: in particular Berkeley introduces structural considerations by abandoning the traditional view that words and ideas correspond on a one-to-one basis, and he requires the mind to perform certain interpretative encoding procedures in translating between verbal and ideational structures.