Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 34, Issue 2-3, 2007

The aim of this paper is to outline an approach to linguistic historiography which is informed by 20th-century phenomenology and hermeneutics, but which is formulated in linguistic terms. The key concept is that of the ‘time horizons’ which delimit the context which is relevant to the interpretation of an event or text. The idea of the time horizon is here illustrated by the everyday notion of the shelf-life of consumable items. The main thrust of the argument is that the interpretation of historical events and texts necessarily involves not one but two cognitive contexts, that of the historical protagonist and that of the modern observer. The approach sets up a three-level contrast between chronography (getting the facts right), reconstruction (recounting the historical story), and interpretation (making sense of the past story in terms of present-day understandings).

For a long time, and well beyond the publication of John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character (1668), a latent tension characterised the orthographic tradition. It was caused by two incompatible principles whose problematic relationship had never been addressed. One is the idea of the logical, chronological and semiotic primacy of speech over writing, or of sound over character, a principle which lives on in modern linguistics. The other is the doctrine of an abstract unity of sound/potestas and character/figura in the letter/littera, an axiom that appears to have been abandoned only with the emancipation of modern phonetics from its former orthographic frame of reference. With the advent of the real-character movement in the 17th century, a way was suddenly opened up for the problematic issue to be discussed and resolved. Since a real, i.e., non-sound-related, character implied at least a non-priority of speech over writing — if not a priority of writing —, the first principle could be reformulated so as to be made consonant with the idea of an abstract littera. This paper tries to bring out Wilkins’s sophisticated discussion of the littera, his attempt to localise the abstract unity of sound and character in the configuration of the articulatory organs, as well as the utilisation of his littera concept for his design of a real character of sounds. In a parallel line of argument, it is claimed that Wilkins’s orthography, or doctrine of letters, forms the conceptual equivalent to his metaphysics, or science of things. More than that, the two disciplines are so interlocked that things and letters can be seen to converge in letter-things, or thing-letters.

Richard John Lloyd (1846–1906) was a well-known Liverpool businessman who also pursued the study of phonetics, English language, literature, sociology and philosophy. His wide intellectual background embraced mathematics and physics too. His work in phonetics is characterised by a particular emphasis on the acoustics of vowel sounds, as well as by close attention to the fine detail of articulation (what he called “minute phonetics”). Alongside a small group of scientists in Europe, he was actively involved in research into the formant structure of vowels. His relatively early death meant that his work never achieved the prominence it deserved, and hence his influence has remained negligible. His work, however, bears comparison with that of colleagues in articulatory and experimental phonetics later in the 20th century.

This article examines shared motifs in the history of the study of grammatical gender in North American Indian and Indo-European languages. Specifically, I investigate the degree of semantic and cultural motivation attributed to gender in Algonquian languages, and present analogies with accounts of gender in Indo-European. The presence of exceptions within animate gender in Algonquian has led to conflicting interpretations: while some focused on the arbitrary nature of the categorization, others regarded them as culturally based. Algonquian languages provide an example of how claims that have traditionally been made about Indo-European gender, particularly its supposed semantic arbitrariness, have been extended to languages apparently less suited for the purpose.

This paper is a re-examination of Howard N. Rose’s Thesaurus of Slang (1934): of its purpose, structure, contents, reliability, and sources. Contemporary reviewers were largely unimpressed, and their criticisms are also considered. Despite its undoubtedly poor quality, Rose’s work provides some interesting insights into attitudes towards American English, the power of the word “thesaurus”, and the partiality of the reviewing process.