Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 37, Issue 1-2, 2010

This article traces the interactions between the philologist and applied linguist Henry Sweet (1845–1912) and the anthropologist and evolutionist E. B. Tylor (1832–1917). Tylor was impressed by Sweet’s uniformitarian views on phonetic synthesis and word-division: that phonetic and grammatical processes observable in the present could be used to explain grammatical formation and inflection in the past. Conversely, Sweet’s views on language and its origins owe much to Tylor’s intellectualism and his doctrine of survivals. According to Tylor, ‘primitive man’ employed rational thought in his attempts to make intellectual sense of the world and its phenomena. In expressions such as ‘the sun rises’, vestiges of this primitive thought and animism then survive in the lexis and syntax of later, modern languages. Sweet used Tylorian material in his language textbooks, and the intellectualist theory was taken up by literary critics in the 1880s, e.g., in the Shelley Society — of which Sweet was a founding member, in order to explore the roots of poetic metaphor and figurative language as used in modern English poetry.

This article, a successor to the author’s 2002 “Steinthal and Max Müller: Comparative Lives”, attempts to situate the Semiticist and ‘Orientalist’ Ernest Renan in a nexus between the poles represented by Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899) and Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900). Renan can be viewed as wavering — in the 1840s through 1860s — between (and perhaps developing from) a natural scientific and linguistic orientation influenced by Humboldtians such as August Friedrich Pott (1802–1887) and the Völkerpsychologist Steinthal and a racial ideology in linguistics similar to that of the more historicist linguist Max Müller. Max Müller had a similar set of influences in Paris to Renan in this period, such as their common amateur mentor Baron Ferdinand von Eckstein (1790–1861) and Collège de France professor Eugène Burnouf (1801–1852). But a crucial hypothesis relates to how much Renan was influenced in his change to racial ideology by the advent of the 1848 Revolution. The author explains how this hypothesis can be tested by specific further research into the manuscript of Renan’s 1847 Prix Volney prizewinning essay.

This article analyses previously unpublished notes by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) contained in a single large register which he used in the first half of the 1880s. The earliest pages include his detailed reactions to La parole intérieure (1881) by Victor Egger (1848–1909). Although these reactions are sometimes hostile, the later notes, dated December 1884 and March 1885, appear to build on ideas he encountered in Egger. These notes — probably connected to his course on Gothic and Old High German grammar at the École des Hautes Études in Paris — show to what extent the account of language associated with his lectures on general linguistics of 1907–1911 was already present in his teaching a quarter of a century earlier.