Amsterdam Classics in Linguistics, 1800–1925

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.

This volume contains a reprint of the English translation (1843) by Sir George Webbe Dasent of Rask’s Anvising till Isländskan eller Nordiska Fornspråket (1818). This re-edition, with an added bio-bibliography of Rask, should enable the linguist of today to obtain a fairly rounded picture of this important 19th-century scholar who, together with Bopp and Grimm, has justly been ranked among the founding fathers of the comparative-historical study of Indo-European languages.

Rasmus Kristian Rask (1787–1832) did not occupy himself with historical linguistics alone as a comparativist, but also with language as a system based on a notion of structure comprised of three key ideas: the idea of wholeness, the idea of transformation (derivation and composition), and the idea of self-regulation. He formulated theoretical and practical premises for the composition of grammars, and in this he was far ahead of his time and in closer proximity to the linguistic concerns and problems of our era. From both theoretical and pedagogical points of view, Rask’s grammar of Icelandic remains a most remarkable work.

This volume contains a fac simile edition of the 1882 English translation of Delbrück’s Einleitung in das Sprachstudium. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte und Methodik der vergleichenden Sprachforschung (Leipzig 1880), together with a Foreword and a Selected Bibliography.

The essays reproduced in this volume represent the major and characteristic documents in that flood of literature that was produced during the neogrammarian controversy. At that time, the entire community of linguists came face to face with the most profound problems of its theory and practice; it was a true crisis of empirical interpretation. Therefore, these essays are of much more than ‘mere’ historical interest: each one of them plunges directly into the central issues of the science of historical linguistics.

Curtius’ Zur Kritik der neuesten Sprachforschung (January 1885) was the initial polemic. Delbrück’s reply Die neueste Sprachforschung, Betrachtungen über George Curtius’Schrift ‘Zur Kritik der neuesten Sprachforschung’ and Brugmann’s retort Zum heutigen Stand der Sprachwissenschaft appeared soon thereafter. Later that year appeared Schuchardt’s attack Über die Lautgesetze: Gegen die Junggrammatiker. Collitz’article Die neueste Sprachforschung und die Erklärung des indogermanischen Ablautes did not appear until 1886, followed soon by Osthoff’s reply Die neueste Sprachforschung und die Erklärung des indogermanischen Ablautes: Antwort auf die gleichnamige Schrift von Dr. Hermann Collitz. Jespersen’s criticism of the neogrammarians appeared in German translation as Zur Lautgesetzfrage in1887.

The volume provides an Introduction and Select Bibliography.

New edition of a pioneering work on word order, which originally appeared in French in 1844 (3rd ed., 1879), with an index.

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.

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.

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.