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A History of Modern Linguistics: From the Beginnings to World War II
In this book, McElvenny offers a concise history of modern linguistics from its emergence in the early nineteenth century up to the end of World War II. Written as a collective biography of the field, it concentrates on the interaction between the leading figures of linguistics, their controversies, and the role of the social and political context in shaping their ideas and methods. While A History of Modern Linguistics focuses on disciplinary linguistics, the boundaries of the account are developments in neighbouring fields - in particular, philosophy, psychology and anthropology - are brought into the discussion where they have contributed to linguistic research.
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208 pages, Hardcover
Published February 12, 2024
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August 11, 2026อ่านจบละ โน้ตหลัง Ch 12 เดี๋ยวค่อยมาเขียน
Notes of interesting things I find about this:
Chapter 2
- Historical-comparative grammar is the oldest branch of linguistics in the sense that it was the first to be institutionalised in Germany
- There is a clear and tight connection between "comparative" in the biological/anatomical sense and the linguistic sense. The idea is borrowed from anatomy directly by Friedrich Schlegel.
- The everything-is-iconic-but-historical-changes-obscured-it was quite old, going back to at least Locke, Leibniz, then Franz Bopp (probably the first true comparative linguist).
- Lots of old ideas were not "scientific" in the modern sense. Grimm's Law for example was seen as a manifestation of the spirit of the people (Volkgeist), William Jones' idea of the genealogy of languages has biblical roots (genesis).
Chapter 3
- This chapter is about how in the beginning people confused genealogy with typology quite a bit
- Most people cite de Saussure when they want to talk about the arbitrariness of the sign, but this idea goes way back. Condillac (French, 18C) had naturalistic, accidental (signs acquire meanings by context recurrence), instituted (arbitrary) signs.
- Humboldt (18C), of course, was racist as shit (as with anyone then), but the cool thing is that while others were busy classifying whole languages, Humboldt was thinking in terms of grammatical processes that can co-exist in a single language (isolation, agglutination, inflection--more or less the same as the modern idea--and incoporation/fusion).
Chapter 4
- August Schleicher (Indo-Europeanist, 19C) was the first in this tradition to suggest finding immutable laws (modern-day diachronic universals). Bro was reconstruction-pilled enough to write the famous PIE passage.
- Schleicher was staunchly a scientific materialist (though he rejected the label)--meaning roughly a physicalist in metaphysics sense--no spirits or whatever. He thought of langauges as natural organisms.
- He was probably one of the first to biologise language (ultimately everything tied to the brain), and to tease apart genealogy from typology, and to propose the anaesynthetic spiral (from less to more synthetic during pre-history, to less synthetic again during history). Bopp also had a similar "agglutination theory". All of these are basically precursors to grammaticalisation-as-loss-of-autonomy.
Chapter 5
- William Dwight Whitney (19C) is awesome. Up to this point people sorta treated languages as their own objects (e.g. organisms as in Schleicher's case).
- WDW was way ahead of his time. He introduced what is essentially the modern variationist/evolutionary view (languages are abstractions over linguistic communities--what he called "institutions", and language change happens as accumulation of individual lingusitic acts).
- The idea of language as arbitrary but crucially conventional ("institution") comes from Common Sense Scottish philosophy
- WDW introduced frequency analysis (!) of vowels and use it to argue for tendency for economy in language change (in particular Indo-European lgs tend to reduce vowel openness, an effort reduction cause [a] requires wide mouth--rate of [a] falls from PIE to Germanic to WDW's American English).
- Same principle of least effort leads to grammaticalisation (form reduction).
- WDW also formally introduced Uniformitarianism, but the application of thet principle to language was suggested even earlier by a geologist (!) who introduced the idea to geology--Charles Lyell (19C), who in fact view language change as a result of sociolinguistic pressures like class and fashion.
Chapter 6
- Junggrammatiker ("Neogrammarians", or "Young" grammarians) is a cluster of linguists with similar thoughts. Ringleaders: Karl Brugman and his bestie Hermann Osthoff
- Brugman was a rebel, publishing in his prof's journal articles that contradict his prof's established position.
- Neogrammarians believe in looking at present-day variation in minor dialects as a clue to the range of possible variation, which gives clues to how languages develop
- The neogrammarians look to Verner for inspiration of their exceptionless doctrine. ("There are no exceptions to regularity of sound chnage if you look hard enough"--as Verner shows with the fact that Grimm's Law needs a statement on the stress-based conditioning).
- Hermann Paul basically articulates the modern linguistic view: There ius no such thing as a language. There are only speakers, and linguistic norms--no such tihng as collective psychology that is not an abstraction. Linguistics is meant to figure out how individual ses relate to norms and how the feedback mechanisms determine norm changes.
- Paul's view is also modern in that he cares both about the cognitive/mental individual psychology of language, and the norms.
Chapter 7
- Neogrammarians suffer from critiques that they aren't too original but really just continue Schleicher's rigour, and that they are too narrow in what should count as linguistics.
- One critic was Georg von der Gabelentz (19C), basically a pioneer in modern traditional typology (what a weird phrase to type). Gabelentz started looking at language in more probabilistic terms (e.g. comparing potential cognates between Basque and Berber lgs probabilistically)
- Hugo Schuchardt argues Neogrammarians draw a false dichotomy between (a strawman, 'cause as Paul suggests a). He also argues that facts of variation (that language always exists in variation) seem to work against Neogrammarians, and that Neogrammarian exceptionless sound laws don't have explanatory value, even though Neogs like to accuse other people of simply gathering facts.
- What I find deeply intersting is that there is a rather striking parallel between this Neogrammarian controversy episode and the Chomskyan/functionalist rift. For Chomskyans, an abstract, high general, universal law would count as an "explanation" (with some hand-wavy arguments about learnability), whereas for functionalists it just begs the question--it's just a generalisation that describes the fact, but does not actually have an explanatory value. Linguistics seems to have always been torn between people who want languages to work neatly and who seeks exceptionless laws vs. who views languages as messy, probabilistic and is more interested in causes of language.
- Like WDW, Schuchardt was basically the proto-variationist: He theorised that people use variants depending on fashion, either consciously or unconsciously, and change is innovation + propagation.
- The tree model (taken literally then) is attacked by "wave theory" (basically, a theory that looks at the actual variation and geolinguistics of dialects, which in finds tihngs like the French-Italian dialect continuum). This emphasises the effects of geographically driven language contact.
- Wave theory is so called because Schmidt thinks changes proceed in waves, radiating from a single source in successions.
- Vossler thought trying to make linguistics like a natural science is misguided 'cause humans ain't like that. In a way, Vossler might be termed the proto-Wave-3-sociolinguist: Linguistics is simply stylistics 'cause empirical observations about change etc. don't tell us about they why of those changes (for those you should look at idiolectal styles).
Chapter 8
- Historically, Saussure was not the mythological revolutionary of the modern standard history. He was just a Neogrammarian.
- Saussure's contributions are actually somewhat underwhelming from a historical perspective. (It's interesting *why* he was made to be such a big deal--maybe I'll find out in later chapters on structuralists).
- Arbitrariness of the sign was attributed to WDW by Saussure, which has even further precedents
- Saussure's synchrony-diachrony distinction was due to the Neogrammarians.
- The simplicity of his PIE reconstruction (being able to propose a single vowel that varies depending on environment) comes from the fact that he treated vowels as part of a system--that'd already been done by the Neogrammarians.
- The success story of the laryngeal theory is not entirely Sasussure's (reconstructed as an abstract vowel by Saussure, proposed to be laryngeal by Möller, confirmed by the deciphering of Hittite)
- The key information-theorey-esque structuralist notion of value-as-difference-from-other-items does not seem to have a clear lineage (beyond the general systemic approach), and that's kinda cool in itself.
- Bloomfield's evaluation is that Saussure systematises the ideas that had long been in the air.
Chapter 9
- This one is a bit boring. The gist is that "the phoneme" as a term/word began first (by French linguist Dufriche Mugdan)
- Followed by Saussure, who used it in the Cours. He wasn't precise about what it was but basically it was used for his reconstrcuted PIE abstract phoneme.
- Followed by an articulation of the concept that corresponds to the more or less modern view--phoneme as an abstract psychological construct not its physical realisations--by de Courtenay (but was not called "phoneme", plus it wasn't new in the sense that system-level thinking was in the air)
- Followed by de Courtenay's student, Kruszewski, who applied the term to the concept above.
- Due to some weird historical accident, Saussure's adoption of Kruszewski's phoneme turns out to be a parole (not langue) concept.
- The IPA (both the association and the alphabet) has origins as a teaching tool for language teachers with desire to sidestep the problem of existing script systems which can't always do one-to-one mappings.
- One precursor to the IPA is Visible Speech, made by Alexander Graham Bell's dad.
Chapter 10
- Jakobson x Trubetzkoy they defo were not just friends
- Both escaped Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. Jakobson was disillusioned with the Bolsheviks and Trubetzkoy was a prince (!).
- Both formed Prague Linguistic Circle (akin to the Vienna Circle in philosophy). Jakobson idolised Saussure and he finally moved to the US and became influential at MIT (both Chomsky and Halle were indirect students), which means that Saussure became the mythological figure we have today.
- "Structuralism" is first explciitly discussed by Jakobson.
- Jakobs0n is the structuralism evangelist: Got into contact with the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle (Prague Circle offshoot in Denmark) which includes people like Hjelmslev (who developed glossematics--a formal treatment of language). Basically all Levi-Strauss etc. attend his lectures and adopted the ideas.
- McElvenny thinks that Saussurean structuralism actually corresponds to something like substance-free phonology ("no meaning in positive terms" means no substance--only contrasts).
- While saying that they followed Saussure, J&T's phonemic analysis actually looked at substance (phonetic content) and led them to develop markedness theory, and a theory of distinctive features. What's interesting here is that Jakobson seemed to be very modern in his thinking, linking this to acquisition etc.
- For T, phonemes are not atomic. Structuralism ~ Gestalt psychology. Words are *analysed into* phonemes but they are fundamentally "wholes" the same way an octave is a whole.
Chapter 11
- Holy shit. So much was forgotten about the contribution of Philipp Wegener (1848–1916)
- Wegener had a PhD but was a German gymnasium teacher. According to McElvenny, he basically founded functionalism.
- Wegener introduced the language-as-action idea; this essentially anticipated Searle.
- He also introduced information structure (though didn't call this back then). He cared about common ground. His "logical subject" is essentially the modern-day IS "topic", and his "logical predicate" is the modern-day "focus" (in the sense of new information). He looked at intonational/grammatical devices used to express IS.
- Of course he has his sources, which go back to Gabelentz and his contemporary Breal (French linguist). His idea was also anticipated by Johan Nicolai Madvig, who conceptualised language as a co-operative activity. Bro wrote in Danish, though, so nobody gaf and by the time it got translated the pragmatic view was already widely known.
- The ideas were well received though seen as not "core linguistics" by Neogrammarians (again, it's almost like Chomsky was a Neogrammarian reincarnate...), who thought real linguists onyl studied change.
- This chapter in general made me realise how heavily US-centric the standard linguistics curriculum is. Students will likely never hear about Wegener but will remember Grice and Searle.
Chapter 12
- Firth was an "ambivalent imperialist" (1890-1960). He was a coloniser, but wanted to de-Europeanise, and recognise the awesomeness of the Indian phonological (he called phonetic) tradition.
- Firth thinks that language is functional at every level (though "function" seems to have a very broad sense for him), from phonetics (really this is phonological contrasts), lexical (bascially morphological contrasts), to syntax.
- Firth didn't really like phenomic theory 'cause he looked at Chinese and was like, "what about suprasegmentals that associate with units larger than phones" and also this script wasn't alphabetic, so he developed prosodic phonology owhich was more holistic. For him, Chinese toneal contrasts are equal to segmental contrasts (of course, we now know this isn't quite right. Tones carry less functional load and are judged less important by speakers).
- Firth gave birth to the modern L2 learning way where you learn language within context (book chapters divided by contexts you find a new language in). He produced a crash course based on Japanese radio broadcasts during WWII.
- Malinowski was a Pole who migrated to Britain. Prominent anthropologist who did fieldwork in New Guinea and found that understanding cultures is super important to understanding wtf people were actually talking about.
- Malinowski drew heavily on Ogden & Richards (of the famous semiotic triangle) in theorising about this.
- M also had a theory of language development/evolution where it started with baby cries and ended with language-as-compressed-thought. Kinda boring.
Notes of interesting things I find about this:
Chapter 2
- Historical-comparative grammar is the oldest branch of linguistics in the sense that it was the first to be institutionalised in Germany
- There is a clear and tight connection between "comparative" in the biological/anatomical sense and the linguistic sense. The idea is borrowed from anatomy directly by Friedrich Schlegel.
- The everything-is-iconic-but-historical-changes-obscured-it was quite old, going back to at least Locke, Leibniz, then Franz Bopp (probably the first true comparative linguist).
- Lots of old ideas were not "scientific" in the modern sense. Grimm's Law for example was seen as a manifestation of the spirit of the people (Volkgeist), William Jones' idea of the genealogy of languages has biblical roots (genesis).
Chapter 3
- This chapter is about how in the beginning people confused genealogy with typology quite a bit
- Most people cite de Saussure when they want to talk about the arbitrariness of the sign, but this idea goes way back. Condillac (French, 18C) had naturalistic, accidental (signs acquire meanings by context recurrence), instituted (arbitrary) signs.
- Humboldt (18C), of course, was racist as shit (as with anyone then), but the cool thing is that while others were busy classifying whole languages, Humboldt was thinking in terms of grammatical processes that can co-exist in a single language (isolation, agglutination, inflection--more or less the same as the modern idea--and incoporation/fusion).
Chapter 4
- August Schleicher (Indo-Europeanist, 19C) was the first in this tradition to suggest finding immutable laws (modern-day diachronic universals). Bro was reconstruction-pilled enough to write the famous PIE passage.
- Schleicher was staunchly a scientific materialist (though he rejected the label)--meaning roughly a physicalist in metaphysics sense--no spirits or whatever. He thought of langauges as natural organisms.
- He was probably one of the first to biologise language (ultimately everything tied to the brain), and to tease apart genealogy from typology, and to propose the anaesynthetic spiral (from less to more synthetic during pre-history, to less synthetic again during history). Bopp also had a similar "agglutination theory". All of these are basically precursors to grammaticalisation-as-loss-of-autonomy.
Chapter 5
- William Dwight Whitney (19C) is awesome. Up to this point people sorta treated languages as their own objects (e.g. organisms as in Schleicher's case).
- WDW was way ahead of his time. He introduced what is essentially the modern variationist/evolutionary view (languages are abstractions over linguistic communities--what he called "institutions", and language change happens as accumulation of individual lingusitic acts).
- The idea of language as arbitrary but crucially conventional ("institution") comes from Common Sense Scottish philosophy
- WDW introduced frequency analysis (!) of vowels and use it to argue for tendency for economy in language change (in particular Indo-European lgs tend to reduce vowel openness, an effort reduction cause [a] requires wide mouth--rate of [a] falls from PIE to Germanic to WDW's American English).
- Same principle of least effort leads to grammaticalisation (form reduction).
- WDW also formally introduced Uniformitarianism, but the application of thet principle to language was suggested even earlier by a geologist (!) who introduced the idea to geology--Charles Lyell (19C), who in fact view language change as a result of sociolinguistic pressures like class and fashion.
Chapter 6
- Junggrammatiker ("Neogrammarians", or "Young" grammarians) is a cluster of linguists with similar thoughts. Ringleaders: Karl Brugman and his bestie Hermann Osthoff
- Brugman was a rebel, publishing in his prof's journal articles that contradict his prof's established position.
- Neogrammarians believe in looking at present-day variation in minor dialects as a clue to the range of possible variation, which gives clues to how languages develop
- The neogrammarians look to Verner for inspiration of their exceptionless doctrine. ("There are no exceptions to regularity of sound chnage if you look hard enough"--as Verner shows with the fact that Grimm's Law needs a statement on the stress-based conditioning).
- Hermann Paul basically articulates the modern linguistic view: There ius no such thing as a language. There are only speakers, and linguistic norms--no such tihng as collective psychology that is not an abstraction. Linguistics is meant to figure out how individual ses relate to norms and how the feedback mechanisms determine norm changes.
- Paul's view is also modern in that he cares both about the cognitive/mental individual psychology of language, and the norms.
Chapter 7
- Neogrammarians suffer from critiques that they aren't too original but really just continue Schleicher's rigour, and that they are too narrow in what should count as linguistics.
- One critic was Georg von der Gabelentz (19C), basically a pioneer in modern traditional typology (what a weird phrase to type). Gabelentz started looking at language in more probabilistic terms (e.g. comparing potential cognates between Basque and Berber lgs probabilistically)
- Hugo Schuchardt argues Neogrammarians draw a false dichotomy between (a strawman, 'cause as Paul suggests a). He also argues that facts of variation (that language always exists in variation) seem to work against Neogrammarians, and that Neogrammarian exceptionless sound laws don't have explanatory value, even though Neogs like to accuse other people of simply gathering facts.
- What I find deeply intersting is that there is a rather striking parallel between this Neogrammarian controversy episode and the Chomskyan/functionalist rift. For Chomskyans, an abstract, high general, universal law would count as an "explanation" (with some hand-wavy arguments about learnability), whereas for functionalists it just begs the question--it's just a generalisation that describes the fact, but does not actually have an explanatory value. Linguistics seems to have always been torn between people who want languages to work neatly and who seeks exceptionless laws vs. who views languages as messy, probabilistic and is more interested in causes of language.
- Like WDW, Schuchardt was basically the proto-variationist: He theorised that people use variants depending on fashion, either consciously or unconsciously, and change is innovation + propagation.
- The tree model (taken literally then) is attacked by "wave theory" (basically, a theory that looks at the actual variation and geolinguistics of dialects, which in finds tihngs like the French-Italian dialect continuum). This emphasises the effects of geographically driven language contact.
- Wave theory is so called because Schmidt thinks changes proceed in waves, radiating from a single source in successions.
- Vossler thought trying to make linguistics like a natural science is misguided 'cause humans ain't like that. In a way, Vossler might be termed the proto-Wave-3-sociolinguist: Linguistics is simply stylistics 'cause empirical observations about change etc. don't tell us about they why of those changes (for those you should look at idiolectal styles).
Chapter 8
- Historically, Saussure was not the mythological revolutionary of the modern standard history. He was just a Neogrammarian.
- Saussure's contributions are actually somewhat underwhelming from a historical perspective. (It's interesting *why* he was made to be such a big deal--maybe I'll find out in later chapters on structuralists).
- Arbitrariness of the sign was attributed to WDW by Saussure, which has even further precedents
- Saussure's synchrony-diachrony distinction was due to the Neogrammarians.
- The simplicity of his PIE reconstruction (being able to propose a single vowel that varies depending on environment) comes from the fact that he treated vowels as part of a system--that'd already been done by the Neogrammarians.
- The success story of the laryngeal theory is not entirely Sasussure's (reconstructed as an abstract vowel by Saussure, proposed to be laryngeal by Möller, confirmed by the deciphering of Hittite)
- The key information-theorey-esque structuralist notion of value-as-difference-from-other-items does not seem to have a clear lineage (beyond the general systemic approach), and that's kinda cool in itself.
- Bloomfield's evaluation is that Saussure systematises the ideas that had long been in the air.
Chapter 9
- This one is a bit boring. The gist is that "the phoneme" as a term/word began first (by French linguist Dufriche Mugdan)
- Followed by Saussure, who used it in the Cours. He wasn't precise about what it was but basically it was used for his reconstrcuted PIE abstract phoneme.
- Followed by an articulation of the concept that corresponds to the more or less modern view--phoneme as an abstract psychological construct not its physical realisations--by de Courtenay (but was not called "phoneme", plus it wasn't new in the sense that system-level thinking was in the air)
- Followed by de Courtenay's student, Kruszewski, who applied the term to the concept above.
- Due to some weird historical accident, Saussure's adoption of Kruszewski's phoneme turns out to be a parole (not langue) concept.
- The IPA (both the association and the alphabet) has origins as a teaching tool for language teachers with desire to sidestep the problem of existing script systems which can't always do one-to-one mappings.
- One precursor to the IPA is Visible Speech, made by Alexander Graham Bell's dad.
Chapter 10
- Jakobson x Trubetzkoy they defo were not just friends
- Both escaped Russia during the Bolshevik revolution. Jakobson was disillusioned with the Bolsheviks and Trubetzkoy was a prince (!).
- Both formed Prague Linguistic Circle (akin to the Vienna Circle in philosophy). Jakobson idolised Saussure and he finally moved to the US and became influential at MIT (both Chomsky and Halle were indirect students), which means that Saussure became the mythological figure we have today.
- "Structuralism" is first explciitly discussed by Jakobson.
- Jakobs0n is the structuralism evangelist: Got into contact with the Copenhagen Linguistic Circle (Prague Circle offshoot in Denmark) which includes people like Hjelmslev (who developed glossematics--a formal treatment of language). Basically all Levi-Strauss etc. attend his lectures and adopted the ideas.
- McElvenny thinks that Saussurean structuralism actually corresponds to something like substance-free phonology ("no meaning in positive terms" means no substance--only contrasts).
- While saying that they followed Saussure, J&T's phonemic analysis actually looked at substance (phonetic content) and led them to develop markedness theory, and a theory of distinctive features. What's interesting here is that Jakobson seemed to be very modern in his thinking, linking this to acquisition etc.
- For T, phonemes are not atomic. Structuralism ~ Gestalt psychology. Words are *analysed into* phonemes but they are fundamentally "wholes" the same way an octave is a whole.
Chapter 11
- Holy shit. So much was forgotten about the contribution of Philipp Wegener (1848–1916)
- Wegener had a PhD but was a German gymnasium teacher. According to McElvenny, he basically founded functionalism.
- Wegener introduced the language-as-action idea; this essentially anticipated Searle.
- He also introduced information structure (though didn't call this back then). He cared about common ground. His "logical subject" is essentially the modern-day IS "topic", and his "logical predicate" is the modern-day "focus" (in the sense of new information). He looked at intonational/grammatical devices used to express IS.
- Of course he has his sources, which go back to Gabelentz and his contemporary Breal (French linguist). His idea was also anticipated by Johan Nicolai Madvig, who conceptualised language as a co-operative activity. Bro wrote in Danish, though, so nobody gaf and by the time it got translated the pragmatic view was already widely known.
- The ideas were well received though seen as not "core linguistics" by Neogrammarians (again, it's almost like Chomsky was a Neogrammarian reincarnate...), who thought real linguists onyl studied change.
- This chapter in general made me realise how heavily US-centric the standard linguistics curriculum is. Students will likely never hear about Wegener but will remember Grice and Searle.
Chapter 12
- Firth was an "ambivalent imperialist" (1890-1960). He was a coloniser, but wanted to de-Europeanise, and recognise the awesomeness of the Indian phonological (he called phonetic) tradition.
- Firth thinks that language is functional at every level (though "function" seems to have a very broad sense for him), from phonetics (really this is phonological contrasts), lexical (bascially morphological contrasts), to syntax.
- Firth didn't really like phenomic theory 'cause he looked at Chinese and was like, "what about suprasegmentals that associate with units larger than phones" and also this script wasn't alphabetic, so he developed prosodic phonology owhich was more holistic. For him, Chinese toneal contrasts are equal to segmental contrasts (of course, we now know this isn't quite right. Tones carry less functional load and are judged less important by speakers).
- Firth gave birth to the modern L2 learning way where you learn language within context (book chapters divided by contexts you find a new language in). He produced a crash course based on Japanese radio broadcasts during WWII.
- Malinowski was a Pole who migrated to Britain. Prominent anthropologist who did fieldwork in New Guinea and found that understanding cultures is super important to understanding wtf people were actually talking about.
- Malinowski drew heavily on Ogden & Richards (of the famous semiotic triangle) in theorising about this.
- M also had a theory of language development/evolution where it started with baby cries and ended with language-as-compressed-thought. Kinda boring.
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