An Encyclopaedia of Language_09

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An Encyclopaedia of Language_09 AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 445of mankind at a correspondingly primitive stage of development. From these beginnings language typology emerged. Theproblem of the origin of language itself suffered an interesting fate: the prize offered by the Berlin Academy in 1771 for anessay on this subject attracted some 31 entries, and, despite Herder’s winning contribution (Abhandlung über den Ursprungder Sprache), continued to prompt lively discussion to the end of the century and beyond. That the Société de Linguistique deParis found it necessary to proscribe contributions on this subject as late as 1866 shows as clearly that popular interest in thesubject was still very much alive as that the academic mainstream despaired of ever finding a solution. But in the meantime an unexpected new element was introduced: the Sanskrit language. The question of language originwas first briefly diverted into the assumption that Sanskrit was the parent language, and then forgotten as energy went into thedetailed formal comparison of Sanskrit and cognate languages. A few scholars took advantage of the breadth of perspectiveafforded by the discovery of Sanskrit and still more exotic languages to formulate far-reaching hypotheses about the natureand role of language. Wilhelm von Humboldt, brother of the scientist and explorer Alexander and a friend of Goethe’s,viewed language as the organ of inner existence, the way to understanding—or manifesting—thoughts and feelings (Über dieVerschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts,1836). The human spirit manifests itself in different forms of civilisation and culture among different peoples, and also indifferent languages. Each is an attempt, an approximation, a contribution to the universal need to develop a people’sintellectual and spiritual powers and to unfold their own mode of relating to the world. Far from representing phenomenadirectly, each language articulates that speech community’s perception of the world around it from its own distinctive point ofview. Humboldt’s deep interest in the essence of individual differences between languages is found not so much in themainstream of theoretical linguistics in the twentieth century as in anthropological linguistics, initiated by the work of E.Sapirand B.L.Whorf, and in the work of German scholars from Leo Weisgerber on. But by the time Humboldt’s great work was published (posthumously) the universal aspect of language study was beingpushed aside by the newly emerging discipline of comparative philology. Although philologists of the stature of Jakob Grimm,Max Müller, H.Steinthal, and W.D.Whitney concerned themselves with problems like the ultimate origin of language, itsrelation to thought, and its position among the sciences, their writings on these subjects were eclipsed by the contemporaryenthusiasm for historical and comparative work. Thus it was that although the ideas taught by Ferdinand de Saussure in hiscelebrated lecture course at Geneva (Cours de linguistique générale, published posthumously on the basis of his students’lecture notes in 1916) were far from novel, and had been in circulation intermittently during the nineteenth century, in thechanged intellectual climate of the post-Great War world they struck the scholarly community as fresh, stimulating, and aboveall unfamiliar. The consequence was an over-rigid interpretation of ideas presented schematically in the Cours which hadonce been current in subtler and more diversified guises. Such, for instance, has been the case with the doctrine of l’arbitrairedu signe, the arbitrary nature of the relationship between the linguistic sign and what it denotes. Elevated into a dogma in mostbranches of linguistics, it contravenes the intuitive feeling of the native speaker (and the literary critic) for the affective valueof certain sounds and sound-groups, a fact recognised by von Humboldt (and by Plato long before). The linguistic sign,defined as the union between a concept (signifié) and its acoustic representation (signifiant), is yet another manifestation ofAristotle’s schema, but lacking the refinement of the level of percept. Saussure’s distinction between the synchronic and thediachronic approach to language was taken as a charter for the liberation of a synchronic descriptive structural linguistics fromhistorical linguistics, despite Saussure’s own awareness of the symbiotic relationship of the two temporal axes. Perhaps themost fruitful of Saussure’s insights has been the celebrated langue−parole dichotomy—langue that aspect of language whichis a system of signs existing in the speech community independent of the will of any individual, while parole denotes theparticular utterances of individ ...