ABSTRACT
Strong parallels exist between techniques for mapping the earth and describing languages. Some of these parallels merely reflect the fact that advances in navigation and language study were informed by the paradigm changes that characterize the transition from medieval to modern learning. In both areas, authority and myth gave way to observation, recording, and analysis. However, I find other salient reasons for approaching language study from the model of terrestrial navigation. If, as I have already tried to argue, spatial ideas constantly informed linguistic thought, the technologies of mastering space can also be expected to show up in linguistic thought. This chapter will suggest that they do. In so suggesting I will use spatial metaphors self-consciously. That is, I will often bring metaphors of mapping and navigating to bear on the historical material, rather than rely more passively on the material to provide the metaphors I use to analyze it. My justification for appearing to impose my metaphors rather than eliciting them from the material goes as follows. Early moderns were not conscious of the solutions that later generations would offer for known problems of navigation and cartography. Yet later solutions, in retrospect, helped define the nature of the problems that early navigators faced. Because, as I will try to demonstrate,
mapping problems so strongly parallel the problems faced in linguistic inquiry, we are justified, if we are careful not to overreach, in interpreting the development of linguistic knowledge in terms of them. They help us tease out pertinent aspects of this history that we might otherwise miss.
