ABSTRACT
The final part of the nineteenth century (the last thirty years) opened propitiously for linguistics, or at least for its historical-comparative branch. The successes of the discipline were universally acknowledged. Most and eventually all - German Universities taught the subject; a number of other European countries followed suit and the United States also began to play an important role (see above, p. 207ff.). Outside Germany the previous expansion was partly due to German scholars who had sought and found academic positions abroad but now there was a new generation of native scholars and the periphery began to influence the centre. We have already mentioned some of the relevant events. A traditional history of 'linguistic science in the nineteenth century' such as that of Pedersen ([1931] 1962) lists for the generations born from the 1830s to the 1850s a number of linguists who originated in countries other than Germany: Britain, Denmark, France, Italy, Russia, the Scandinavian countries, Switzerland, etc. Work on Romance, after Diez, is cultivated by French scholars such as Paul Meyer (1840-1927) or Gaston Paris (1839-1903), by Danes such as K. Nyrop (1858-1931), by Swiss authors such as J. Gillieron (1854-1926), by Italians such as Ascoli and Mussafia. The German Universities offer weighty contributions, but the archetypal German work, the real replacement for Diez's grammar and etymological dictionary, is due to W. Meyer-Liibke (1861-1936), who was a Swiss by birth and became professor at Vienna before moving to Bonn. We have seen already how cosmopolitan the work on phonetics was: Britain and France had an important role to play with, on the one hand, e.g. Alexander Melville Bell, Alexander Ellis and Henry Sweet, 1 and, on the other, Paul Passy (1859-1940), the initiator of the IPA transcription, and the abbe Pierre Rousselot (1846-1924), one of the founders of experimental phonetics. But there were also J. A. Lundell (1851-1940) in Norway, Otto Jespersen (1860-1946) in Denmark, etc. An experimental phonetics laboratory ('gabinetto di glottologia sperimentale') was founded by F. L. Pullé in the University of Pisa in 1890, one year earlier than the institution of an equivalent laboratory at the College de France (Bolelli 1965a). Even in the privileged field of Indo-European studies, non-German influence had begun to be felt: once again one may refer to the Italian Ascoli, but we should also consider the Russian F. F. Fortunatov (1848-1914) and the Belgian E. Tegner (1843— 1928) or the three great Danish scholars V. Thomsen (1842-1927), Karl Verner (1846-1896), Hermann Moller (1850-1923), or the somewhat younger Swiss scholars Jacob Wackernagel (1853-1938) and Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). Finally we cannot ignore a Sanskritist of the calibre of the American W. D. Whitney (see above, p. 207ff.).
