Linguistics 'ante litteram'

The present contribution aims to address some issues relating to the transmission and the organization of linguistic knowledge in a time when there was no such thing as an independent linguistic discipline yet. Franz Bopp (1791-1867) is generally credited with having institutionalized a new academic branch of scholarship, since the publication of his Über das Conjugationssystem in 1816 earned him the first chair of comparative linguistics at the University of Berlin five years later. ¹ Whereas the nineteenth-century interest in linguistics was chiefly limited to the study of the diachronic evolution and the genealogical kinship of languages (leaving aside some notable exceptions), ² twentieth-century linguistics mainly focused on general and synchronic linguistics. To a large extent, this major shift in perspective has been triggered by Ferdinand de Saussure’s (1857-1913) Cours de linguistique générale, published posthumously exactly one hundred years after Bopp’s Conjugationssystem (which may have been no coincidence). ³ In the nineteenth century, however, research questions that were focused on the history and relatedness of (mainly Indo-European) languages took centre stage in the new academic discipline. Nevertheless, the interest in such historical and comparative issues was in itself far from new. From the early Renaissance onwards, a number of fundamental questions about human languages had been asked: why do different peoples speak different languages? What reasons underlie some striking commonalities between some of these different languages? Was there originally only one language and is this language still extant? Why do languages unremittingly change? ⁴