apologetics and linearity: arguments from the past
are far too often selectively cited to serve in presentday controversies; and far too often, too, the men of the past are judged by the answer to the question: what did they know or fail to know that we now hold to be true. There is always the peril of missing inconspicuous but centrally important shifts in terminology and of imputing irrelevant preconceptions to our predecessors. The continuity of our discipline is indeed a fact, but an exceedingly subtle one. The somewhat overwhelming truth is still that in order to understand the history of a field of learning one must understand the subject matter as well as the wider intellectual history of the time. One of the many necessary approaches to this difficult goal is neglected at the moment: intellectual biography of the type that steers clear of anecdote and human interest in the journalistic sense but instead goes into matters of outlook and training and also, insofar as possible, into the matter of personality in a more sophisticated sense. For this reason the two handsome volumes under review are a perfect godsend. Seventy-four scholars of the past, from Jones (d. 1794) to Edgerton (d. 1963) are represented, some with more than one piece. Many selections are obituaries written under the fresh impact of the subjects death. Others are more properly historical in their claim to detachment, written as they are from a later vantage point, if usually also in a commemorative context. Though imbued with the flavor of the graveyard (I, p. xii), the obituaries written by contemporaries are the more valuable. Many of the authors are indeed distinguished men. Their judgments can be most interesting, especially when the essay departs from the merely laudatory. [It may be apropos to note that nine names appear both as subjects and as authors. Another bit of idle statistics: in about the same space, the first volume accommodates 36 essays, the second, 54.Obituaries have become shorter and perhaps also less informative.] Mostly, however, one reads them for academic-biographic information: to learn (or be reminded) who attended the university with whom, who sided against whom in controversies too ephemeral to survive in print or sufficiently unpleasant to be repressed or distorted in self-testimony, but remembered and offered as background for some part of the record by a sensitive and usually sympathetic comrade-in-arms. Next to correspondence (of which there is, unfortunately, no overabundance) these sketches are our best source of information. Johannes Schmidts biographical paper on August Schleicher (I, pp. 37439.5)illustrates the value of such information as an antidote to the inescapable deceptiveness of autobiography, especially in the case of a highly creative personality like Schleichers. The strong influence on Schleicher of the classicist Ritschl continued beyond his student years. How plausible it is, therefore, to see in some of Schleichers ideas the reflex of early training in
of his own thinking was quite different, and he did himself the most formidable injustice by insisting, for all posterity as it were, on the importance of his quasi-Darwinistic outlook. For reasons of this kind the reader feels a little pang of disappointment a t not finding Hermann G. Grassmann, the mathematician, Sanskritist, and linguist, among the subjects, although a biographical appendix of sorts is published in his collected works. This is not to say, however, that it would be anything but foolish to find fault with Sebeoks selection, which is a masterpiece of both service and good taste. Anthropologists will be particularly interested in the items on Humboldt (two, by very eminent men, Alfred Dove and Heymann Steinthal), Bohtlingk (by Berthold Delbrtick), Reguly (by Josef PApay, rescued from a rather hard to get publication), Meinhof (one by Clement M. Doke, and another by Doke and G r a r d Paul Estrade), Boas (one by Murray B. Emeneau and one by Roman Jakobson), Uhlenbeck (by J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong), Finck (by Ernst Lewy), P. Wilhelm Schmidt (by Arnold Burgmann), Kroeber (by Dell Hymes), Sapir (by Carl F. Voegelin), and Whorf (by John B. Carroll). The printing is accurate and beautiful to the point of lavishness. The works usefulness, as proclaimed in the subtitle, a biographical source book for the history of western linguistics, 1746-1963, is as great as its attractiveness, even where we do not admire the necrologists judgment unreservedly. It is a very bright feather, indeed, in the cap of the editor, the editorial committee of the Studies, and the Indiana Press.
The Linguistic School of Prague: An Introduction to
its Theory and Practice. JOSEF VACHEK. (Indiana University Studies in the History and Theory of Linguistics.) Bloomington & London: Indiana University Press, 1966. 184 pp., 3 appendices, selected bibliography, index of names, index of subjects, notes. $6.00, 38s. Reviewed by E D WSTANKIEWICZ ~ University of Chicago The book under review is the third in a series of works written by Professor Vachek intended to present to a wider public the achievements of the Prague School of linguistics. The Sturm und Drang period of that school fell within the years 1926-1939, and its most important contributions are contained in the eight volumes of the Trauaux du Cerde LinguistiquedcPrague(1929-1939). As these volumes are not easily accessible and many of its articles were written in Slavic languages, the fame of that school has often rested more on secondhand information than on an intimate knowledge of its tenets and of its formulations of linguistic problems. Professor Vacheks former works, the Dictionnaire de 1 h ~ guistique de 1Ecolc de Prague (1960)and the Prague
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American Anlhropologisl
School Reader in Lingziisfics (1964), have made
available to the Western reader the terminology and the main body of Prague linguistic writings; this book is an attempt a t a synthesis and a critical evaluation. The book contains eight chapters, three appendices, a bibliography of the pertinent literature, and an index of names and subjects. The eight chapters present the various aspects of Prague linguistic theory that have determined the particular brand of structuralism that sets it apart from other structuralist schools, such as American descriptivism and Copenhagen glossematics. The longest and best chapter of the book is, predictably, the one devoted to phonology, which constituted the main contribution of the Prague School to modern linguistics. The other chapters include historical background, problems of morphonology and morphology, syntax, the Standard language and orthography, esthetics, and future prospectives. Professor Vachek traces the development of the concept of the phoneme from its early stage, when it was interpreted as a psychological entity, until the late 1930s when it was redefined by Jakobson as a bundle of distinctive features. He also shows how the many-sided study of phonology has led to an exploration of the various functions and styles of language. He particularly emphasizes the great contribution of Prague linguistics to questions of diachronic processes, which were misunderstood and largely neglected by Western structuralists (beginning with de Saussure). Vacheks comments on the whence and whither of historical change recapitulate the older Prague views, with the addition of some sociological interpretations of recent Prague vintage. On the whole, the discussion leaves some major issues unsolved. An excellent supplement to it is the reprinted article by B. Trnka (Appendix 111), one of the finest thinkers of the Prague Circle. Trnkas article contributes also to our better understanding of the intellectual climate that gave rise to the new developments in linguistics. The chapters on morphology and syntax are more modest in scope, reflecting in part the lesser interest of the Circle in the semantic levels of language. The narrowing of outlook is, however, also due in part to the authors lack of discrimination between the more important and seminal works, and the works that tried mechanically to transplant the notions of phonology to that of the higher, more complex levels. Thus there is no doubt that the morphological studies of Karcevski (on derivation and on the adverb) and of Jakobson (on the Russian verb and case-system), which are mentioned in passing, have contributed far more to a broadening of the structuralist horizon than the studies on semes and morphemes that the author discusses in detail. There can likewise he little doubt that the work of the Prague School on poetics and versilication was of greater import than its contributions to questions of Standard language and orthography, though the elaboration of the
[70,19681
latter testifies, as well, to the scope and breadth of
the linguistic interests of the Circle. What is most disappointing about Professor Vacheks book, however, is the tacit assumption that the so-called Prague