Brigitte Nerlich
University of Nottingham
My old book Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener has just come out as an ebook. It was first published in 1990 and has now been reissued in Routledge’s History of Linguistic Thought Series. That is a good occasion to look back at one of the book’s protagonists: Philipp Wegener (1848–1916). His work has a lot to offer to linguists, as well as computer scientists and people dealing with AI’s famous Large Language Models.
The following summary of his work is based on a chapter of the book devoted to Wegener, which I had also summarised in a 1988 contribution to the Bulletin of the Henry Sweet Society, a society then in its infancy and a haven for me as a budding historian of linguistics.
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