Interview conducted in Lyon, on March 10th, 2021 by Chloé Laplantine.
Film directed by Emilie Aussant, Chloé Laplantine and Rafaello Pisu.
Translation by Andrew Eastman.
Music from Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Les Indes galantes (interpreted by Les Arts Florissants, at the Philarmonie de Paris).
The text of the interview has been edited in a bilingual version French / English, available here.
Chloé Laplantine:
Hello, Sylvain, and thank you for agreeing to answer my questions.
The purpose of this interview is to introduce your work, to look back on your career, your books, to highlight the issues and the fields of investigation you have ventured into and the role you have played in the organization of a network in the history of linguistic ideas.
Can you tell us a little about your training and about how you first became interested in language-related issues?
Sylvain Auroux:
My background is very simple, I did preparatory classes and I specialized in philosophy and I also studied linguistics, because my girlfriend happened to be a linguist.
Why did I become interested in language? First of all, language was the theme of the entrance exam in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure. I started very early on, and very early on I followed the advice of Desanti, my mentor in philosophy, who told us that one could only speak about a discipline if one was well-versed in it.
So I studied linguistics, but with the aim of elaborating a reflection on the discipline, not with the aim of describing unknown languages. So what led me to get interested in the history of linguistic ideas? At the time, there was a kind of koiné even among people who were studying history, I would even say a fortiori among those who were doing history, and which consisted in saying that there were epistemological ruptures, which were a bit like changes of gestalt, and that finally linguistics was born with Ferdinand de Saussure; this was an epistemological rupture, there was a before and an after. The before was stammerings, after came science. It is a thesis that has always seemed to me to be completely mistaken, and due simply to the ignorance of the people who propounded it. Consequently, I tackled this question from two points of view, from the point of view of a philosopher who thought that this history of epistemological ruptures was completely overrated, and when I reread today Bachelard’s texts on the question I think that it was even more overrated than I thought at the time, and secondly, because it seemed to me impossible that the very substantial work of the Greek grammarians, for example, could have been thought to lie outside of science, while some measly lecturer at the Sorbonne was developing the royal road to the knowledge of language. So I started to work on this question and as I have a temperament that compels me to organize things, I got a lot of people involved and all that really did give us a rather advanced understanding of how linguistic knowledge developed—and it is pretty clear that this is one of the oldest disciplines in the history of humanity. So that’s about it. I was a good traditional philosopher, and even taught philosophy in high school before joining the CNRS in the «language sciences» section. That is to say, I was a philosopher of science too. The idea is that we must try to analyze the processes by which we build knowledge. How they are stabilized, by what protocols they are verified, and become solidified in what we call a science. And I have always maintained that the sciences of language were sciences in their own right and that it was quite superficial to try to explain that they were born recently.
Chloé Laplantine:
Could you tell us a little more about Jean-Toussaint Desanti?
Sylvain Auroux:
Jean Toussaint-Desanti. A former student of the rue d’Ulm, therefore a student of Cavaillès, he was a whole tradition of French epistemology all by himself; a member of the Communist Party when he was still a student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure, who was for a time almost on the central committee, and who left the party on tiptoe in 1956 in view of events that are well known. But—how shall I put it—he was a rather formidable person. When he came to give a lecture. We had, for example, certain texts of Aristotle on the program for the agrégation. He would come with his Greek text and nothing else, and then he would give us the commentary just like that. He was a philosopher who was very, very interested in ancient philosophy, essentially Aristotle, and in the philosophy of mathematics, specializing in the birth of certain theories of functions in the 19th century. At the same time, he had a global idea of what philosophy was, not as a major discipline as it was believed to be at the time, but as a kind of secondary discourse that, on the basis of scientific knowledge, elaborates problems of questioning, of constructions, of general thesis. He was a very fine public speaker and was interested in his students. And that’s what drew me in, because I was very bored in philosophy classes, especially at Nanterre where the students from Saint-Cloud went. It was pretty mediocre overall. The Sorbonne was not much better, but Desanti made me read things, notably Husserl of course, but especially Aristotle who remained for us the philosopher. Basically, Plato for us is only a pre-Aristotelian. I believe that this is where my desire to understand how knowledge functions came from, and not by introspection as the philosophers would have it, in particular the later phenomenologists, but by concrete study of the processes by which knowledge is constructed in a society with institutions, etc. This is more or less what guided me in my work and what makes my epistemological style specific.
Chloé Laplantine:
How did you come to work on the «grammar» and «language» articles in the Encyclopedia? What were you interested in finding out?
Sylvain Auroux:
You have to go back to the mindset of the time. We are at the end of the 1970s and we were the disciples of Foucault. I recall that Les mots et les choses [The Order of Things] was published in 1966. Well, it’s full of mistakes, but it was, I would say, the work which people like me started out from. And what was in Foucault ? The idea of the epistemé ; that is to say, the idea that there was a constitution of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields specific to an era. And so, with a few friends, we said to ourselves that we would study all the fields of an era. I specialized in language. There were others who did economics, mathematics, and so on. And we were a bit lazy, we thought that basically the Encyclopedia would offer a faithful representation of these disciplinary fields of an era. And instead of scattering our efforts in the study of various works, we were going to take the different fields treated by the Encyclopedia and see how things were articulated, and I was assigned language. And as is often the case in, I would say, collective endeavors, that was all that resulted from our grand project—my edition of the «language» and «grammar» articles of the Encyclopedia.
Chloé Laplantine:
Could you tell us about your first book, La sémiotique des encyclopédistes?
Sylvain Auroux:
It’s my post-graduate thesis which I wrote at the same time as I was preparing the Agrégation. The Agrégation is an absolutely unbearable competitive exam. And so you get bored, you need to find something else to do. And so it was published in 1972, in a revised version in 1979. But it’s the book I’m most attached to. Because it was the first time that I formulated a certain number of theses on the consistency of fields of knowledge, which I worked on a lot in the introduction, even if it didn’t receive the attention that I would have thought it might. Because, I would say, it was the first time that I showed the coherence of a field of knowledge in its constitution, its functioning, its progress, its theses, etc. And I think that it was indeed for me a formative work. Well, I’m not going to say that the theses it develops are more important than those I have developed in other works. It’s simply that in an intellectual history, the first book that you write and then publish directly with Payot is something that counts.
Chloé Laplantine:
Was it an adventurous work at the time?
Sylvain Auroux:
Without a doubt, because on the one hand, it was indeed something that had its factual source in Foucault, and if Foucault hadn’t written Les mots et les choses, I think that the whole of the material he was dealing with would not have attracted our attention. But on the other hand, once this attention was drawn, it soon became clear to us that he had read the whole thing very quickly and often did not go beyond the prefaces. I am very critical of Foucault, of this Foucault. The later Foucault, the man of prisons, etc., the man of the analysis of power and knowledge, of the relationship between knowledge and power, is compelling. I think that Les mots et les choses, is—well—an essay by an ambitious undergraduate, but it made me want to work on these questions.
Chloé Laplantine:
Are there any encounters or books that have had a decisive influence on your thinking?
Sylvain Auroux:
There was Foucault, as I was saying, but as far as philosophy is concerned, I studied at a time when we were very ill at ease. In France, Husserl at best and a Heidegger-vulgate at worst reigned. It was pretty awful. So people like me escaped by reading English-language philosophers, by doing logic, by doing maths, by finding that this philosophy that was endlessly scratching its head over consciousness had nothing interesting to offer the world. And so that’s how I came to the idea of analyzing the concrete functioning of the sciences in order to have a theory of knowledge. So the language sciences were there. It was also a period of enormous development and cultural impact for the language sciences. It was a time when some did not hesitate to consider that linguistics was a pilot science, without having any idea of the Greek underpinnings of our linguistic knowledge. For them, three sentences that they remembered from Saussure were enough to make up a science, very good for publicity, lectures, and articles in Le Nouvel Obs.
Chloé Laplantine:
Could you tell us something about Antoine Culioli?
Sylvain Auroux:
Culioli. I was not strictly speaking a student of Culioli, since I was at Paris 5. So I am a student of old Martinet, of the structuralist tradition, whereas Culioli was officiating at Paris 7, but actually came from English linguistics. He was an English teacher at first. And then I had many friends at Paris 7. I became closer to Culioli. I often had discussions with him. He was also very interested both in linguistic theories and, how should I say, in philosophy. And I would add that it was he who advised me to build a team of researchers in the history of linguistics, and it was even he who gave us the title «history of linguistic theories» because he thought that «history of the language sciences» was too vague and too flat. So we owe a lot to Culioli, who was on the one hand a remarkable expert linguist, but also someone with an extremely open mind, extremely theoretical, extremely curious, so curious that he did not take the time to write. That’s the problem. But yes, Culioli, I would say that in linguistics he was probably the one who brought me the most. I don’t want to say that my studies with Martinet didn’t bring me anything. They taught me the rudiments of phonology, the rudiments of the structural analysis of an unknown language. But I got ideas from Culioli that resonated with me, for example the idea that what is at work in language is operations. This is extremely fundamental because language has always been represented as something flat, as in some way pieces that fit together. And Culioli had the idea that the utterance, in the end, was only a result, that behind it there was a process. In this process what was normalized and regular were the operations. And that I find to be an extremely powerful idea. This is one of the things that Culioli brought to us, besides the fact that one day he said, «you set up a research group in the history of linguistic theories, I will give you an office and you will have the right to use the linguistic research department’s photocopier.” And that’s enormous. We wouldn’t be here otherwise.
Chloé Laplantine:
Could you tell us something about the work being done in linguistics when you started out. Did you ever make a description of a language?
Sylvain Auroux:
Well, obviously, I did linguistics, I did a complete study of linguistics. So I did exercises. Sometimes I worked in groups that were describing languages, particularly American Indian languages, but that’s not what interested me. What interested me was to know how one could build knowledge on the fact that man speaks. Because I quickly understood that grammars were not simply knowledge, they were tools. Tools working to normalize the spaces of communication, to transmit languages, to provide techniques for apprehending texts, etc. And so yes, it fascinated me to see that knowledge could be built on this, and what the limits of this knowledge were. We must not forget that at the time, we went so far as to think that generative grammar was going to tell us the alpha and omega of the essence of language. So that’s what was important: this idea of going through the mediation of a constructed knowledge in order to see how its object worked. It may seem a bit twisted and obvious as an approach, but I don’t believe in immediate contact with things.
Chloé Laplantine:
I’d like to come back to three of your books: La logique des idées, La révolution technologique de la grammatisation, et La raison, le langage et les norms. They were published in close succession, yet seem to deal with quite distinct problems. What do they have in common?
Sylvain Auroux:
What they have in common, finally, is the idea of seeing the nature of language through the scientific discourses it has generated. In La logique des idées, what I am trying to show is that, basically, from the 17th century onwards, we had the elements of a new conception of the functioning of thought, what I have called «the logic of ideas», which had been totally obscured because—not without reason—it was considered that from a logical point of view it was rather weak compared to what was done in the 19th century. This is not quite so true as all that, and moreover for a historian of science like me nothing comes from nothing. I was one of the first to consider that the epistemological ruptures in question were a bit like the equivalent in the history of science of spontaneous generation in biology, and everyone knows what to think of spontaneous generation. So there you have it, to find a coherence and a force in the classical texts that were considered rather disorganized and to try to show that there was a place for it in the history of logical thought, notably because there were inventions. I think that for example the neutral element, that is to say something which was fundamental for calculation in Boolean logic, is something that was brought to light in the classical age. So, if you like, I have this idea that there are ruptures, there are moments when the fields reorganize themselves. But I am an atomist, I am a true materialist, that is to say that there are cores of rationality that persist during these reorganizations even though they are affected by them, and this is what we must follow when we do the history of science.
Chloé Laplantine:
One of the absolutely original things that you brought to the history and epistemology of the language sciences was the opening up of research into non-Western linguistic traditions and ancient periods.At the time, was this a reaction to an overly limited conception of linguistics, and what new questions did this interest in the diversity of linguistic traditions bring?
Sylvain Auroux:
Yes, well, it was something that was absolutely not, how shall I say, conceivable. There were people who were interested in what had been said about language in China, or even in something intellectually closer to us, like India, but no one thought that it belonged to the history of science. And from that point of view, I was marked by two questions. First, we were shown that there was a kind of rationality in scientific development, that in some way what was invented came at the right time and could not have not been. I came to think that there is contingency in the history of the sciences, and in particular I was interested in their development. I never really fully accepted the triumphant discourse of the miraculous birth of universal scientific thought in the Greek world, and all that lies behind it, and I would add all that ends up in German philosophy, in Heidegger, and so on—the idea was unbearable to me. And I was interested in seeing how things went on elsewhere. And after all, the Chinese have a way of thinking about language, it can’t be called philosophy, rigorously speaking, but that does not matter. They have an abstract way of thinking, they have built knowledge about language, they have built linguistic instruments. I don’t see why it would be less interesting than the grammar of Dionysius Thrax, which is 20 pages long and quite summary. That’s a bit of what I got into, and I managed to find friends who worked in various disciplines, but who were generally scholars. For example, a sinologist knew a little bit about what was going on in terms of language in the history of Chinese thought, but he didn’t connect that to what could be a kind of universal history of linguistic knowledge. And that’s where I got them to work together and try to understand what was common, what was different; what was contingent. And so it was very exciting for me and a great discovery. And in the end it didn’t go so badly. In a way, nobody protested. It didn’t go so well either, because it didn’t make an impression. You never have people saying: « Oh yes, in Chinese linguistic theories, there is no theory of the verb, there is no this, there is no that.” No one is doing something that I’ve been interested in, that I’ve tried to promote with rather mixed success, which is comparative epistemology. The idea that knowledge can develop from different grounds and according to a different historical process. This is something that is not accepted. We are in the most complete universalism. At one point, I was even talking with historians of mathematics, such as my friend Karine Chemla, who is a specialist in Chinese mathematics, and we can see that the history of Chinese mathematics is not the history of Western mathematics, and that there is something to be done, to be studied, to be compared, and from there even to reflect upon what the human mind and knowledge are. This is what guides me in the diversity of cultural approaches to language.
Chloé Laplantine:
What got you interested in the grammars of American Indian languages?
Sylvain Auroux:
Why was I interested in the grammars of American Indian languages? Because I had a very close friend, Francesco Queixalos, whose profession it was. He was, like me, a student of Bernard Pottier. And I was fascinated because I was reading grammars of Amerindian languages or other languages dating from the 17th century which explained, for example, that in such-and-such a language there is no verb, there is no article, there is not this, there is not that, and I wanted to see concretely how it worked. And so I said to myself that the simplest thing, following the method of my mentor Desanti, was to go and see, and we even published a grammar of an Amerindian language, the only one that was done by French people. So I could very well have taken up comparative grammar and tried to study this or that aspect of the evolution of this or that consonantal group, but it was still more fun to study Amerindian grammars. And then the people who did that were more easy-going, were more open to diversity. That’s all. And so I did in fact retain the approach. And I would add that during my studies in linguistic, a large part of the general linguistics certificate consisted in teaching us what we should do if we came in contact with an unknown language. How to do the phonology of the language, how to grasp the basic grammatical elements, etc. That was part of the training. It was a reaction against the old linguists who were doing comparative grammar. So I liked the Native American grammars, besides the fact that the people who did that were remarkable people.
Chloé Laplantine:
It seems to me that what distinguishes your work from that of other researchers, what you bring, is a real theory of history, that is to say we have the feeling when reading some writers that they are relating facts, that history is understood to be linear and unequivocal, whereas in your way of presenting things, there are for example horizons of projection and retrospection, which make history somewhat more complex.
Sylvain Auroux:
Our achievement and our trademark was to produce a history with theoretical points of view, to demonstrate that raw facts don’t exist. By the way, this is the French historiographical tradition, including the philosophy of general history. Consequently, those who set out to tell us what some little grammar was, or string together history like that, are working in the anecdotal. We must have a look at their bibliographies to see if there is anything we don’t know about, but the value of their articles really doesn’t go beyond that. So what we must maintain is this theoretical point of view, which means that for us, history is not about a mind that is a blank slate encountering facts which exist by themselves. History is the construction of hypotheses about the functioning of a domain of reality, which in this case is the knowledge of linguistic phenomena. I believe that’s what we must carry on with, because otherwise we will fall back again into the anecdotal, which simply means we will not be a discipline anymore. Well then, what deserves to be studied? I believe we should direct our interests towards the history of the formalisation of the language sciences, since, I would say, the 1930s until today when… I think this formalisation has less importance today than it used to have back in 1990–2000, when generative grammar was still being developed. Why? Because we realize that it’s never anything but a particular form of exposition, a language. And from this point of view, when one describes something, one can always choose one’s own language. Sometimes, I think to myself: in the end, what messed up formalisation, the mathematical study of language so to speak, which gave rise to the rest, to new mathematical objects. The theory of formal languages, arose out of grammatical speculation, just as, I would say, integral calculus arose out of classical physics. So there’s no reason to be ashamed of the relation between linguistics and mathematics. But I have the feeling that the more we advance, the less it matters. Currently, I can’t think of anyone who would take pleasure in saying, ‘’I’ve formalised language’’. That’s obvious.
Chloé Laplantine:
Is that something that really matters to you, not to put up a wall between the humanities and the natural sciences?
Sylvain Auroux:
Of course, I am completely against the idea putting up a wall between them, and in particular because what lies behind it is an idea about the humanities that doesn’t satisfy me. For me the humanities are not about erudition or about emotional outpourings. They are a precise form of knowledge—philology, the establishment of facts, etc. There is a common discipline uniting them, and I deeply believe in an intellectual unity of the mind. Whether you study, I don’t know, the evolution of classical Sanskrit, or you study black holes, there are not so many ways to do it, it’s always the same mind. This is a powerful idea, somewhat idealistic maybe, but tempered by the idea that behind this unity of the mind, there is diversity, because mind alone is not enough, it only represents a small fraction of all knowledge, since for me, the environment is involved in knowledge. It is this environment that decides what we build, that decides what types of knowledge we have.
Chloé Laplantine:
The third volume of Histoire des idées linguistiques ends chronologically around 1920. Why didn’t you go further, and if a fourth volume were to exist, what would it have been about?
Sylvain Auroux:
There will be a fourth volume one day, we can be sure of that! Well now, what form will it take? If I knew, I would have done it. Then why did we stop around the 1920s? Because it seems to me that there was a break, I stopped right before the intellectual triumph of structuralism. Because in the cultural context back in those days, it was very difficult to talk about structuralism with our historians’ methods. We were going against almost everything that was being said, how with structuralism, science was born, and this, and that, and there were still too many people involved in linguistics who were taking this approach; it would have been an epic battle, and I think not a very interesting one. So now, I think we could go further. I think we can now go with normal historians’ methods all the way up to Chomsky, since that is over now, too. But I have remained faithful to a remark made by Hegel, ‘’The Owl of Minerva takes flight only when dusk begins to gather”. When one is doing historians’ work, one only comes afterwards.
Chloé Laplantine:
With the three volumes of Histoire des Idées Linguistiques, we see that you managed to organize an international network of researchers, working on epistemological questions, on various linguistic traditions and on various periods as well. These volumes resulted in great part from all you’ve done to organize research, especially the Histoire des Théories Linguistiques laboratory, the Société d’histoire et d’épistémologie des sciences du langage, and the journal Histoire Épistémologie Langage. What future do you see now for research in this field? Are there, in your view, mistakes to avoid, dead ends, or projects which according to you have yet to be undertaken?
Sylvain Auroux:
Well, let’s start with the beginning of your question about the organisational aspect, shall we? This is very dear to me, because of my materialist conception of what science is. Science is not something being done inside someone’s head. It is something that’s being done by means of human interactions, through the construction of institutions. I’ve always thought that the creation of journals, of scholarly societies, of meetings among scholars, was an essential part of the creation of science. Consequently, when I wanted us to work on the history of the language sciences, precisely to get another idea of what linguistics was, it appeared obvious to me that it could not be done all alone, all by myself. You know, I truly believe in research, I believe in the institutional side of research, I believe in the university, I don’t believe in the lone genius inventing something all by himself. So that’s why I worked to set up a journal, a scholarly society, to hold congresses, and to bring together people who were doing this all around the world. Contacts were made through trips, through congresses, it didn’t come right away. Those people came forward. A particular milieu was created, and I would add that we need to create vulgates in those milieus, and the history of linguistic ideas is somewhat like that. We French historians and epistemologists had a fairly consistent and coherent idea of what the whole represented, and it was expressed in the three volumes of the Histoire des idées linguistiques, to which I think there were 80 contributors. So it’s quite diversified, and at the same time, it shows that behind this diversification, there was a certain core of rationality coming together. And what is still to be done in the history of linguistic theories? I think we will need to do more comparative history. It’s true that it stands as a horizon for everybody who has read the three books of the Histoire des idées linguistiques that there are other traditions around the world that built up knowledge about language, in other contexts and circumstances, with other concepts, etc. But until now, we haven’t asked questions such as: ‘’well now, what could possibly differentiate, I don’t know, let’s say in the fifteenth century, Western knowledge about language from Chinese or Japanese knowledge, or even Indian knowledge?’’ I mention the fifteenth century because it seems to me that the great break in the history of the language sciences, and what precisely set the West wholly apart, was the fact of apprehending all the languages of the world from the point of view of one single linguistic tradition. It is quite striking, these were indeed what was called ‘’the great discoveries’’, but we had grammars to study the languages, to give instruments to missionnaries, to voyagers, etc. On this particular point, Western intellectual history is completely different. Imagine, though, you tell me that in China there is a great variety of languages. I am not even sure that there are many people who speak Mandarin. No one has ever been interested in that. We know that there were a few written documents to help ambassadors, but no, and it is the same for India. So in general, when a linguistic tradition is being built up, and for reasons we haven’t understood very well yet, it is self-centered on the vernacular that people manipulate. It is somewhat surprising to see that the technical need to communicate with other peoples, etc., is not very important, we now think, in the history of the birth of grammatical traditions. What matters in the history of grammatical traditions is the relation with a text, with literature, and it is only in the West, starting with the great discoveries, the conquests, etc., that grammars of all the world’s languages start to be made. But perhaps we also know less about the details of the Chinese grammatical tradition, and that there were a lot of small manuals.
Chloé Laplantine:
What about things we should avoid: are there ways of doing the history of linguistic theories that seem to you unfruitful, are there poorly formulated questions? How do you see it?
Sylvain Auroux:
What must be avoided is what I call historiography. That is to say people narrating their own personal intellectual adventure. This is not history. What must be avoided, to some extent, are amateurs coming upon a grammar and saying, ‘’Oh my, that’s awesome, don’t you think? In the 17th century, there was a grammar describing this language very well.” Of course, people were describing languages very well. They were good technicians. So we must carry on working with protocols, with tools, and how should I say, and some day we will have to take up the period of structuralism. Truly, it was quite something, a time when linguistics exploded. Based on what people of my generation know, it was not that rich intellectually – well, that will have to be verified – and especially empirically, it is to this period that we owe descriptions of hundreds of languages. So clearly, there’s work to be done here, and it will have to be evaluated whether formalisation in the field of the language sciences really does bring anything new or not. I tend to consider, because I am also an historian of logic, that formalisation has been present from the beginning. A grammar puts things in a certain form, and even if it does not use techniques of the same order as mathematical writing, form is already there. That being said, we should look at what the concept of recursivity is worth, when applied to everyday language. I understand perfectly well what it means when we want to build numerical sequences, or when we are dealing with artificial languages where sentences can be infinite, but it seemed to me that an axiom we should put forward when talking about our language is that it is designed for dialogue, and consequently, it must be finite, and that is what is characteristic about it. It seems to me we should study it like that. But, these are just ideas… I was saying earlier on that one should be sceptical when retired people retrace the history of their discipline, which means one should take my view with a grain of salt. That’s all.
(Translation : Andrew Eastman)
Bibliography
Sylvain Auroux. 1973. L’Encyclopédie : ‘grammaire’ et ‘langue’ au XVIIIe siècle. Paris : Mame.
— 1979. La Sémiotique des Encyclopédistes. Essai d’Epistémologie historique des sciences du langage. Paris : Payot.
— 1989. Histoire des idées linguistiques. t. I : La Naissance des Métalangages en Orient et en Occident. Liège : Mardaga.
— 1991. Histoire des idées linguistiques. t. II : Le développement de la grammaire occidentale. Liège : Mardaga.
— 1993. La logique des Idées. Montréal : Bellarmin & Paris, Vrin. [Nouvelle édition revue, avec une postface inédite en 2008. PDF disponible ici].
— 1994. La révolution technologique de la grammatisation. Liège : Mardaga.
— 1998. La raison, le langage et les normes. Paris : Presses Universitaires de France.
— 1998. Histoire des idées linguistiques, t. III : L’hégémonie du comparatisme. Liège : Mardaga.
— et Queixalos Francisco. 1985. Pour une histoire de la linguistique amérindienne en France. Paris : Association d’Ethnolinguistique Amérindienne.
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 
Fascinating. Thank you!