Camiel Hamans
University of Amsterdam/Adam Mickiewicz University Poznań
27 June 1668, the Amsterdam prosecutor demanded a remarkable punishment: the accused should be displayed on the scaffold, his right thumb should be cut off, his tongue should be pierced with a glowing poker, his books and all his writings should be burned, all his property should be confiscated and he himself should be imprisoned for thirty years. The court, made up of the mayors of the city of Amsterdam, and the public gathered in one of the torture chambers of Amsterdam’s town hall, now the royal palace on Dam Square, must have been shocked. After all, the accused was not a mass murderer, thief, or otherwise known criminal, but an esteemed intellectual, with two doctorates from Leiden University, in both law and medicine, and someone who had friends in the College of Mayors. Moreover, his crime involved a book. Luckily, when the sentence fell, it was only ten years in prison, a huge fine and subsequently ten years in exile. In the end, he served only one of these ten years in captivity. He passed away in prison in the early days of October 1669.
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For more than 30 years, from 1949 till 1982, the two influential linguists Roman Jakobson (1896-1982) and Eli Fischer-Jørgensen (1911-2010) regularly exchanged letters. Now, almost 40 years after the last letter of the correspondence was signed, The Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters is publishing the entire collection of preserved letters in which we are introduced to two strong personalities: the Russian born linguist Roman Jakobson and the Danish phonetician and general linguist Eli Fischer-Jørgensen, both members of the Royal Academy, Eli being the first ever Danish woman elected a member. 
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 