Linguists choosing the wrong side: Jacob van Ginneken and other alleged Nazi collaborators

Posted on 7 August 2013 by beo — 4 Comments

Toon Van Hal
University of Leuven

Unlike the other posts to this blog, the present post is not intended as a contribution to learning. Its sole ambition is to open a discussion on a rather sensitive topic (which is not my own field of specialization). How do, or should, we deal today with linguists having chosen the ‘wrong’ side in the Second World War? The question came to my mind when I was reading Jac. van Ginneken under fire [“Jac. van Ginneken onder vuur”], the Dutch doctoral dissertation defended one year ago by Gerrold van der Stroom at the Free University of Amsterdam (Van der Stroom 2012). In English its subtitle reads “on contemporary and postwar criticism of the linguist J.J.A. Van Ginnekens S.J. (1877-1945)”. In the Interwar Period, Van Ginneken ‒ professor at the Dutch Catholic University of Nijmegen from its 1923 foundation onward ‒ was a visionary and unconventional linguist, being prominently present on the European scene. Not only was he a trained scholar in Indo-European linguistics, he also tried to join linguistics with psychology, sociology and genetics in a truly interdisciplinary way. In the last year of the War Van Ginneken died of a brain tumor, and his intellectual legacy (almost) died with him. During and after the War Van Ginneken’s reputation suffered from his alleged sympathy for the German occupiers. The very fact that Van Ginneken had shown a profound interest for the interconnection between linguistics and biology made him suspect, not to say ridiculous, in the eyes of a later generation of scholars. Van der Stroom, a former employee of the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdocumentatie (Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in English), argues in great detail that many of these accusations cannot be substantiated.

Tagged with: 20th century, history, Jacob van Ginneken, linguistics, Nazi ideology
Posted in 20th century, Article, History, Linguistics

Rethinking the history of the Aryan paradigm

Posted on 24 July 2013 by chutton2013 — 3 Comments

Christopher Hutton
University of Hong Kong

My involvement with this topic began when I observed that the notion of a superior ‘Aryan race’, which functions in the English-speaking world as a near-universal shorthand for Nazi ideology, has no clear counterpart in the actual theories of Nazi ideologues. The term arische Rasse (‘Aryan race’) is not to be found in Nazi-era sources; the term used is arisches Volk (‘Aryan people’). In fact both academics and officials in the Nazi state rejected categorically the idea that ‘Aryan’ could be used to designate a racial identity. While the term arisch had immense ideological power in the public sphere in Germany between 1933 and 1945, it belonged, as far as race theorists were concerned, to the study of language and culture (Hutton 2005). The use of the phrase ‘Aryan race’ in English language sources derives from translating Volk (‘people’) as ‘race’, and then reading into the translated term ‘race’ a form of bio-racial essentialism. While ‘race’ (Rasse) was indeed a central concept in Nazi Germany, its actual status, and relationship to the concept of Volk, was the subject of complex and contentious debate. Despite the ubiquity of the term, the history of the Aryan paradigm has yet to be written. The most comprehensive guide to the early textual history of the term ‘Aryan’ remains that produced by a Nazi scholar, Hans Siegert (1941/42), but over the past twenty-five years a series of detailed intellectual histories and themed volumes that touch on the Aryan question have been published.¹The issue here however is not simply the correcting of a misleading translation or the creation of a historical narrative, but the reconceptualization of the Aryan paradigm, and, as a corollary, the political history of linguistic theorizing.

Tagged with: Aryan, Germany, history of linguistics, Nazi ideology, race, Volk
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, Germany, History, Linguistics

Program July-October 2013

Posted on 19 July 2013 by The Editor — Leave a comment

[Program updated 30 July 2013]

24 July	Rethinking the history of the Aryan paradigm Christopher Hutton University of Hong Kong
31 July	Break
7 August	Linguists choosing the wrong side: Jacob van Ginneken and other alleged Nazi collaborators Toon Van Hal University of Leuven
14 August	Der Artikel ist keine ‘Wortart’! Zur synthetischen Grammatik von Sekiguchi Kennosuke Ezawa Ost-West-Gesellschaft für Sprach- und Kulturforschung, Berlin
21 August	Otto Neurath’s Isotype and his philosophy of language James McElvenny University of Sydney
28 August	Authenticity and the correction of errors in the context of language reclamation Rob Amery Kaurna Warra Pintyanthi and University of Adelaide
4 September	Historical Chinese phonology as a meeting ground for the Indian, the Chinese, and the Western linguistic tradition Lei Zhu Shanghai International Studies University
11 September	From inductivism to structuralism: the ‘method of residues’ goes to the field Michael Silverstein University of Chicago
18 September	No beetle? Wittgenstein’s ‘grammatical illusions’ and Dalabon emotion metaphors Maïa Ponsonnet Australian National University and Dynamique du Langage (CNRS/Université Lyon 2)
25 September	The social cognition of linguists Andrea Schalley Griffith University
2 October	Emile Benveniste et les langues amérindiennes Chloé Laplantine Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, Université Paris-Diderot

Tagged with: programs
Posted in Programs

Do linguists measure anything?

Posted on 17 July 2013 by nickriemer — 3 Comments

Nick Riemer
University of Sydney and Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques, Université Paris-Diderot

Few questions in linguistics can be as hoary, fundamental or, perhaps, as unsatisfactorily handled, as that of the discipline’s empirical status – a question typically presented as one of linguistics’ ‘scientificity’. Among the many issues needing attention from anyone who wants to make a serious epistemological effort to clarify the character of linguistic theory, one in particular has received strikingly little discussion: the presence (or nonpresence) in linguistics of measurement.

Measurement couldn’t be more central to canonical sciences: theories are characteristically formulated in mathematical terms, and contain hypotheses about quantified data, a situation which naturally presupposes the measurement of the base phenomena (see Kuhn 1961 for a fascinating explosion of ‘myths’ about measurement in physics). In linguistics – or, at least, in the core theoretical domains of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics – measurement comparable to that observed in the empirical sciences plays no obvious role. That, presumably, is the reason for the ambient silence about the topic. But could there be some more subtle respect in which theoretical linguistics does, after all, involve something analogous to measurement?

This question isn’t without interest, since it forms part of the comparatively neglected methodological side of the question of the scientificity of linguistics – taking ‘science’, of course, in its typical English sense, and not in the broader sense captured by German Wissenschaft. As everyone now knows, there’s no straightforward criterion of the ‘scientific’: just what qualifies something as a science, in fact, is – fortunately – a subject of debate (see the useful Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy entry). One thing, though, should be clear: it’s not enough for a discipline to count as a science that it simply have an empirical object. This, however, is typically the implicit grounds of linguists’ protestations about the scientificity of their discipline: languages are empirical objects, and the linguist studies them in the same way that other scientists study other empirical objects.

Tagged with: philosophy of linguistics, science, scientificity, scientism, semantics
Posted in Article, Linguistics, Philosophy, Semantics

Early writing and printing in the Philippines

Posted on 10 July 2013 by rebecafr — 10 Comments

Rebeca Ferndández Rodríguez
Universidade de Trás-os-Montes e Alto Douro

Printing and publishing began in the Philippines with the arrival of the Spanish in 1565. Encountering an enormous number of native languages, the Spaniards felt a pressing need to describe the languages most commonly spoken in the archipelago in order to communicate with the Filipinos. With the establishment of Spanish sovereignty over the Philippines, the Spanish Crown issued several contradictory laws regarding language. The missionaries were urged to learn the vernacular languages but were subsequently required to teach Spanish. For this reason, missionaries learnt the Philippine languages by writing vocabularies, grammars, and catechisms.

Philippine linguistic writing – grammars and vocabularies – is extensive and exhaustive. There was a pre-Hispanic writing system in the Philippines, baybayin, but it was used for personal communication and not for recording literature or history. For this reason missionaries had to start from the beginning. By describing the languages they contributed to their survival. In the last decades scholars have studied manuscripts and early editions of Tagalog, Bisaya and Ilocano texts and have been re-editing them. This is the case for Arte y reglas de la lengua tagala (1610) by Francisco Blancas de San José (1560–1614) edited by Quilis in 1997; Bocabulario de lengua bisaya, hiligueyna y Haraya de la isla de Panay y Sugbu y para las demas islas (1632) by Alonso de Méntrida (1559–1637) edited by García–Medall in 2004; and Arte de la lengua japona (1732), Tagalysmo elucidado (1742) and “Arte chínico” (1742) by Melchor Oyanguren de Santa Inés (1688–1747), edited by Zwartjes (2010). There is also an unpublished PhD dissertation about the Calepino ylocano (ca. 1797) of Pedro Vivar (1730–1771) and Andrés Carro (?–1806) by Fernández Rodríguez (2012).

Tagged with: 16th century, history, Philippines, printing, Spain, writing
Posted in 16th century, 17th century, 18th century, Article, History, Philippines

Historical and moral arguments for language reclamation

Posted on 26 June 2013 by Ghil'ad Zuckermann — 15 Comments

Ghil‘ad Zuckermann
University of Adelaide

Language is an archaeological vehicle, full of the remnants of dead and living pasts, lost and buried civilizations and technologies. The language we speak is a whole palimpsest of human effort and history.
Russell Hoban (children’s writer, 1925-2011 – cf. Haffenden 1985: 138)

Introduction

Linguicide (language killing) and glottophagy (language eating) have made Australia an unlucky country. These twin forces have been in operation in Australia since the early colonial period, when efforts were made to prevent Aboriginal people from continuing to speak their language, in order to ‘civilize’ them. Anthony Forster, a nineteenth-century financier and politician, gave voice to a colonial linguicide ideology, which was typical of much of the attitude towards Australian languages (Report on a public meeting of the South Australian Missionary Society in aid of the German Mission to the Aborigines, Southern Australian, 8 September 1843, p. 2, cf. Scrimgeour 2007: 116):

The natives would be sooner civilized if their language was extinct. The children taught would afterwards mix only with whites, where their own language would be of no use – the use of their language would preserve their prejudices and debasement, and their language was not sufficient to express the ideas of civilized life.

Even Governor of South Australia George Grey, who was relatively pro-Aboriginal, appeared to partially share this opinion and remarked in his journal that ‘the ruder languages disappear successively, and the tongue of England alone is heard around’ (Grey 1841: 200-201). What was seen as a ‘civilizing’ process was actually the traumatic death of various fascinating and multifaceted Aboriginal languages.

It is not surprising therefore that out of 250 known Aboriginal languages, today only 18 (7%) are alive and kicking, i.e. spoken natively by the community children. Blatant statements of linguistic imperialism such as the ones made by Forster and Grey now seem to be less frequent, but the processes they describe are nonetheless still active, let alone if one looks at the Stolen Generations between approximately 1909 and 1969.

There are approximately 7,000 languages currently spoken worldwide. 96% of the world’s population speaks 4% of the world’s languages, leaving the vast majority of tongues vulnerable to extinction and disempowering for their speakers. Linguistic diversity reflects many things beyond accidental historical splits. Languages are essential building blocks of community identity and authority. However, with globalization, homogenization and Coca-colonization there will be more and more groups added to the forlorn club of the powerless lost-heritage peoples. Language reclamation will become increasingly relevant as people seek to recover their cultural autonomy, empower their spiritual and intellectual sovereignty, and improve their wellbeing.

Revivalistics – including Revival Linguistics and Revivalomics – is a new interdisciplinary field of enquiry studying comparatively and systematically the universal constraints and global mechanisms on the one hand (see Zuckermann 2009), and particularistic peculiarities and cultural relativist idiosyncrasies on the other, apparent in linguistic revitalization attempts across various sociological backgrounds, all over the globe (Zuckermann & Walsh 2011).

The creation of ‘parts of speech’ for Chinese: ‘translingual practice’ across Graeco-Roman and Sinitic traditions

Posted on 12 June 2013 by Edward McDonald — 2 Comments

Edward McDonald
University of Sydney

The English term ‘parts of speech’ is actually a mistranslation of long standing of the Latin partēs oratiōnis, itself a translation of the Greek merē logou, in which the term oratiō / logos takes not its common meaning of ‘speech’ but rather the technical sense of ‘sentence’ (Halliday 1977/2003: 98). So the notion of ‘parts of speech’, which may seem to suggest that these ‘parts’ are natural classes somehow inherent to the language, should in fact be read ‘parts of the sentence’, in other words, constructs of language analysis. This confusion seems fitting as an epigraph to tracing the process of ‘translingual practice’ (Liu 1995) whereby this category came to be introduced from the Graeco-Roman tradition of linguistic scholarship to its Sinitic counterpart by a multilingual Chinese scholar just over a century ago. This notion allows us to understand the complexity of an achievement which cannot be reduced to ‘explaining change in terms of either foreign impact or indigenous evolution’ (Liu 1995: xix, emphasis added), but rather allows us to recognise the scholar, deeply versed in both Chinese and European scholarly traditions, strategically deploying concepts from both traditions in the service of his scholarly and political project.

The ‘responsible party’ in this case, Chinese diplomat and scholar Ma Jianzhong 馬建忠 (1845-1900), was educated not only in Chinese but in Latin and French at a French Catholic school in Shanghai. In 1876 he went to France to study international law, becoming the first Chinese to achieve a baccalauréat, followed by a diploma in law in 1879. After a professional career as a diplomat, Ma transferred his energies to the scholarly arena, devoting the last decade of his life to writing the first grammar of Chinese produced by a native scholar, 馬氏文通 Mashi Wentong [Mr Ma’s Compleat Grammar] (1898/1956).*

Tagged with: History of Chinese grammar, Ma Shi, Mashi Wentong
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, China, History, Linguistics, Syntax

Analyses du fonctionnement sémantico-référentiel du nom propre dans l’Inde ancienne

Posted on 5 June 2013 by emilieaussant — 4 Comments

Émilie Aussant
Laboratoire d’histoire des théories linguistiques (CNRS) – Université Paris Diderot

Introduction

La question du « sens » des noms propres a suscité, aussi bien en Occident qu’en Inde, de nombreuses réflexions. Si les débats ont longtemps concerné, en Occident, la logique et la philosophie – la linguistique n’y participant que de manière marginale – ce sont essentiellement les grammairiens (vaiyākaraṇa) et les dialecticiens (naiyāyika) qui, dans l’Inde ancienne, se sont emparés du problème. Les premiers ont majoritairement défendu l’idée selon laquelle les noms propres dénotent parce qu’ils connotent, alors que, parmi les seconds, c’est l’idée d’une dénotation directe, sans connotation, qui a été le plus souvent soutenue.

La présente contribution, qui se fonde sur une recherche publiée en 2009 sous le titre Le nom propre en Inde. Considérations sur le mécanisme référentiel (Aussant 2009), vise à donner un aperçu de ces deux types d’analyses. Bien que leur contexte d’émergence soit différent, elles s’élaborent toutes deux autour du concept de « cause d’application » (pravṛtti-nimitta), auquel la première section de cet article est consacrée. J’expliquerai, dans la deuxième section, en quoi consiste la première analyse (les noms propres dénotent parce qu’ils connotent) à travers la thèse de la propriété générique comme cause d’application des noms propres, la plus ancienne qui soit parvenue jusqu’à nous et la plus fréquemment évoquée. La troisième et dernière section de cette contribution sera consacrée au deuxième type d’analyse (les noms propres dénotent directement), analyse défendue par plusieurs dialecticiens et dont les fondements sont posés dès le VI^es.

Tagged with: history of grammar, history of semantics, India, Sanskrit, semantics
Posted in Article, History, India, Linguistics, Semantics

Theoretical linguistics and artificial languages

Posted on 29 May 2013 by Alan Reed Libert — 5 Comments

Alan Reed Libert
University of Newcastle, New South Wales

Mainstream theoretical linguists have generally ignored artificial languages, apparently considering them unworthy of attention. This is true not only of “fictional languages” such as Klingon, but also of “serious” languages such as Esperanto. Much of the linguistic work which has been done on artificial languages has been carried out by Esperantists and is not concerned with structural aspects of these languages (see e.g. Schubert, ed. 1989). Serious languages have usually been designed to facilitate international communication and so are generally intended to be optimally designed for easy learning and use. Chomskyan linguists assume that there is a human language faculty, which sets limits on a possible human language. If this is the case, one might think that there would be limits even on languages which have been consciously created — unless one were trying to be perverse, which one presumably would not do in creating a language for international communication — or at least there would be limits on a usable artificial language.

The strangest, and perhaps the most interesting, artificial languages are the a priori languages, that is, those (supposedly) designed from scratch without reference to existing languages. These will seem exotic for various reasons, one being the total unfamiliarity of most of the vocabulary to speakers of any natural language. This is in contrast to another main type of artificial languages, a posteriori languages, which are based on one or more natural languages. Still other languages are called mixed languages, as they contain substantial material of both the a priori and a posteriori types (this way of classifying artificial languages has long been used, e.g. by Couturat and Leau 1903). Esperanto, the best known and most successful artificial language, is of the a posteriori type, and much of Esperanto will be familiar to someone who knows several major European languages (for a recent grammar of Esperanto in English, see Gledhill 2000). Volapük, a mixed language, was the most successful artificial language before Esperanto (see e.g. Post 1890 for more information on it).

By looking at artificial languages, in particular at the a priori ones, we may be able to explore the limits of language universals: perhaps universals will constrain even language creation. In fact, there may not be any truly a priori artificial languages, since we cannot create — or at least cannot fluently use — a language which lacks properties that natural languages must have.

The notion of stereotype in language study

Posted on 22 May 2013 by Elena L. Vilinbakhova — 5 Comments

Elena L. Vilinbakhova
St. Petersburg State University

1. Introduction

Originally, the word stereotype derives from two Ancient Greek roots: στερεός ‘solid’ and τύπος ‘impression’. It was first used by the French printer Firmin Didot in 1796 as a typographical term. Later, it became a part of everyday language (in the beginning, it was used mostly in the form of an adjective stéréotypé ‘stereotyped’) to describe repetitive situations that lacked originality or spontaneity.

In 1922, it was introduced into the social, cultural and psychological studies by the American writer Walter Lippmann in his book “Public Opinion”. He saw stereotypes as pictures in our heads which simplify reality: “[stereotypes] may not be a complete picture of the world, but they are a picture of a possible world to which we are adapted” (Ibid.).

Nowadays, the notion of stereotype is widely used in different areas, and even in linguistics, there are two major traditions of understanding it. The first approach defines stereotype as a fixed form, fixed expression, or even fixed text. According to the second approach, stereotype is seen as a fixed content, a fixed mental image of a person, an object or an event. Both definitions of stereotype share the same characteristic of stability, but it is either the stability of form or the stability of content (сf. the terms formal vs. semantic stereotype (Bartmiński 2005), Sprachstereotype ‘stereotype of speech’ vs. Denkstereotype ‘stereotype of thought’ (Gülich 1978), stéréotype de langue ‘stereotype of language’ vs. stéréotype de pensée ‘stereotype of thought’ (Schapira 1999), etc. My focus here will be on semantic, rather then formal, stereotypes.

Tagged with: Hilary Putnam, linguistics, prototype, semantics, stereotype
Posted in Article, Linguistics, Semantics

Linguists choosing the wrong side: Jacob van Ginneken and other alleged Nazi collaborators

Rethinking the history of the Aryan paradigm

Program July-October 2013

Do linguists measure anything?

Early writing and printing in the Philippines

Historical and moral arguments for language reclamation

Introduction

The creation of ‘parts of speech’ for Chinese: ‘translingual practice’ across Graeco-Roman and Sinitic traditions

Analyses du fonctionnement sémantico-référentiel du nom propre dans l’Inde ancienne

Introduction

Theoretical linguistics and artificial languages

The notion of stereotype in language study

1. Introduction

Upcoming events

Posts

Follow