History of Linguistics 1999 (review)

This volume contains a selection of twenty-five papers given at the Eighth International Conference on the History of Language Sciences, a conference that reunites, every three years, an important part of the research community active in the field of the history of linguistics. The conference was last held at the École Normale Supérieure at Fontenay-aux-Roses, near Paris, in September 1999. Despite its English title, the volume contains only nine articles in English; the remaining are in French and without an English abstract. The topics range from old Latin works, through comparative studies of medieval linguistic production, up to post-war twentieth-century linguistics. Studies on non-European traditions remain rare in the volume, but the book contains two papers on indigenous languages in Canada and in Mexico, an article on the linguistic situation in Brazil during the eighteenth century, a contribution that deals with the problem of Arabic diglossia, and an analysis of the early eighteenth-century Georgian dictionary by Sulkhan-Saba Orbeliani. The volume also contains an article about the Semitic component of Yiddish.

A couple of contributions pay attention to exceptional and, in some cases, less-known figures of the history of linguistics, such as John Scottus Eriugena, Alexandre de Villedieu, Évrard de Béthune, Jan Amos Comenius, Francisco Pimentel, Johann Werner Meiner, John Horne Tooke, Michel Bréal, Johan Storm, Alexander Potebnia, and others.

A particular emphasis is put on the history of foreign language teaching. One article treats specialized dictionaries for learning Spanish in sixteenth-century Europe, another analyzes the textbooks for the learning of vernacular languages in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries, and a third discusses the role of school grammar in nineteenth-century Germany. One paper compares the sentence distinction in several seventeenth-century grammars, and another comparative contribution discusses the treatment of verb construction in Latin humanist grammar.

Some contributions give new information about the history of linguistics in the former East-European countries during the Soviet era, like the article on Romanian post-war approaches to phonology. An interesting article describes the development of the notion of empiricism in the history of linguistics. The question of terminology appears in a paper on the construction of metalanguage in the first third of the twentieth century. Interdisciplinary questions are raised in an article on the contact of linguistics with the theory of communication after World War II and in a contribution on the relationship between linguistics and medicine in the second half of the nineteenth century. The final paper considers the place of linguistic historiography within the language sciences.

The selected papers offer a new perspective on current research in the field of linguistic history. Some of the articles provide access to little-known scientific texts and information, constituting a valuable contribution to the history of linguistics.