Linguistic Historiography: Projects and Prospects (review)

E. F. K. (‘Konrad’) Koerner has done more than anyone else to establish history of linguistics as a well-defined field of scholarship; he founded a journal (Historiographia Linguistica), a series of books (of which this is the 92nd volume), and a series of conferences (which now meet with the LSA). In this volume he presents revised versions of ten of his recent papers, plus an introduction and two appendices. The book is illustrated with pictures (mostly photographs) of Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, August Schleicher, Otto Jespersen, Roman Jakobson, J. R. Firth, Einar Haugen, Antoine Meillet, and K himself, next to a bust of Jakob Grimm.

K would not be K without strong opinions, and in these essays he is as opinionated as ever. He advocates treating the history of linguistics as an integral part of the field (as is traditional in medicine and, I might add, astronomy). He disparages ‘Whig history’ (historiography in defense of particular movements) as practiced by F. J. Newmeyer and, earlier, Leonard Bloomfield and Berthold Delbrück. Yet he has relatively kind things to say about Chomsky’s Cartesian linguistics (New York, Harper & Row, 1966), now seen as ‘not truly history but . . . an account of the way in which he [Chomsky] thinks things should have happened but didn’t’ (3).

In defense of historical education, K caricatures a phonologist who ‘was constantly concerned that someone might have come up with an insight or a new theoretical precept in phonology without his having received the information within a matter of weeks, and as a result, he spent much of his time watching the Internet to make sure he did not miss anything’ (6). I agree wholeheartedly that such anxiety may indicate a lack of awareness of how scholarship progresses and that ‘one may save time and effort by waiting a bit until the dust has settled’.

The papers address general topics, the concept of ‘revolution’ in linguistics, the idea of reconstruction in early historical linguistics, and the works of Otto Jespersen, Roman Jakobson, J. R. Firth, Einar Haugen, and Ferdinand de Saussure. An appendix recounts a one-hour conversation with Noam Chomsky in 1978.