Language: A Linguistic Introduction to History (review)

The present monograph by the Dutch linguist Joseph Vendryes (1875–1960) is a wonderful edition of a book first published in English in 1925 (a translation of the French original from 1914 (revised 1924)). It is the only linguistic volume in Kegan Paul’s ‘History of civilization’ series with publications ranging from ancient Egyptian times to the late Middle Ages. The extensive and flattering foreword (vii–xxiv) was provided by V’s contemporary, the French historian and philosopher Henri Berr (1863–1954), and is followed by the author’s preface (1–4) and ‘Introduction’ (5–16) to ‘The origin of language’ (putting, philology aside, language into the scope of history, psychology, and social evolution). The study itself is composed of five parts rounded off by concluding remarks.

Part 1, ‘Sounds’ (17–70), contains three chapters. In Ch. 1, ‘The sound mechanisms’, V lays out the basics of physiological classifications of human language sounds. Ch. 2 discusses ‘The phonetic system and its mutations’, and Ch. 3 deals with ‘The phonetic word and verbal images’. The core of the study is Part 2, ‘Grammar’ (73–171). Here Ch. 1 starts off with ‘Words and morphemes’, followed by Ch. 2 on ‘Grammatical categories’. In Ch. 3, V addresses ‘Different kinds of words’ (a critical look at the classification of the parts of speech). In Ch. 4, ‘Affective language’, V investigates the linguistic means of expression and issues like word order, and in Ch. 5, ‘Morphological mutations’, he addresses morphological language change (from a ‘historical’ perspective) and expressiveness.

In Part 3, ‘Vocabulary’ (175–230), V considers etymology and related issues in ‘The nature and extent of vocabularies’ (Ch. 1), ‘How the meaning of words is modified’ (Ch. 2), and ‘How the terms that express ideas are changed’ (Ch. 3). Part 4, ‘The structure of languages’ (233–311), is an extremely interesting account of the author’s take on ‘Language and languages’ (Ch. 1), ‘Dialects and specialized languages’ (Ch. 2), and ‘Standard or common language’ (Ch. 3). In Ch. 4, he addresses ‘The mutual influence of languages’, and in Ch. 5, he considers ‘The relationship between languages and the comparative method’. In Part 5, ‘Writing’ (315–43), V sketches the ‘Origin and development of writing’ in Ch. 1 and muses on ‘The written language and its spelling’ in Ch. 2.

In his ‘Conclusion’ (344–59), V observes ‘The progress of language’, or rather, the rightly perceived incompatibility of this term applied to human language. He underlines the main thesis of the work (hence inclusion in the current series) that linguistic evolution is a reflection of social evolution. The book contains a bibliography and a comprehensive index as well as an appendix in which he mentions some works that were not available in 1914, but had appeared by 1924. This monograph is a welcome publication for historians of language and linguistics and is surely more accessible than the original publication from eighty years ago.