Sticking Points

Something combines the squiggles you currently see, the sounds you hear as you read them, and the meanings that bubble up for your comprehension. This is the foundation of language, and of linguistics as the science of language. But ask what of language is being connected, and we push hard against commonplaces in philosophy, sociology, anthropology, art, and history writing, just to name a few. Go deeper still, ask what is doing the combining, and we fumble towards an understanding of our culture and other societies, or perhaps towards nature, or something inarticulable at the heart of language. Amidst this darkness, we find the ideas that drive linguistics itself. Pourciau's The Writing of Spirit is not a history of linguistics, as such, but rather a history of the idea, or perhaps an intuition, that the ways we express ourselves reflect some hidden order.

A hard enough task, but a task made harder by starting with early nineteenth-century Romantic philosopher Friedrich Schelling's Weltseele. The world-soul demanded that science capture not only its objects of knowledge but also their surroundings, how our dappled reality emerges from a cosmic whole. By understanding the origins and inner drive of the world as it unfurls throughout history, we may be able to gain some hint to its—and our—ultimate purpose: in my beginning is my end. The Weltseele gave impetus to many studies of language, most famously to Jakob Grimm's "sound laws," the historic shifting of consonants in manuscripts: at once a call for a pure Germanic tongue, a testament to the inner balance of language, and a search for the origins of Reason itself. Words connect Logos and Psyche.

Less familiar to English-speaking audiences is just how far language-as-spirit permeated nineteenth-century thought. Pourciau gives two examples. The first surrounds Sanskrit hymns, Latin verses and, in particular, the German word Stab. The term can mean letter or stick, and as a poetic device indicates alliteration and emphasis. Yet, for nineteenth-century etymologists, it meant much more: an origin scene of Germanic tribes, witnessed by Tacitus, removing twigs from trees and caving runes on them. Then cast into the air for the priest to read aloud the message that Odin had impelled within. From this scene—Language, Nature, and Divinity tied into One—came the origins of the German alphabet and the fundamental shape of German verse, emphasis and meaning spread throughout. Pourciau's second example of spirit-language is even more grandiose. In a series of essays published between 1849 and 1852, Richard Wagner transformed theories of a primal German poetry into operatic art. Music and poetry follow their separate laws and paths of organic development, he believed, but when coming together as equals give emotional intensity and a sense of living movement. Vowels held this key. Carrier of sound and time, vowels for Wagner were at once music, breath, and life. Audiences were to identify with the eternal cycles of the cosmos and find in his The Ring of Nibelung their oldest origin story, a goal for humanity. These examples achieve an argumentative force by translating the heady pronouncements of idealist philosophy into more concrete, indeed picturesque, forms. They animate Pourciau's discussions, drawing connections between the arts, humanities, and sciences that few scholars have attempted before. They are a rich reward for the author's attention to detail.

Naturally, others did not wish to return to the forests from which we came. These include mechanist-materialist August Schleicher and Neogrammarians Karl Brugman and Hermann Osthoff. But chief opponents of the Sprachgeist for Pourciau are late nineteenth-century Swiss semiotician Ferdinand de Saussure and early twentieth-century Russian-American literary theorist Roman Jakobson. Pourciau makes good use of the manuscripts discovered in 1996 to explain Saussure's turn away from the bright light of the Infinite. When faced with the written and spoken word in all their variety, Saussure reasoned, either we the recipients have endless stores of knowledge...