La linguistique et l'appel de l'histoire (1600-1800): Rationalisme et révolutions positivistes By Daniel Droixhe (review)

REVIEWS427 NCG may have deviated from PGmc. in more extreme ways than would perhaps be appealing to a Germanist. Such a possibility is greatly strengthened by the facts that, on the one hand, language contact among the Crimean Goths, Greeks, Tartars, and others is documented as having been extensive (as S himself reports)— and, on the other hand, that certain features of Busbecq's CG, attributed by S to the influence of CGk. (e.g. shortened vowels, and perhaps degeminated consonants), had developed in a number of other Gmc. dialects well before Busbecq's time ; thus they may be independent, bona-fide innovations in NCG that were correctly repeated by the informant, their agreement with his CGk. resulting more from their phonetic/phonological naturalness than from interference or anything else. All in all, however, Stearns's diminutive magnum opus, though describing an admittedly small, closed corpus, must—because ofits soberness, comprehensiveness, and depth—qualify as one of the best descriptions and analyses in the linguistic literature. [Received 20 June 1979.] La linguistique et l'appel de l'histoire (1600-1800): Rationalisme et révolutions positivistes. By Daniel Droixhe. (Langue et cultures, 10.) Genève & Paris: Librairie Droz, 1978. Pp. 455. Reviewed by Yakov Malkiel, University of California, Berkeley It is a rare book of 450 crowded pages that is allowed to appear without a preface or so much as a prefatory note. Yet this isjust one ofthe unexplained feats, or feats in reverse, that Droixhe has accomplished in launching this strange book— which gives the impression of being a Liège doctoral dissertation, but possibly is not. What one learns from the back of the jacket is that D, now in his mid-thirties, is a lecturer at the University of Liège and also a curator at a local museum. Academically, Liège is justly famous for its separate contributions to medieval French literature and to Walloon dialectology (the flowering of the latter specialty derives from the efforts of an unforgotten master figure, Jean Haust); conversely, its share in the growth of general linguistics has so far been meager (witness the critics' cool reception of Deroy 1956 on the phenomenon of lexical borrowing). A few senior scholars attached to the Liège faculty have been eclectics, preferring a variety of light active involvements to a single, sharply-profiled specialization. One such many-sided teacher, for decades, has been Maurice Piron, who has to his credit an annotated edition (1961) of the short treatise on etymology by Turgot (1727-81), which enjoyed prominence within the context of French Enlightenment and of the Diderot-D'Alembert Encyclopédie. This work by Piron, which upon its publication almost twenty years ago produced few immediate reverberations (as well as, one is led to conjecture, that scholar's subsequent lecture courses and seminars) prompted his disciple Droixhe, a decade or so ago, to plunge into the newly plowed-over field of the pre-1800 history of linguistics. In reconstructing the academic climate of the late sixties, one is hardly surprised to note the impact, on very young minds groping for some significant, 'relevant' investment of time and effort, of Chomsky 1966, which is seldom and almost apologetically mentioned today. D's thick book, and a series of preceding articles and notes in the same domain, were conceived at or near the intersection of his conservative teacher Piron's long concern with Turgot (plus other 18th century figures?) and of Chomsky's book, meant to be revolutionary, as well as the violent reactions it triggered. A short piece from D's pen (1977), which may actually postdate his book by a slight margin, was written in the same vein, but perhaps with greater skill. 428LANGUAGE, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2 (1980) D's book can perhaps be best described as follows. A long and somewhat tortured introduction (9-32), to which we shall return in connection with the title and subtitle of the monograph, leads to the first (33-225) of three major parts, devoted to the origins of speech, if one may so paraphrase D's own, less precise heading ('Langage et origine'). A second and shorter part (227-326) deals with 'Language and reason'; the...