Finnisch-ugrische Sprachforschung: von der Renaissance bis zum Neupositivismus By Gunter Johannes Stipa (review)

186LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 1 (1992) REFERENCES Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton. Cornyn, William S. 1948. On the classification of Russian verbs. Lg. 26.64-75. Halle, Morris. 1983. On the origins of the distinctive features. Roman Jakobson: What he taught us, ed. by Morris Halle, 77-86. International Journal of Slavic Linguistics and Poetics 27, Supplement. -----. 1988. N. S. Troubetzkoy et les origines de la phonologie moderne. Cahiers Ferdinand de Saussure 42.5-22. Harris, Zellig S. 1942. Review of Grundzüge der Phonologie, by N. S. Trubetzkoy. Lg. 17.345-49. Jakobson, Roman. 1962-. The selected writings. The Hague: Mouton-DeGruyter. [Abbreviated SW.] -----. 1975. N. S. Trubetzkoy's letters and notes. The Hague: Mouton. Martinet, André. 1957. Substance phonique et traits distinctifs. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 53.72-85. Pomorska, Krystyna, and Stephen Rudy (eds.) 1987. Roman Jakobson/Language in literature. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Trubetzkoy, Nikolaj S. 1939. Grundzüge der Phonologie. Prague: Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague, 9. Department of Linguistics & Philosophy[Received 16 June 1991; Massachusetts Institute of Technologyrevision received 23 August 1991.] Cambridge, MA 02139 Finnisch-ugrische Sprachforschung: von der Renaissance bis zum Neupositivismus . By Gunter Johannes Stipa. (Suomalais-Ugrilaisen Seuran Toimituksia , 206 / Mémoires de la Société Finno-Ougrienne, 206.) Helsinki: Suomalais-Ugrilainen Seura, 1990. Pp. 438. Reviewed by Lyle Campbell, Louisiana State University Stipa's history of Finno-Ugric linguistics is truly excellent: it is comprehensive , learned, and exciting. S has discovered and integrated many heretofore neglected sources and facts. The result is a remarkable contribution not only to the history of Finno-Ugric (henceforth FU) linguistics, but also to the history of Indo-European (IE) linguistics, to the historiography of linguistics, and to intellectual history in general. The scholarship is dazzling. It is the product of a decade of research in the universities, libraries, and archives of many countries ; more than 1800 sources appear in the bibliography (with entries in thirteen different languages). Nevertheless, it is not only the book's extensiveness but its consequential content that is so stunning. In the chapter on the Renaissance and the Reformation, S surveys the first word-lists, dictionaries, and grammars of the various FU languages, and in the process we learn that a number of common misconceptions recited in the history of linguistics fall by the wayside. For example, long before Sir William Jones' famous 'philologer passage' in 1786 (see Mukherjee 1968), often cited as the beginning of IE studies and of historical linguistics, and before Sajnovics (1770) or Gyarmathi (1799; cf. Hanzeli 1983), we learn that Sebastian Münster (1544) discovered—using historical linguistic techniques—that Finnish, Es- REVIEWS187 tonian, and Lapp are related; Hakluyt (1589) connected the Lapp and Permian languages; and Martin Fogel (1668) offered his comparative linguistic demonstration of the genetic relationship between Finnish and Hungarian. We also learn of the methods, evidence, grammatical comparisons, sound correspondences , and etymologies employed in Stiernhielm 1670 for Finnish-EstonianLapp -Hungarian, Comenius [Komensky] 1657 for Finnish-Hungarian, Rudbeck , Jr., 1717, Wexonius 1650, and Witsen 1692 for Cheremis and Mordvin, and other works. In the Enlightenment chapter S documents, among other things, that Leibniz (1710a, 1710b) filled out the FU family members and discovered the relationship of FU to Samoyed. S gives us an intimate understanding of such major players as Peter I, Strahlenberg, Fischer, Ihre, Katherine II, Pallas, Sajnovics, Gyarmathi , Porthan, and many others, as well as of the important settings—earlier research explorations in Russia and Siberia, the St. Petersburg Academy of Science, Uppsala University, Göttingen University, the comparative vocabularies , etc. The chapters on Neohumanism and Romanticism and on Positivism begin with surveys of the intellectual developments of the times, particularly in IndoEuropean linguistics. The Neohumanism and Romanticism chapter surveys the development of standard written languages and grammars, particularly for Hungarian , Estonian, and Finnish. The Positivism chapter presents general developments in FU linguistics of the period, which include works on historical linguistic matters, language and culture, loanwords, oral literature and folk poetry, linguistic paleontology, etc. In short, this book is an extremely valuable basic reference, contributing very significantly to the history of linguistics in general; it is masterful on the...