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Postprint from: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 15 (2005), 177-1

Postprint from: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft 15 (2005), 177-188. ISSN 0939-215 On Analogy, or Humboldt’s Dutch Connexion1 Jan Noordegraaf VU University Amsterdam Abstract. In this article it is pointed out that Wilhelm von Humboldt was well acquainted with the writings of the Dutch ‘Schola Hemsterhusiana’. The works of this Schola, among other things frequently reprinted studies by classical scholars such as L.C. Valckenaer and J.D. van Lennep edited by E. Scheidius and others, were published in the last decade of the eighteenth-century and in the early nineteenth century. In the writings of the Schola Hemsterhusiana concepts and terms as ‘analogia’ and ‘linguae forma interna’ (‘innere Sprachform’) are frequently used. These concepts are among the key concepts in Humboldt’s theory of language. The question can be put forward to what extent Humboldt was indebted to this Schola Hemsterhusiana as far as his ‘Analogie’ concept is concerned. Key words: Wilhelm von Humboldt; Schola Hemsterhusiana; Tiberius Hemsterhuis; L.C. Valckenaer; J.D. van Lennep; analogie; analogia; analogy; innere Form der Sprache. linguae forma interna 1. Introduction Gauß, der zuvor nicht zugehört hatte, bat den Diplomaten, seinen Namen zu wiederholen. Der Diplomat tat es mit einer Verneigung. Er sei übrigens auch Forscher! Neugierig beugte Gauß sich vor. Er untersuche alte Sprachen. Ach so, sagte Gauß. Das, sagte der Diplomat, habe enttauscht geklungen. Sprachwissenschaft. Gauß wiegte den Kopf. Er wolle ja keinem zu nahe treten. Daniel Kehlman, Die Vermessung der Welt (2005) “Man kann es als einen festen Grundsatz annehemen, dass Alles in einer Sprache auf Analogie beruht”. This quote from Wilhelm von Humboldt introduces Itkonen’s recent book on Analogy as structure and process (Itkonen 2005: v). This is entirely reasonable, since it is 1 Revised and expanded section of a paper presented at the Tenth International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS X), University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1-5 September 2005. For the discussion and information, I would like to thank Gerda Haßler, Frank Vonk, and Serhii Wakúlenko. A Dutch version was published in A.D 2005. Variaties op een thema door familie, vrienden en collega’s bij het afscheid van Ad Welschen van de Universiteit van Amsterdam op donderdag 27 oktober 2005, ed. by Fred Weerman and Els Elffers. CD-ROM, Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen Universiteit van Amsterdam 2005, and also on http://hdl.handle.net/1871/10884. 1 well known that analogy is a basic concept in Humboldt’s linguistic theory (cf. Di Cesare 1989: 68). In the following brief note I would like to point to a neglected aspect of the provenance of Humboldt’s idea of analogy. As it happens, ‘analogy’ is also a [178] key term in the linguistic theory of the eighteenth-century Dutch Schola Hemsterhusiana, and I shall argue that Humboldt, like many of his contemporaries, was well acquainted with the writings of this school. 2. The Schola Hemsterhusiana When the famous German book collector Zacharias Conrad von Uffenbach (1683-1734) stayed in Amsterdam in the chilly months of February and March 1711, he also called upon Tiberius Hemsterhuis (1685-1766), whom he believed to be a “sehr höflicher Mann”, but with whom he was “bald [...] fertig”, since the young Amsterdam professor “weiter nichts als seine Critic wußte” (Uffenbach 1754: 594). Uffenbach could not know that his interlocutor was to become “the greatest Greek scholar of his time” (Lord Monboddo), and the founding father of the ‘Schola Hemsterhusiana’, a group of Dutch scholars, with an international reputation for its etymological method of investigating language, based on principles of reconstruction. These scholars also launched several initiatives to improve Dutch usage, while challenging the overvaluation of Latin. They also gave the first academic courses on Dutch in the eighteenth century. Around the middle of the nineteenth century, however, several harsh German critics such as Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), A.F. Pott (1802-1887), and Theodor Benfey (1809-1881), tried to permanently relegate the Schola’s work to the scrap heap of linguistics,2 though not quite deservedly (cf. Stankiewicz 1974: 170). The German scholars mainly took offence at the ‘esoteric’ “Wortgrübeleien” of the “Schola Lennepio- Scheidiana”, ignoring what comparative historical grammar, the dominant paradigm in nineteenth-century linguistics, had in common with eighteenth-century Dutch classical scholarship.3 In the field of linguistics proper neither Tiberius Hemsterhuis nor his most renowned students, Lodewijk Caspar Valckenaer (1715-1785) and Johannes Daniel van Lennep (1724- 1771), published a great deal. Although their lecture notes on linguistics had circulated for many years among interested students and colleagues, both within the Netherlands and abroad, it was only in 1790 that Everardus Scheidius (1742-1794) edited Lennep’s voluminous Etymologicum linguae Graecae (18082, 18203). In the same year Scheidius published [179] Valckenaer’s and Lennep’s lecture notes in one volume as L.C. Valckenaeriii Observationes academicae, quibus via munitur ad origines Graecas investigandas, lexicorumque defectus resarciendos; et Io. Dan. a Lennep praelectiones academiae, de analogia linguae Graecae, sive rationum analogicarum linguae Graecae expositio. Scheidius, “the erudite scholar”, as Sir William Jones once called him, justified this edition by the fact that both Valckenaer’s and Lennep’s lectures had been copied and recopied. These 2 Cf. for example, Max Müller, Introduction to the Science of Religion (New ed., London: Longmans, Green & Co. 1893 [18701 ], 17): “I feel certain that the time will come when all that is now written on theology, whether from an ecclesiastical or philosophical point of view, will seem as antiquated, as strange, as unaccountable as the works of Vossius, Hemsterhuys, Valckenaer, and Lennep, by the side of Bopp’s Comparative Grammar”. 3 For more detailed information on the professional vicissitudes of the Schola Hemsterhusiana, see my earlier studies mentioned in the reference section. 2 unauthorized copies had turned up in France, Germany, and even Transylvania. Moreover, in London a spurious edition had been published in 1778 by someone who hardly knew Latin.4 The 1790 edition was first reprinted in 1805 – the book had sold better “quam hodie solent libri Latine scripti”, as the publisher proudly announced (cf. Gerretzen 1940: 322 n.3) – and it was reprinted in London in 1820. Valckenaers Observationes were also included in his two-volume Opuscula philologica, critica, oratoria (Leipzig 1808-1809). But Hemsterhuis’ unpublished and undated Lectio publica de originibus linguae graecae (1740?) had not been as ‘vulgata’ as the lecture notes of his students. Edited by the Frisian linguist J.H. Halbertsma (1789-1869), the Lectio appeared only in 1845. Jacob Grimm was presented with a free copy, but Halbertsma’s gesture did not help to salvage the reputation of the Schola Hemsterhusiana. In 1866, however, when Michel Bréal (1832-1915) published his French translation of the first volume of Franz Bopp’s (1791-1867) Vergleichende Grammatik, he still referred to the Schola: “il n’y avait pas longtemps que l’école hollandaise, représentée par Hemsterhuys, Valckenaer, Lennep et Scheide avait essayé de renouveler l’étude de la langue grecque” (Bréal 1866: xxviii). The writings of the Schola were composed in Latin, and as such they could be read without any problem by their European colleagues, as well as by Wilhelm von Humboldt, a German who was very interested in classical Greek. 3. Humboldt and the Schola Hemsterhusiana Was Wilhelm von Humboldt aware of or even acquainted with the writings of the Schola Hemsterhusiana? I believe this was indeed the case, and to support this, I will provide some evidence. 3.1. In August 1796, when travelling in the Northern part of Germany, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) visited the German poet and well-known [180] translator of Homer, Johann Heinrich Voss (1751-1826). In his Reisetagebuch Humboldt noted: Hofrath Voss. – Ich sprach ihn überaus viel und fand ihn in hohem Grade interessant. Obgleich nur sehr wenige Sachen ihn so berühren, dass er über sie redet, und obgleich er alles mit Stillschweigen übergeht, in das er nicht eigentlich eingedrungen ist, so spricht er doch über die eigentlichen Gegenstände seines Studirens sehr gut, raisonirend, und allgemein. Das Gespräch auf einzelne Stellen in Schriftstellern zu lenken, oder sich auf Grammatik oder eigentliche Philologie einzulassen ist schlechterdings nicht seine Art, er verachtet, wie es scheint, allen eigentlichen gelehrten Kram (Humboldt 1981: 28). It can also be concluded that Voss was deeply involved in the study of language, for in his notes Humboldt remarked: Den eigentlichen und ursprünglichen Bedeutungen der Wörter scheint er durch tiefe Sprachforschungen eifrig nachzugehen. Er bedient sich ungefähr der Lennepschen Methode, doch in andrer Art (Humboldt 1981: 30; emphasis added). 4 “ab homine minime Latine, nedum Graece, docto: quod patet ex copia errorum vitiorumque scriptionis”, as Wyttenbach remarked in 1779 (cf. Noordegraaf 1996b: 219). 3 In 1796 it was clear to Humboldt what was meant by the “Lennepschen Methode”. It is not surprising that with respect to this passage the editors of Humboldt’s Kleine Schriften refer to Lennep’s inaugural lecture of 1752, De linguarum analogia, ex analogicis mentis actionibus probata (a lecture which shows that van Lennep was a clear and eloquent advocate of a mentalist approach), and to the 1790 edition of his lecture notes, De analogia linguae Graecae. 3.2. At the end of 1799 Humboldt was in Madrid as part of his sojourn in Paris and his famous travels to the Basque provinces. On 20 December 1799, he wrote a letter uploads/Litterature/ on-analogy-or-humboldt-s-dutch-connexion.pdf