8 - The philosophical–psychological– typological–evolutionary approach to language relationships

Summary

The founders of modern mind are philologists.

(Ernest Renan 1890:141 [Said 1979:132])

Introduction

For most of this book we have been dealing with language classification as viewed in the dominant current of comparative linguistics. However, there is, or better said, there was, another once influential orientation, which involves philosophical–psychological(–typological–evolutionary) outlooks concerning the general nature and evolution of language, including the classification of languages. Both approaches reflect the nineteenth-century search for origins and the belief in “progress” (unilinear evolution). The two currents were partially overlapping and intertwined, and partially conflicting theoretical lines of historical linguistic thought. The other approach was still remembered and addressed, for example, by Sapir (1921b) and Bloomfield (1933) (see also Pedersen 1962[1931]), but is largely forgotten by current generations of linguists – though important unrecognized repercussions still affect historical linguistic work today, particularly in typological arguments. This difference has to do with the frequent nineteenth-century clash between linguistics viewed as a “Naturwissenschaft” and as a “Geisteswissenschaft.” Geisteswissenschaft was often translated as ‘moral [or spiritual] science’ (linked with modern humanities), Naturwissenschaft as ‘natural or physical science.’ This dichotomy is usually mentioned in connection with August Schleicher's attempt to place linguistics in the natural sciences, denying linguistics as a branch of the humanities or of the more spiritual/mental/“sentimental” intellectual pursuits (see Schleicher 1861–2). Bloomfield (1933:17–18) repeated the by then received opinion that there was both a nineteenth-century “main stream” represented by the Neogrammarians and a “small current,” the psychological–typological–evolutionary orientation represented by the Humboldt–Steinthal–Wundt tradition.