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Preface : The Handbook of Historical Linguistics : Blackwell Reference Online

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Preface

Subject

Linguistics » Historical Linguistics

DOI:

10.1111/b.9781405127479.2004.00001.x

Any large-scale work like this typically involves a huge amount of effort on the part of a great many

individuals, and such is certainly the case with the present volume. Given the enormous debt of gratitude

owed by the editors to all the participants in this massive project, we are moved to adopt (and adapt) the

phrasing which Peter Schickele (1976: xvii) was led to use in expressing his thanks for the help he had

received with one of his books (though of a very different nature):

A project of this scope could not be realized without the aid of many people … [–] or rather it

could , but it would be dumb to do it that way when there are so many people around willing to

give their aid. It is impossible to thank by name every single person who helped …, but it

would be a … shame if … [the editors] didn't mention those to whom … [they are] most deeply

indebted.

Most importantly, the authors represented here have all been very cooperative and, on the whole, quite

prompt. Inasmuch as this work has developed over a long period of time – the initial proposal for the volume

was first put together in 1994 – we especially thank all parties involved for their indulgence and patience at

moments when the book occasionally seemed to be barely inching its way toward the finish line. To a great

extent, the single longest delay resulted from our working through several conceptions of our introductory

chapter, which we finally came to see not as a mere curtain-raiser to open the volume, but as an attempt to

wrestle with significant but rarely addressed questions concerning the general nature of historical linguistics,

even if this extended the work's gestation period beyond what any of us originally expected or could easily

have imagined.

Still, even with the passage of so much time – or even precisely because of it – we are encouraged by the

following apposite words (brought to our attention by William Clausing) from Nietzsche's 1886 book

Morgenröte: Gedanken über die moralischen Vorurteile (“Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of

Morality” ), which we here give after an excerpt (p. 5) from the 1997 translation by R. J. Hollindale (edited by

Maudemarie Clark and Brian Leiter): 1

Above all, let us say it SLOWLY …. This preface is late, but not too late … – what, after all, do

five or six years matter? A book like this, a problem like this, is in no hurry; we both, … just as

much as … [the] book, are friends of lento . It is not for nothing that one has been a

philologist; perhaps one is a philologist still – that is to say, a teacher of slow reading: in the

end, one also writes slowly … [. P]atient friends, this book desires for itself only perfect readers

and philologists[; it asks]: learn to read me well!

Whether just understandably human or else all too human in explanation, the lengthy preparation-time

expended on this volume makes it hard for us to list exhaustively all the input and assistance that have gone

into making the final product what it is. Still, we would like to single out by name a number of people and

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into making the final product what it is. Still, we would like to single out by name a number of people and

institutions for special thanks. Most of all, we gratefully acknowledge the support of our respective families

and relatives, the sore trying of whose patience must sometimes have led them to wonder whether our jobs

required them to be Jobs. We are also extremely appreciative of the help provided over the years by several

research assistants, especially Toby Gonsalves, Steve Burgin, Mike Daniels, and Pauline Welby. To the staff at

Blackwell Publishing, particularly Beth Remmes and Tami Kaplan, we are forever indebted for their unusual

tolerance of our persistent tinkering, their willingness to accommodate their schedules to our work habits,

and their enthusiasm for the project in the first place (from the earliest moments of Philip Carpenter's first

conversations with us through Steve Smith's encouragement along the way). Finally, we thank the

Department of Linguistics, along with the Department of Slavic and East European Languages and

Literatures, both at The Ohio State University, for providing significant support in the form of subsidies for

postage and xeroxing, computer accounts, and access to research assistants.

It is traditional to offer a dedication for a book; how could a volume on historical linguistics not embrace

such a tradition wholeheartedly? Since a dedication to our families could not even begin to express

adequately our appreciation for their long suffering through seemingly endless discussions of individual

chapters and related issues, followed by the thrashing out of draft after draft of the introduction, we promise

them other compensation for their sacrifices. Hence we must turn elsewhere for an appropriate object of our

dedication – though not completely.

In a sense, virtually all our efforts in editing this handbook have confronted us with the inescapable fact that

the best work in linguistic diachrony nearly always involves various sorts of collaboration – collaboration that

is at times even family-like (parental or filial, between teachers and students; fraternal or sororal, among

colleagues and competitors), but more often just amicable, and almost invariably cooperative in several

senses. For example, in cases where investigators of language change express violent disagreement with

their predecessors, a closer look tends to reveal that a strong rebuttal of an earlier position may still

crucially presuppose some determinative phrasing of scholarly questions, an indispensable collation of the

facts, or pioneering paleographic spadework by the previous researcher being criticized. Just as often,

advances in historical linguistics arise via the progressive, mosaic-like accumulation of contributions that

gradually come to cover all relevant aspects of, and perspectives on, a particular diachronic problem.

Increasingly, too, breakthroughs in various specializations have brought such complexity to linguistic

diachrony as a whole that a single person cannot gain or maintain expertise in all of its subfields, and

therefore a collaborative approach becomes inescapable. In all of these instances, scholarly cooperation and

collectivity really do provide demonstrable benefits for individuals, since they allow the weaknesses of one

researcher to be compensated for by the strengths of another. After all, as the author of the Argentine

gaucho epic Martín Fierro put matters (albeit within a very different context) – cf. Hernández (1872: 33,

lines 1057–8; our translation): “It's not unusual for one person to be short of something that another person

has more than enough of.” 2

One aspect of collaboration has to do, of course, with interdisciplinary research. A solid beginning in this

direction already exists in the many writings which compare diachronic or synchronic linguistics with biology

(especially its evolutionary aspects) and paleontology. In a field which calls itself “historical linguistics,”

focusing on change over time, one might also expect to encounter substantial cross-contacts in which

(diachronic) linguists react to the work of historians and other students of time and change – especially

philosophers, but also anthropologists, psychologists, and physicists. In preparing our introductory chapter,

though, we were surprised to find so few recent discussions by linguistic diachronicians of intersections

between our field and the work of historians or other specialists on time and change. The extensive scope of

our introductory essay is therefore due in large part to our having attempted to discuss a judicious selection

of directly relevant historical and time- or change-related work. Since we are not specialists in those fields,

our remarks concerning them should be taken as suggestive leads intended to goad our readers into joining

us in exploring links with those other disciplines. Their doing so will promote collaboration more than

sufficient to make up for any castigation we may receive at the hands of those with greater sophistication in

the above-mentioned fields.

At this juncture, however, we can probably best promote interdisciplinary approaches to language change by

acknowledging briefly, with admiration and astonishment, the standard set for linguists by those (non-

linguistic) historians who sift through what seem like not only mountains but even mountain ranges of

written and other evidence in their studies of earlier times. We have in mind here, besides a number of

studies mentioned in our introductory chapter, such volumes as Gerhard L. Weinberg's meticulously

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studies mentioned in our introductory chapter, such volumes as Gerhard L. Weinberg's meticulously

documented The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany (1970–80) and his even more comprehensive A World

at Arms: A Global History of World War II (1994), or David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British

Folkways in America (1989) – as broad as it is deep -and his more specialized Paul Revere's Ride (1994).

Thus, for example, though Fischer (1994) focuses on a subject which might seem already to have been

strip-mined to oblivion by earlier historians, he succeeds in reaching original conclusions by basing its 17

chapters of connected narrative and analysis (pp. 1–295) on 124 pages of documentation, the latter including

19 appendices (pp. 297–325), 12 historiographical summaries (pp. 327–44), 46 categories of primary-source

listings (pp. 345–72, with an overview on p. 345), and 841 notes (pp. 373–421). Even more exemplary is the

documentation in Weinberg (1994b) – more than 3,000 notes (of two sorts, filling over 180 pages),

supplemented by 23 maps and a 24-page bibliographical essay on the variety of published and archival

sources consulted (the major abbreviations alone taking three pages to list) – given that its wealth of

unpublished material allows Weinberg to establish multiple points of detailed fact which in turn justify more

global conclusions of great novelty and insight. 3 In the presence of such scholarship, we do not see how any

historically minded researcher could react otherwise than as Beethoven said he would do (here in our

retranslation; cf. Thayer et al. 1908: 455–8 on the tangled transmission of the composer's remarks) in

expressing his esteem for Handel: “I would bare my head and fall to my knees!” 4

Still, regardless of the degree to which they do or do not individually cross inter- or intra-disciplinary

boundaries, we are convinced that the chapters of this volume together demonstrate the value, utility, and

necessity of collaboration in work on language change: no single author, living or dead, could possess the

expertise in all branches of historical linguistics needed in order to author alone a handbook like this.

Similarly, the combination of planning, advisory commenting, and introduction-writing carried out by the

editors has been possible only through a highly collaborative effort. And sometimes even the names of

collaborating authors and/or editors can undergo a kind of fusion. In a number of our own joint works

(supplementary to our independent writings), although all of these have been produced via absolutely equal

participation, there have even occasionally been variations in the ordering of our names (a case in point

being that for the editorship of this handbook as a whole versus that for the authorship of this preface and

the introduction). Such variable orderings have caused bibliographical conundrums occasionally finessed by

references to “J and J.”

Now, in all humility, we readily admit that we are not now, nor are we ever likely to be, the best-known –

and we certainly are not the first – J and J to collaborate in historical linguistics. Rather, both of these

distinctions seem likely to be held in perpetuity by Karl Jaberg (1877–1958) and Jakob Jud (1882–1952); cf.,

for example, Bronstein et al. (1977: 102–3, 111–12). Besides publishing many individual works, these two

giants of Romance dialectology and its diachronic implications co-authored the monumental Sprach- und

Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz (1928–this); 40 “ Linguistic and Material Atlas of Italy and Southern

Switzerland” consists of eight primary volumes, plus three supplemental ones, and it contains more than

1,700 maps. (It in turn served as the main model for the Linguistic Atlas of New England (Kurath et al.

1939–43), whose staff Jud helped to train.) Most importantly, though, the joint productions of this earlier J-

and-J pair provide exactly the model for linguistic diachronicians' (and variationists’) collaboration to which

we aspire and which we so highly recommend; cf. Malkiel (1959: 259):

[T]he two Swiss scholars were … different in temperaments, tastes, and ambitions. It was their

ability to bridge this … discernible gap in embarking on a joint venture, with thorough mutual

respect for … [each other's] accomplishments and inclinations, that assured the[ir] … success.

… Jaberg … and Jud exemplify a team who succeeded in maintaining their bonds of loyalty …

through different stages of their … lives, despite … occasional disagreements on matters of

detail. No severer test of a person's tact and delicacy has ever been devised.

While Jaberg and Jud had the luxury of frequently conferring in person as they carried out their joint work on

dialectology and diachrony, the field of historical linguistics – especially, again, historical Romance

linguistics – provides several equally encouraging instances of long-distance collaboration (a difficult

circumstance of which we two have become acutely aware while finishing the joint editing of this volume via

messages, phone calls, and mailings back and forth across the Atlantic).

One of the most inspiring such examples involves the international exchange of scholarly papers and

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epistolary consultations between a German-born Austrian and a Spaniard who, despite their very different

backgrounds, circumstances, and ages, remained in touch as they each matched their long lifetimes with

publication lists characterized by not only length but also longevity (i.e., active shelf-lives). Given that mail

delivery by train between major European cities – especially before the rise of air transport during and

following World War II – was once astoundingly rapid (even by today's standards), a question/ answer pair of

messages traveling by rail from Graz to Madrid and back could be exchanged faster than many twenty-first-

century scholars read and answer their e-mail via the Internet. Thus, in the decades straddling the turn from

the nineteenth to the twentieth century, it often took only two days for a letter from Hugo (Ernst Maria)

Schuchardt (1842–1927) to reach Ramón Menéndez Pidal (1869–1968) when they were corresponding about

their prolific contributions to so many fields. Schuchardt wrote on Romance dialects and Vulgar Latin, but

also more generally; he specialized in analogy, etymology, and sound-“laws” – regarding the last of which he

took on the Neogrammarians, as in his 1885 Über die Lautgesetze: gegen die Junggrammatiker – and he

was an initiator of creole and language-contact studies (cf. Baggioni 1996). Menéndez Pidal, too, was a

dialectologist, but he is best known for founding historical philology in Spain through his tireless activities in

editing medieval texts, developing (from 1904 through its twelfth edition in 1966) an increasingly detailed

Manual de gramática histórica española (“Handbook of Spanish Historical Grammar” ), publishing on

stylistics, founding a journal, training students, and presiding for more than thirty years over the Royal

Spanish Academy (cf. Portolés 1996).

The poignant culmination of the mutually supportive communications between Schuchardt and Menéndez

Pidal arguably came when the Austrian, in his early eighties, was asked to contribute an original study as a

collegial offering for the festschrift (three volumes, later published as Comisión organ-izadora 1925) then

being prepared in honor of his Spanish correspondent. Schuchardt responded with a poem explaining that,

although his arms were too weak to carry the heavy dictionaries needed for a work of scholarship, and his

eyes too tired to read the tiny print of their contents, he could still send a simple greeting in verse to the

man who had edited – and done so much else to promote the study of – the twelfth-century Spanish epic “ El

cantar de mío Cid” (“The Song of My Cid”), itself a poem celebrating Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (c.1043–99), the

noble warrior-champion (in older Spanish, campeador ) who had become known as el Cid (from Spanish

Arabic as-scd “the lord”). In his boyhood, wrote Schuchardt (1925), the story of el Cid had provided him with

a radiant paragon of heroism to whom he dedicated childish verses. But then Ramón Menéndez Pidal's

editions of that epic narrative had firmly linked the fame of Don Rodrigo with the name of the poem's

energetic and academically fearless editor – Don Ramón – thus again justifying use of a salutation from long

ago to address a warrior-champion of philology: “ Mío Cid Campeador.” In light of such a magnanimous

gesture, it is our wish that every historical linguist should be able to correspond, and even to collaborate,

with an altruistic, truly encouraging colleague of this sort. 5

We are hopeful, then, that these kinds of productive close cooperation among investigators of language

change will turn out to be at least as common and as fruitful later in the new century and millennium as

they are now, and as they were in previous centuries. Such a pooling of strengths and resources is dictated

not only by the above-mentioned growing complexity of differing specializations within research on

linguistic diachrony, but also by the fact that – as our introductory chapter emphasizes in several places

(especially its concluding sections) – a sharing of labor between studies of changes completed in the past

and studies of ongoing changes in the present seems likely to provide the surest basis for progress in our

field. And these dual foci of attention virtually demand a maximum of coordinated joint work – of

collaboration.

We therefore dedicate this book to the spirit of cooperation and collaboration in historical linguistics – past,

present, and future. This attitude is embodied (if not directly expressed) by the following anonymous poem

in Sanskrit, the language whose growing importance in late-eighteenth-century and early-nineteenth-

century philology is generally viewed as having provided perhaps the major impetus for the ensuing

development of historical linguistics into a science. The verses in question were anthologized by Böhtlingk

(1870: 175) as no. 940 (no. 346 in his earlier, shorter edition); we present them first in devanagari script and

then in transliteration, followed by our more metrical and referentially broader adaptation of the translation

by Brough (1968: 69; his no. 62). 6 We know of no more eloquent way to symbolize the interconnectedness

of (i) time and history, (ii) scholarship via friendly collaboration, and – by implication – (iii) language:

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Quite lean at first, they quickly gather force, And grow in richness as they run their course;

Once started, back again they do not bend: Great rivers, years, and ties to a good friend.

Richard D. Janda

The American Library in Paris

Brian D. Joseph

Columbus, Ohio

1 Nietzsche's (1881/1964: 9–10) original German reads: “- … Vor allem sagen wir es langsam. … Diese Vorrede

kommt spät, aber nicht zu spät…[;] was liegt im Grunde an fünf, sechs Jahren? Ein solches Buch, ein solches

Problem hat keine Eile; überdies sind wir beide Freunde des lento , … ebensowohl als … [das] Buch. Man ist nicht

umsonst Philologe gewesen, man ist es vielleicht noch …[ − ] das will sagen, ein Lehrer des langsamen Lesens:

endlich schreibt man auch langsam … [. G]eduldige … Freunde, dies Buch wünscht sich nur vollkommene Leser

und Philologen[; es bittet]: lernt mich gut lesen!! –.”

2 The original Spanish of Hernández' gaucho narrator (1872: 33) states: “No es raro que a uno le falte / lo que [a]

algún otro le sobre.”

3 Weinberg (1994) is unique in combining presentation of details like Hitler's 1940 order to ready plans for

invading Switzerland – a project, “[o]riginally code-named operation ‘Green’, renamed ‘Christmas Tree’ when the

former … was applied to the planned invasion of Ireland” (pp. 174, 982nn.219–23) – with discussion of such

higher-level conclusions as the tactical failure (and not just the strategic error) of Pearl Harbor's bombing: “The

ships were for the most part raised; by the end of December … [, 1941,] two of the battleships … imagined sunk

were on their way to the West Coast for repairs … [, and ultimately a]ll but the Arizona returned to service” (pp.

258–62, 1004–5nn.338–57). The story- and script-writers of the 2001 film Pearl Harbor should have read

Weinberg (1994) first.

4 Thayer et al. (1908: 455–8) give the German version of what Beethoven said as: “Ich würde mein Haupt entblößen

und … niederknieen!”

5 Schuchardt's (1925) original German is as follows: “Einst, in meinen Kinderjahren …[,]/ Strahlte mir der Cid als

Vorbild / Wahren Heldentums entgegen, / Und ich weiht' ihm kind'sche Verse. … / Mit dem Ruhm von Don

Rodrigo / Habt Ihr, Don Ramón, den Euern / Fest verknüpft. …/… Nun … / steigt wie einst der Gruß empor: / Mío

Cid Campeador.” For the previously mentioned information about the speed of early twentieth-century mail

delivery by train between Austria and Spain, we are indebted to Bernhard Hurch, who now holds Schuchardt's chair

at the University of Graz (where there is a Schuchardt archive which maintains a site on the World-Wide Web).

6 In contrast to the preceding endnoted remarks, we should inform our readers that (with rare exceptions) no

original non-English versions are given for any of the quotations included in the following introductory discussion

of the topics and contents found in this volume. This decision to use only translations (which are uniformly our

own, if not otherwise attributed) in the general introduction to the book reflects not our preferences, but the need

to achieve at least some economies of space in an already lengthy essay.

Cite this article

"Preface." The Handbook of Historical Linguistics . Joseph, Brian D. and Richard D. Janda (eds). Blackwell Publishing,

2004. Blackwell Reference Online. 11 December 2007 <http://www.blackwellreference.com/subscriber/tocnode?

id=g9781405127479_chunk_g97814051274791>

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