Young grammarians

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Young grammarians are a group of linguists from the so-called Leipzig School , which was formed around August Leskien (1840–1916), Karl Brugmann (1849–1919) and Hermann Osthoff (1847–1909) in Leipzig at the end of the 1870s . With their hypothesis of the "absence of exception of the sound laws" they tried to re-establish the linguistics, which had previously been declared as humanities, under the sign of natural science. This development resulted from the increasing competition between the humanities and the natural sciences.

The term young grammarist , which is to be understood as a “young linguist”, is supposed to come from the Germanist Friedrich Zarncke, a member of the older generation who coined it based on the term used by other “young” or revolutionary movements, such as B. Young Germany . On the occasion of a doctorate, Zarncke ironically referred to the inexperience and militant behavior of the young generation. The name was later taken up again by this younger generation.

Main representative

August Leskien (1913)

The most important representatives of the young grammarians were:

Basic assumptions

The young grammarians represented a positivist direction in Indo-European and general linguistics and followed the doctrine of the physiologist Emil Heinrich du Bois-Reymond (1818–1896) of the exemption of the laws of nature . In their opinion, language changes take place without exception on the basis of natural sound laws . Linguistic knowledge should be based exclusively on observable facts - and not on abstractions.

research object

The young grammarians made it their main task in linguistics to examine the historical development of language. This diachronic interest stands in contrast to the later emphasis on a synchronic - because system and structure-related - approach in structuralism. For young grammarians - in contrast to later structuralism - it was not the linguistic system but only the individual, directly observable language ( idiolect ) that was the subject of linguistics. For young grammarians, the sound level is the "most important level of description", which is understood to be absolutely autonomous compared to syntax and semantics. There was also a greater interest in the dialectology and language of children.

Exclusion of the sound laws

According to their theorem of the invariability of the laws of sound , the psychophysics of the speech act in its momentary and historical dimension was the main subject of linguistics. This led to more accurate and comprehensive field research and discoveries in the field of sound shifting. In their search for “general laws”, the young grammarians repeatedly came across exceptions and special cases that were explained as unrecognized rules. One tried to explain such limits by analogy .

Publications and discoveries

In the " blessed year 1876" the young grammarians produced the following important works:

  • August Leskien (1840–1916): Declination in Slavic-Lithuanian and Germanic
  • Eduard Sievers (1850–1932): Basics of Sound Physiology
    This work is based on extensive own investigations by Sievers, who no longer just considers the individual sound, but the sound in its environment.
  • Hermann Osthoff (1847–1909): Discovery of the “liquida sonans” in Indo-European
    Due to the different development of the “liquida sonans” in the individual languages, Osthoff explained an abundance of striking peculiarities in vocalism.
  • Karl Brugmann (1849-1919): Essay on Nasalis sonans in the Indo-European original language

The linguist Hans Arens describes the spirit of optimism that resulted from this scientific success in the following words: “If one looks at the main achievements of a single year listed here, all of the results of efforts to improve the phonetic side of language, but not accidental discoveries or ingenious apercuses in any sector all of which are due to the systematic research of a mass of unexplained peculiarities in the development of sounds and to prove all regularity in place of earlier irregularity, then one has to say that, if at some point, at this point in time the proclamation of the "invariance of the sound laws" had to appear justified and logical . It was not a provable theorem or axiom, it was a postulate and a belief in which a generation of scientists united and recognized. And like any belief, it was a nuisance to many and tempted its followers. But also a common name, which was initially meant jokingly, was seriously adopted by them and still serves to summarize: Junggrammatiker, this strange combination of ideas by a scientific Jung Siegfried. "

Opponent of the young grammarians

The opponents of young grammarians include:

In 1885 the young grammarians were declared a warrior. Georg Curtius ' (1820–1885) On the Critique of the Latest Linguistic Research (1885), a representative of the older generation of linguists, found himself attacked in the research methods he had used for decades.

Since the young grammarians - apart from their axiom of the invariability of the sound laws - rejected abstractions that could not be substantiated in all directions by observable facts, they exposed themselves to the criticism of getting lost in details. This literally means: You did not see the forest for the trees. From today's point of view, they had fallen behind August Schleicher (1821–1868), who wanted to break away from philology and saw linguistics as part of the natural sciences , but had found in the theory of evolution a generally more stable basis for researching language changes.

The hypothesis of the absence of exception of the sound laws gave rise to a controversy, among other things with the Romanist and comparative linguist Hugo Schuchardt (1842-1927), who wrote about the sound laws. Against the young grammarians wrote the most important counter-writ. Also Graziadio Isaia Ascoli (1829-1907), the founder of Italian Linguistics, pointed in Dei neogrammatici back the neogrammarian claims. The absence of exception as a "law" has proven to be false. It did not take into account the social character of the language and thus the cultural aspects of the language changes. However, the term phonetic law is a useful working hypothesis in the reconstruction and study of language change, because phonetic change does not take place according to laws without exception, but just as little arbitrarily and irregularly. Every exception to a phonetic law must be explained. This problem was partly clear to the young grammarians and led to an increased preoccupation with language development and dialectology.

The linguistic structuralism , founded by Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913), rejected the young grammarians and thus founded the "modern linguistics", linguistics .

Overcoming the Young Grammarians

A decisive change in the views of the Leipzig School brought the dialect research, which at the time of the young grammarians was working on exploring earlier language states. In 1870 Georg Wenker developed the "Linguistic Atlas of the German Empire", which was a key work in dialectology. The geographical and historical division of the dialects resulted in a proper dialect geography, with which Wenker actually intended to find confirmation of the acceptance of the exemption of the sound laws . In the course of his work, however, he found the opposite and noted that there are no laws that work without exception and not even sharply defined dialect areas. Thus, sound laws were detached from their previous scientific isolation by dialect geography and relativized to sound rules.

Apart from the dialect-geographic work one began to gain knowledge about the cultural history based on the dialects. Thus one moved away from the scientific approach of examining linguistic elements in isolation, and thus came to the point of considering language in the context of space and time as well as in connection with meaning.

literature

  • Hans Arens: Linguistics. The course of their development from antiquity to the present. Volume 1, Athenäum-Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1969, ISBN 3-8072-2077-1 .
  • Helmut Glück (Ed.): Metzler Lexicon Language. Metzler, Stuttgart 2005.
  • Hermann Paul : Principles of the history of language. First edition. 1880.
  • Karl Brugmann and Berthold Delbrück: Outline of the comparative grammar of the Indo-European languages. Second edition, five volumes. 1897-1916.
  • Hugo Schuchardt : “About the sound laws. Against the young grammarians ". In: Hugo-Schuchardt-Brevier, a vademecum in general linguistics , edited by Leo Spitzer. Halle (Saale) 1922.
  • Oliver Junge and Horst Lohnstein: Introduction to grammar theory. Munich 2006, p. 68 ff.
  • Harald Wiese: A journey through time to the origins of our language. How Indo-European Studies explains our words. Second edition. Logos Verlag, Berlin 2010.
  • Eveline Einhauser: The young grammarians: a problem for linguistic historiography. Scientific publishing house, Trier 1989.
  • Hadumod Bußmann (Ed.): Lexicon of Linguistics. Third updated and expanded edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-520-45203-0 .
  • Gerhard Helbig: History of modern linguistics. Under the special aspect of grammar theory. VEB Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig 1973. P. 27 ff.
  • Brigitte Bartschat: Methods of Linguistics. From Hermann Paul to Noam Chomsky . Erich Schmidt, Berlin 1996, p. 13 ff.

swell

  1. ^ A b Hans Arens: Linguistics: The course of their development from antiquity to the present, Volume 1, Athenäum-Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag Frankfurt am Main, 1969.
  2. ↑ Hadumod Bußmann (Ed.): Lexicon of Linguistics. 3rd updated and expanded edition. Kröner, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-520-45203-0 (Junggrammatiker): "Description of atomistic individual processes instead of systemic connections"

Web links

Wiktionary: Junggrammatiker  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations