William Dwight Whitney and the Science of LanguageJHU Press, 2021 M06 22 - 360 pages Linguistics, or the science of language, emerged as an independent field of study in the nineteenth century, amid the religious and scientific ferment of the Victorian era. William Dwight Whitney, one of that period's most eminent language scholars, argued that his field should be classed among the social sciences, thus laying a theoretical foundation for modern sociolinguistics. William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language offers a full-length study of America's pioneer professional linguist, the founder and first president of the American Philological Association and a renowned Orientalist. In recounting Whitney's remarkable career, Stephen G. Alter examines the intricate linguistic debates of that period as well as the politics of establishing language study as a full-fledged science. Whitney's influence, Alter argues, extended to the German Neogrammarian movement and the semiotic theory of Ferdinand de Saussure. This exploration of an early phase of scientific language study provides readers with a unique perspective on Victorian intellectual life as well as on the transatlantic roots of modern linguistic theory. |
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... Society and a founder and the first president of the American Philological Association, these being the nation's first organizations wholly dedicated to linguistically based research. Whitney's own specialty was Vedic Sanskrit, the ...
... society and behavior, including speech behavior. How could linguists meet this threat? A further complicating factor was the Darwinian revolution, along with the Victorian debate over ''man's place in nature.'' Some of the 4 William ...
... Society of Bengal, Jones made a striking observation. He pointed to the structural similarity between Sanskrit, the ancient language of the Indians, and classical Greek and Latin. So close was this similarity, he said, that it could not ...
... Society. This allowed Whitney to travel to New Haven to attend a meeting of that organization as Salisbury's guest.31 W. D. Whitney's labors at the Northampton bank finally came to an end with the arrival of summer 1849. At that point a ...
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Contents
1 | |
6 | |
2 Indological Foreshadowings | 39 |
3 Victorian Language Debates | 53 |
4 Buildinga System of General Linguistics | 66 |
5 Organizinga New Science | 94 |
6 Creatinga Science of Language | 123 |
7 Forgingan Alliance with Anthropology | 146 |
8 The Battlewith MaxMüller | 174 |