Our linguistic history is full of myths. There is the myth of the national language, the one of a particular genius of each language. Insofar as national languages are artifacts built by centuries of language policy and by the careful equipping of the major culture’s languages through language… read more
The eighteenth century constituted a “turning point” in our intellectual tradition: the question of the origin of languages became a question for “natural philosophy” or speculation, which in most cases avoided recourse to religion. This change had solid philosophical bases. By refusing to accept… read more
The discovery of the works of Jean Macé has pushed back the publication of the first known French “general and rational grammar” to 1651 for certain, and perhaps as early as about 1635. The simplest way of realizing the historian’s goal of accounting for certain “phenomena” is to organize them into… read more
Un article de J. Vendryes (1955), a popularisé le mythe, repris par Ε. Benveniste (1971) selon lequel la première société de linguistique, serait la Société de Linguistique de Paris, fondée en 1866. K. Koerner signalait en 1976 l’existence d’une société antérieure: la Société Internationale de… read more
