Book review
Hermann Paul’s 'Principles of Language History' Revisited: Translations and Reflections. . eds. Peter Auer & Murray Robert W.Peter Auer, David Fertig, Paul J. Hopper & Murray Robert W. (= linguae & litterae: Publications of the School of Language & Literature. Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies, 61.).
Berlin & Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2015. vi, 297 pp. ISBN 978-3-11-034884-2 € 99,95 $ 140,00

Reviewed by Armin Burkhardt
Universität Magdeburg
Table of contents

Hermann Paul (born in Salbke, incorporated into Magdeburg in 1910, in 1846 and died in Munich in 1921) was not just one of the leading Neogrammarians but, judging from today, he must be considered the most influential among them all. His Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte in particular, first published in 1880, may be said to have served as the “bible of the neogrammarians” (Wilbur 1977: li), but the book is also widely considered one of the most important works in the history of linguistics. However, 20th-century linguistics, for the most part, was dominated by synchronism and descriptivism, which were closely related to such big names as Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) and Noam Chomsky (born 1928), i.e., to Structuralism and Transformational Grammar, strong movements which hardly took any notice of the processes and mechanisms of language change. But still there were scholars (like myself) who were interested in language history and the principles of linguistic change as well and, therefore, intensively studied Paul’s writings and gained a lot of insights from them.

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References

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