Making a genealogy of “American linguistics” with John Eliot’s Indian Grammar Begun (1666)

Mark Amsler
University of Auckland
Summary

In the history of linguistics John Pickering (1777–1846) and Stephen Du Ponceau’s (1760–1844) decision to reedit and republish John Eliot’s (ca. 1604–1690) The Indian Grammar Begun is an important but underrecognized event. Eliot’s grammar was first published in 1666, but by the early 1800s had been mostly forgotten. Applying book history and critical discourse approaches, I argue the new 1822 edition assembled by Pickering and Du Ponceau was at the center of a newly emergent knowledge project aimed to establish an ‘American’ mode of comparative linguistics on the world intellectual stage. The grammatical analysis of Native American languages, especially Algonquin, and the critique of current European models and typologies of morphology and syntax, especially von Humboldt’s, were central to Pickering and Du Ponceau’s project. Du Ponceau may be “the father of American philology”, but he was not working alone nor did the concept of ‘Comparative Philology’ derive solely from Du Ponceau. Rather, Du Ponceau was the strategist for a more collaborative, organized approach based on the study of American Indian languages. The new edition of Eliot’s grammar reveals how Du Ponceau and Pickering were establishing an informal research network devoted to North American indigenous languages. The production and arrangement of their book depended on a broad, complex, and ultimately institutionally-supported network of scholars and amateur linguists. Their edition also shows how Du Ponceau and Pickering responded to the underlying ideological debate over “savage” languages with an emergent discourse grounded in Native American languages, ‘facts’, and ‘scientific’ linguistics.

Table of contents

The decision to republish a book long out of print is an explicit intervention in a contemporary discursive scene. Sometimes a text is rediscovered, other times it is simply made more widely available again. In literary or intellectual discourses such as linguistics and language study, the new edition often represents the motivated return of a forgotten or repressed past in order to assert, or reassert, ancestry, genealogy, or prescience. By returning other, prior voices to the present dialogue, the editors or publishers reprinting the long unavailable text often have in mind to engage with current discourse and change the future of that discourse. The newly republished text is a kind of utterance which makes ‘other’ speech relevant to current disciplinary debates or paradigms. Book history shows how individual texts circulate in one or more textual economies, how they are made and remade for new or different readers, and how they can linger forgotten and overlooked in a material archive until they are made ‘relevant’ again with new contexts. Book history also shows that while the material book can preserve the surface of an utterance, it does not always say what the author intended the book to say. The return does not always repeat.

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