Book review
Gabelentz and the Science of Language. Ed. by James McElvenny.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019. 316 pp. ISBN 978-94-6298-624-4 (HB). . € 105.00 (HB)

Reviewed by Jacques François
Université de Caen Normandie
Table of contents

The multifaceted book published by James McElvenny is intended to introduce one of the major representatives of German linguistics in the second half of the 19th century to the English-speaking world. At that time, after the crucial discoveries of Franz Bopp (1791–1867), Jacob Grimm (1785–1863) and August Schleicher (1821–1868), among others, in the historical-comparative grammar of Indo-European languages, and those of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) in general linguistics, academic research was divided into two schools with divergent interests, that of the Neogrammarians for the study of ancient Indo-European languages, and that of Humboldt’s pupils for the classification of other language families, especially those without a written tradition. Georg Conon von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) was certainly one of the major representatives of the Humboldtian movement in linguistics, alongside Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899). But unlike Humboldt Gabelentz never adhered, as a sinologist, to the thesis that Chinese and other languages with an isolating morphology are devoid of “internal form” and therefore cannot be the medium of an advanced culture and civilization. The idea of a correlation between cultural development and linguistic morphology was rather foreign to him.

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