We were shocked and deeply saddened by the sudden death of Konrad Koerner, the founder of Historiographia Linguistica, who passed away on 6 January 2022, at the age of 82. He had no chronic illness or severe condition that could possibly lead us to anticipate his loss. While he had removed himself from the day-to-day business of the journal, he was still keeping an eye on its contents, as he was, until very recently, following up on the volume series he had also founded.

John Joseph has done us the favor of writing an obituary in which the life and achievements of Konrad Koerner are given exclusive attention and presented more extensively than in these editors’ notes. We shall use this space to offer a few words about Konrad Koerner’s editorial activity, his importance for our field, and what he intended to do when he founded Historiographia Linguistica, nearly 50 years ago. The project dates back to 1970 and the launching was planned with John Benjamins when he was only 33, an early age by all 20th century standards.11. Historiographia Linguistica, “whose name came to me on the train from Krefeld to Amsterdam in early August 1972”, that is shortly after Konrad Koerner defended his thesis (Koerner 2013Koerner, Konrad 2013 Koerner’s Korner. Historiographia Linguistica 40:3.531-534. : 532). “I still recall that in March 1970, after I had passed my comprehensive exam at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, I told my subsequent thesis supervisor, the late Geoffrey L. Bursill-Hall (1920–1998), that I wanted to start a journal devoted to the history of linguistics. His response was something like “Young man, hold on, wait until you have written and defended your dissertation” ” (Koerner 2013Koerner, Konrad 2013 Koerner’s Korner. Historiographia Linguistica 40:3.531-534. : 531). The 1960s, and more so the 1970s, witnessed a surge of interest in the history and epistemology of sciences (Auroux & Haroche 1980Auroux, Sylvain & Claudine Haroche 1980 Bulletin de la Société d’Histoire et d’Epistémologie des Sciences du Langage 4.) which had its counterpart in linguistics. Schmitter elaborates on the reasons possibly underlying this renewed interest (cf. 1982Schmitter, Peter 1982 Untersuchungen zur Historiographie der Linguistik. Tübingen, Gunter Narr Verlag: 17–26).

Sylvain Auroux has often remarked that linguistic description is one of the three oldest scholarly pursuits of humanity, along with mathematics and astronomy. Yet, in spite of this venerable age and its subsequent connections with multiple other fields, the historiography of linguistics (to use this convenient shortcut for the history of ideas and descriptive practices about languages) has remained what is familiarly known in German as a “kleines Fach”, that is, a ‘small discipline’ or ‘discipline rare’, with very few dedicated university chairs. The fact that linguists often picture themselves as riding the wave of scientific progress, or worse, as belonging to the generation which gave linguistics its scientific credentials, is certainly not conducive to arousing a deep interest in ideas assumed to have expired. Texts of yore do sometimes capture the attention of linguists, but often in proportion to their present value for a current theory, and are typically exploited in an acontextual way. In Battles in the Mind Fields, Goldsmith and Laks have done historians the petty pleasure of compiling a list of citations in which linguists, from the nineteenth century to the present, trumpet that their field has at last gained a truly scientific status, or is on the brink of becoming a “real” science, or is now closer to “hard” science than ever etc. (2019Goldsmith, John & Bernard Laks 2019 Battles in the Mind Field. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.: 8ff). There is enough in this list to dampen one’s positivist enthusiasm and to relativize the value of one’s favorite theory as a vantage point from which the past can be interpreted and judged.

This state-of-affairs renders all the more significant the enormous effort Konrad Koerner put into promoting and defending our “small discipline”, which is always at risk of marginalization or used for self-serving narration. This effort also took a “meta-historical” direction since it involved providing material for the history of modern history-writing, by commenting on Benfey or Pedersen, for instance. In fact, the record of historical studies in Konrad Koerner’s papers and bibliographical compilations was so thorough that it has probably saved many a valuable study from oblivion.22.For lists of such historical studies, see in his bibliography the reference (g) under “1974”. Writing on the history of historical narrations of linguistics was also a way for him to circumscribe what a sound historiography should be, in contrast to other attested modes of narration he thought more dubious, especially what he liked to call (after the historian Butterfield) “whiggish” histories (a prime example being Chomsky’s Cartesian Linguistics, 1966Chomsky, Noam 1966 Cartesian Linguistics. New York: Harper & Row., i.e. published roughly at the time when Konrad Koerner began to delve into the history of linguistics). This typology of historical narrations and the defence of his version of historiography made up the essential matter of his editorial of the first issue of Historiographia Linguistica (1974Koerner, Konrad 1974 Purpose and Scope of Historiographia Linguistica. Editorial. Historiographia Linguistica 1:1.1-10. ). For Konrad Koerner, “historiography” meant a new kind of non-teleological, non-propagandistic and non-reconstructive kind of history, that is, one which did not plot theories along a line of progress, or construct an ancestry for a supposedly superior framework, or take stock of the past to refound linguistics (Koerner 1974Koerner, Konrad 1974 Purpose and Scope of Historiographia Linguistica. Editorial. Historiographia Linguistica 1:1.1-10. and passim in his work). This historiography, he argued, should be as non-committal as possible, and the bailiwick of specialists having a dual expertise in linguistics and intellectual history; it should first and foremost be concerned with the development of theories (rather than the recording of facts) and aiming at a picture of a period which does not give pride of place to the “winners” but sketches the global intellectual context, including other sciences and in society.

In its scope, Historiographia Linguistica was to promote pluralism, thematic openness and pluridisciplinarity. In his first editorial, Konrad Koerner mentioned psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics, quite understandably as these disciplines (in their most recent garb) were blossoming in the seventies. But, as his own work shows, he also included “hard sciences” as fields the historian of linguistics should not hesitate to draw on. He did this when underlining, for example, the importance of the natural sciences for Schleicher, and the very choice of the word Linguistik, in his opinion modelled after Botanik or Physik (Koerner 1989Koerner, Konrad 1989 Practicing Linguistic Historiography. Selected essays. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. : 7).

An illustration of Konrad Koerner’s openness is the fact that he welcomed and promoted contributions in subfields of the history of the language sciences, like missionary linguistics. When Otto Zwartjes and Even Hovdhaugen organized the first International Conference on Missionary Linguistics in Oslo in March 2003, not only did he present an important paper, he did not hesitate a moment to have a selection of the papers of this conference published in the SiHoLS series, arguing that this subfield was still in its infancy in those days. Thanks to Konrad Koerner’s enthusiasm and support, missionary linguistics has now become a recognized subfield within the history of linguistics. Six volumes have been published sofar in SiHoLS (106, 109, 111, 114, 122 and 130) and two special issues in Historiographia Linguistica (36:2/3 and 42:2/3). Spanish being an important language in this field, and as a recognition of “the fact that more and more papers in Spanish devoted to this particular area of interest are being produced” (Koerner 2015Koerner, Konrad 2015 Koerner’s Korner. Historiographia Linguistica 42:2/3.465-467. : 466), Konrad Koerner added Spanish as a fourth working language in these publications. The SiHoLS series also published volumes on specific areas within missionary linguistics, such as the Pacific Northwest Coast (116), missionary grammars written in Portuguese worldwide (117) and recently, the indigenous languages of North America (129).

The choice of three main working languages, English, French and German, was not only for reasons of personal ease of access to the respective literatures, but also with the goal of favoring a kind of pluralism and staving off any kind of domination of a language (an aspect of “his instinctive resistance to domination”, says John Joseph, this issue). To his eyes, creating an international journal was not a justification for choosing English as the international language par excellence. As he noted, in linguistics, journals supposed to cater to an international audience and exclusively in English for that reason could very well be parochial in their way of approaching linguistic theorizing (some examples will no doubt come to the mind of readers). Theoretical ecumenism and non-committal historiography, thematic and disciplinary openness, and linguistic pluralism (to a degree, of course), these were the principles he set forth.

The services he has rendered to our community cannot be overstated, be it through his own scholarship (see the bibliography included in this volume), his prodigious editorial activity or his organisational skills. On the editorial side, Historiographia Linguistica not only was the first journal specially devoted to this area of research, but it set an example for other journals. In 1984, he founded Diachronica, a journal whose field, historical linguistics, figured quite naturally in the horizon of a German historian of the modern science of language. He also supervised five book series, of which three are of most direct relevance for us here.33.In all: ACiL = Amsterdam Classics in Linguistics, 1800–1925CiPL = Classics in Psycholinguistics (for example the reprint of Wegener’s Untersuchungen über die Grundfragen des Sprachlebens, 1885, was published in this series, with an introduction by C. Knobloch)CILT = Current Issues in Linguistic TheoryLISL = Library and Information Sources in LinguisticsSiHoLS = Studies in the History of the Language Sciences.CILT is essentially description-oriented and notably includes studies on Romance and historical linguistics. The series has now reached its 360th volume. Its focus is not historical. However, in CILT were published a three-volume collection of papers on the legacy of Zellig Harris (Nevin 2002aNevin, Bruce 2002a The Legacy of Zellig Harris. Language and information into the 21st century. Volume 1: Philosophy of science, syntax and semantics. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins., 2002bNevin, Bruce 2002b The Legacy of Zellig Harris. Language and information into the 21st century. Volume 2: Mathematics and computability of language. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.) as well as disseminated papers with an historical scope, for example in volumes on linguistic relativity (Pütz & Verspoor 2000Pütz, Martin & Marjolijn H. Verspoor 2000 Explorations in Linguistic Relativity. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ), iconicity (Simone 1995Simone, Raffaele ed. 1995 Iconicity in Language. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ), and the pre-history and history of languages (Brogyanyi 1992Brogyanyi, Bela 1992 Prehistory, History and Historiography of Language, Speech and Linguistic Theory. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ). Embleton, Joseph and Niederehe (1999Embleton, Sheila, John E. Joseph & Hans-Josef Niederehe 1999 Introduction: Problems of structuralist beginnings (and endings). The Emergence of the Modern Language Sciences: Studies on the transition from historical-comparative to structural linguistics. In honour of E. F. K. Koerner. Vol. 1: Historiographical perspectives ed. by Sheila Embleton, John E. Joseph & Hans-Josef Niederehe, ix-xxviii. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.: xix) describe its importance as follows: “Not only do many linguists owe their careers (…) to the existence of this series, but linguistics owes at least some of its current richness to the fact that somebody took the initiative to preserve the pluralism of the field’s voices (…).”LISL includes a volume on Pott (Leopold 1983Leopold, Joan 1983 The Letter Liveth. The life, work and library of August Friedrich Pott (1802–1887). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.) and one on William Jones (Cannon 1979Cannon, Garland 1979 Sir William Jones: A bibliography of primary and secondary sources. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ). Otherwise, the collection provides bibliographical resources for concepts (like ‘analogy’), categories (‘prepositions’), fields (‘theoretical syntax’) and areas (Germanic studies). For more detail on the establishment of these series and their scope, see the already cited introduction by Embleton, Joseph and Niederehe (1999)Embleton, Sheila, John E. Joseph & Hans-Josef Niederehe 1999 Introduction: Problems of structuralist beginnings (and endings). The Emergence of the Modern Language Sciences: Studies on the transition from historical-comparative to structural linguistics. In honour of E. F. K. Koerner. Vol. 1: Historiographical perspectives ed. by Sheila Embleton, John E. Joseph & Hans-Josef Niederehe, ix-xxviii. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.. In SiHOLS has been published the bulk of historical studies (collections and monographies) to have been supervised by Konrad Koerner. The volume series “Studies in the History of the Language Sciences” (SiHOLS) now counts 130 books, the publication of which all but the last entirely overseen by Konrad Koerner, a staggering feat when considering he was responsible for turning out three issues of Historiographia Linguistica every year. To this series must be added the 18 volumes of the “Amsterdam Classics in Linguistics”, which often provided the first-hand material to which scholars could turn to in order to better appreciate the claims made in some of Konrad Koerner’s papers. As an example, his interest for Kruszewski was reflected by the publication of a dedicated study by Radwańska-Williams (1992)Radwańska-Williams, Joanna 1992 A Paradigm Lost. The linguistic theory of Mikołaj Kruszewski. Amsterdam, John Benjamins. and a book including the translation of two famous essays by the Polish linguist (Kruszewski 1995Kruszewski, Mikołaj 1995 Writings in General Linguistics. On Sound Alternation (1881) and Outline of Linguistic Science (1883). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. ).44.To which we may add the review of Radwańska-Williams’ book by Szwedek in this journal (1995Szwedek, Alexander 1995 Review of A Paradigm Lost: The theory of Mikolaj Kruszewski . Historiographia Linguistica 22:1/2.245-250. ). In other words, to the reader interested in Kruszewski was made available a full package: first-hand material (in translation), its extensive presentation and commentary, and a review of the latter. Konrad Koerner also acted as general editor of the shorter “Classics in Psycholinguistics” series, in which is offered a complement to the two series just mentioned, with a (not unjustified) tropism toward German literature, or heavily German-influenced work, such as Bloomfield’s first opus (and this may have been part of Konrad Koerner’s “rehabilitation” of Bloomfield against the bashing of “Bloomfieldians” by generativists; those who have read him knows he was keen on redressing wrongs done by posterity).55.A special issue of Historiographia Linguistica was devoted to Bloomfield in 1987 (14:1/2). There is therefore a coherence discernible between Konrad Koerner’s own concerns and the various studies for which he served as editor or commissioned. This coherence, however, should definitely not suggest that periods, areas and fields that fell out of his main purview were neglected in his editing activity, and among the volumes of the SiHOLS series ancient, medieval and early modern linguistic thought is well represented (as alluded to in note 2, Geoffrey Bursill-Hall had been his PhD supervisor and they edited a volume on medieval grammar together). This striving toward an exhaustive coverage of the field is inspirational, and the best homage we can pay to him is to keep the journal and series he founded alive and thriving without departing from this ecumenical, “historiographical” spirit.

In these circumstances, it would be more improper than ever not to respect the use established by Konrad Koerner of recognizing the help the editors have received in preparing this issue.

The scholars whose names appear below have greatly assisted us in evaluating the submissions we have received, and they deserve all our gratitude:

As is, unfortunately, often the case, we must apologize to our readers for the belated release of the present issue. We have not received a sufficient number of submissions of good quality during the past year and a half, yet, we have not been idle. As editors, we know we should always be on the lookout for potential articles through blogs, personals contacts and conference papers that seemed to augur a good article. The pandemic has probably played a role in this relative scarcity of proposals since their number now appears to be on the rise. Our field is vast, with countless potential subjects of interest, globalisation is on the march (with a greater number of Chinese colleagues submitting proposals, for example), so that there is no reason to fear that the future will not match our expectations.

To improve our chances, we believe that proposals for special issues should be encouraged. Because they can be planned ahead, special issues may help us ensure a more regular rhythm of publications. Not that special issues have not been published in the past, for example the already mentioned ones on missionary linguistics and on Bloomfield (1987, 14.1/2), and more recently another on aspects of medieval and Renaissance linguistics (2017, 44.2/3). We simply mean to invite scholars to make such submissions by making this possibility quite explicit in the guidelines. This is now the case, with the very efficient help of Anke de Looper.

Special thanks are due to our review editor, Klaas Willems, who always manages to recruit reviewers for books we judge important. This task is by no means an easy one. It involves keeping a watch on recent publications, sifting through it to discern what is most valuable for us, and going through one’s list of contacts or the bibliography of the work, or the internet, or all of the above, to find expert reviewers.To them, as to the authors of articles, we express our gratitude for their contribution to the journal.

Lastly, it would be unfair and unthinkable to forget the person whom we interact most at Benjamins, Patricia Leplae. Not only does our joint work proceeds as smoothly as is conceivable, but it does so in a good-humored atmosphere. Many thanks to her.