Johann Gottfried Herder’s (1744–1803) Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache was published in 1772 after winning a prize competition instituted by the Berlin Academy of Sciences for an essay to determine whether or how man, left to his own devices, could devise language for himself. The work was hastily written in the last weeks of 1770 in order to meet the closing date, and its diction and form bear the marks of hurried composition. Alhough it is generally considered to be a seminal work on its subject, it is anything but academic, and some critics have even gone so far as to regard it as a lampoon at the expense of the Academy by showing its question to be a ‘non-question’. At all events, the argumentation of the Abhandlung is not without its weak points; and it is interesting in this light to examine the work of others of the 30 entrants to the competition, who published their essays anonymously about the time when Herder’s work appeared, or a little later.

The present paper traces the main lines of the arguments of three of these essays; and it emerges that Herder’s was not the only one to establish the importance of the distinctive feature (Merkmal) in identifying an object. The more cautious contestants, however, looked upon the Merkmal as an indispensable first step in creating a name; this in turn was to become an initial stage in language. They portrayed the origin of language as a continuous process rather than a sudden discovery by emphasizing the progressive development of abstraction or by examining the means by which the association between words and objects was established within communities. Herder’s rivals, however, do not take account of views expressed before their time, as Herder does in the prize-winning essay, nor do they stress, as he does, that language is necessarily a product of human ingenuity. Nevertheless, Herder was not the only competitor to make an original and positive contribution to the debate, and the essays examined here, too, throw valuable light on a problem which exercised scholars in the 18th century, and in which the 20th has shown renewed interest in the light of enhanced knowledge of linguistics, physiology and ethology.