A Few Remarks on Adam Smith’s Dissertation (1761)
Summary
In 1761 Adam Smith (1723–90) published his Dissertation on the Origin of Languages. Erroneously scholars have thought that this essay appeared as a supplement to the second edition of Smith’s book The Theory of Moral Sentiments of the same year; in fact it was only added to the third edition of that work (1767). Against Coseriu’s opinion that Adam Smith must be considered as a pioneer of the typology of language, one can put forward that Smith’s ideas on the typology of language are very similar to those of the French Abbé Gabriel Girard (1677–1748), whose influence is admitted by Smith himself. On another point, it turns out that before 1809, the year in which J. Manget published a French translation of Smith’s Dissertation, already three other translations into French of the same work had appeared. First-hand inspection of texts appears desirable in the writing of the history of linguistics.