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Abstracts: "Language and Languages in Berlin around 1800"

Part 1: German and the other languages

Joachim Gessinger

In summer 1792, the Berlin Royal Academy of Sciences and Humanities posed a prize question concerning the purification of the German language. The prize was won by the educationalist Joachim Heinrich Campe. In my paper, the history of the prize question inside and outside the "Deutsche Deputation" (German delegation) is reconstructed. It thereby becomes clear how, above all, the proximity of the position of the Academy member Gedike and that of the prize winner Campe concerning linguistic policy and theory, and the convergence of focus on the lexicon and on loan and foreign words, led to the ultimate formulation of the prize question. The political dimension of the decision in favour of Campe, as an honorary citizen of the French Revolution, becomes recognizable if the thesis presented in my paper is correct, i.e. at least some of the people involved knew to whom they were awarding the prize - and Campe, in a sophisticated game of hide-and-seek, also allowed himself to be recognized as the anonymous author.

Manuela Böhm

The subject of the following paper is the language situation in Berlin's French colony around 1800. From the middle to the end of the 18th century the Huguenots living in Berlin and their descendants began to go through the process of acculturation that can be recognized in their language shift from French to German. The reconstruction of the process of language shift in the colony orphanage shows that around 1800 the school children in this establishment, during the course of their primary education, became completely fluent in both languages. However, when one asks how the children learnt both languages, e.g. by studying teaching materials, school reports, and statements about the linguistic proficiency of the orphans, one can conclude that they learnt French as a foreign language from the 1820s at the latest. The comparative analysis of the language shift in the orphanage and in the surrounding colony shows that we are dealing here with a slowly developing and highly complex process whose course differed according to place, time and social sphere.

Annett Volmer

The following paper examines an individual case of linguistic fate at the end of the 18th century - that of the translator and journalist Samuel-Henri Catel. Here we are dealing with a speaker who consciously experienced and reflected on the diglossic situation in which he found himself. The two languages between which he lived are French as the language of his forefathers, the Huguenots, and German as the language of his everyday life and homeland. Historical roots versus regional rooting in the Diaspora? This constellation creates identity problems that I want to pursue in the first part of my paper. The linguistic dilemma of the Huguenot Catel represents the language situation confronting the third generation of Huguenots in Prussia and is resolved - in this individual case - in works that are culturally educational and that deal with methodological aspects of teaching language. I will devote the second part of my paper to this topic.

Conrad Wiedemann

Around 1800, while experiencing a cultural blossoming similar to that of Weimar, Berlin was a bilingual city. This is easily forgotten because there has not been much research into the most important evidence of it, i.e. of the bilingual discussions and letters of that time. The case study presented here aims to give a first impression of this German-French bilingualism in everyday usage, and to highlight some of its organizational criteria (optionality, fluency, authenticity). An unusual triangular exchange of letters during the years 1804-1806 between a Hohenzollern prince, a Huguenot woman and a Jewess serves as an example. The topic of their correspondence encompasses a concept of idealistic love, an idealistic language of love, and the related question of an authentic idiom. The decision in favour of German that is reached by the correspondents, however, does not in any way alter the bilingual conception that they have of themselves. The first part of the study concerns the origins of Berlin's tolerance of bilingualism in which two optional cultural and educational policies are superimposed: namely, on the one hand, the liberal religious policy of the Hohenzollern, to which Berlin's large and influential Huguenot colony owes its existence, and on the other hand, Frederick the Great's decision in favour of a purely French culture at court and in the sciences. After Frederick's death (1786), both lines of policy lead into an open, bourgeois, urban culture.

Roland Gruschka

For Berlin's Jewish population, the time around 1800 was very much influenced by their advanced acculturation into the non-Jewish German middle class. On the linguistic level, the adoption of the German educational ideal meant a gradual shift from Yiddish to High German in all sectors of public and - after a time lag - of private life too. The Jewish Enlightenment philosophers, whose intellectual centre during that period was Berlin, hoped that a modern German and Jewish identity could be established though bilingualism in High German and modern Hebrew. They rejected Yiddish and thus contributed to its slow decline in German-speaking areas. In 1793, in the middle of a period of cultural and political turmoil, the Jewish Enlightenment philosopher Isaac Euchel (1756-1804) wrote his comedy Reb Henoch, oder: Woß tut me damit? in which the use of different languages and idiolects (High German, Yiddish, German dialects, English, the broken German of foreigners etc.) serves to portray the characters on stage and their conflicts with one another in a humorous way. Euchel's comedy Reb Henoch not only gives an idea of the complex linguistic socialization of "ordinary" Jews living in Berlin at the end of the 18th century, but it also clearly exemplifies the attitude of Jewish philosophers to Yiddish and other languages set against the background of a modern Jewish identity that was yet to be created.

Hartmut Schmidt

Moses Mendelssohn, a devout Jew and committed Berlin Enlightenment philosopher, created an edition of the Old Testament with which he pursued the following aims:
a Bible edition in the tradition of the Hebrew Bible with all the usual commentaries complemented by a version of the text in modern German in Hebraic letters, the creation of a basic text for private use based on the German of the Lutheran Bible that took into consideration the level of literacy of its Jewish readers, the (only partly successful) stimulus for an edition of this German translation in German typeface to appear simultaneously as suggested reading for Christians as well, the refinement and modernization of the German language in contemporary Bible editions according to personal knowledge of the text and the traditional Jewish interpretation as the basis for cultural contact between German Christians and Jews.
Only parts of Mendelssohn's translation exist: the most important ones are the Torah and the Psalter. However, his work on the Bible was continued by his friends and pupils under foreseeable difficulties. Even though Mendelssohn did not fulfil his aims, his work is a neglected highlight of High German in Berlin around 1800.

Part 2: Comparative linguistic studies

Jürgen Trabant

Since the 16th century, the project of documenting and describing the multitude and diversity of languages has been connected with the title Mithridates. With reference to Mithridates from Conrad Gesner (1555) and from Adelung and Vater (1806-17) it will be shown that, despite all the increase in knowledge about the languages of the world, the aim of linguistic investigations remains the same: the aim is to research the historical origin of peoples. Languages are only an indication of this: "De originibus gentium ductis potissimum ex indicio linguarum" (Concerning the origins of peoples principally on the basis of linguistic evidence), as Leibniz formulated it in his Brevis designatio (1710). Comparative linguistic studies first became an autonomous discipline with Wilhelm von Humboldt's Vergleichendes Sprachstudium, in which research into the structural diversity of individual languages as a mirror of the human mind is central.

Gerda Haßler

In the history of linguistics, many legends about the Spanish Jesuit Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro (1735-1809) and his influence on the further development of linguistics have been disseminated. The subject of this paper is to reconstruct his statements pertaining to linguistic theory, and to describe their relevance to the discussion about language that took place in Berlin around 1800. My starting point will be his little-known work Idea dell'Universo (1778-1787) written in Italian. In this book he has already begun to compare languages and to consider their origin. Hervás is a man of the 18th century in that he wanted to capture the state of advanced knowledge of his day. In his Catálogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas (1800-1805) he published the largest collection of languages then known that must be examined in relation to his anthropological work. For Hervás, different languages are a reliable criterium for classifying peoples. Language diversity, in particular, is in his view proof of divine influence. Fundamentally, the different "artificial" languages serving human communication are to be considered separately from the mental and natural languages. Because of the priority he gave to his anthropological interests, it seems problematic to consider Hervás as a forerunner of historical comparative linguistics.

Barbara Kaltz

On the instructions of Catherine the Great, the Berliner and natural scientist Peter Simon Pallas (1740-1811) compiled a comparative dictionary of the languages known at that time (2 volumes, Petersburg 1786/7-1789). The work comprises word lists that contain about 300 words (mostly nouns) translated from Russian into about 200 languages. Particularly in learned circles, Pallas's glossary met with great interest but also with criticism because of its methodological weaknesses. Christian Jacob Kraus (1753-1807), who taught at the University of Königsberg, wrote a review of the first volume concerning European and Asian languages for the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung. My paper aims to show how Kraus deals with the subject of his review, how he develops his conception of a scientifically sound comparison of languages within the framework of "philosophischen Universallinguistik" (philosophical universal linguistics) (Kraus 1787) out of his criticism of Pallas, and thus presents a perfect example of "deutscher gründlicher Kritik" (thorough German criticism) (Friedrich Adelung).

Ute Tintemann

Julius Heinrich Klaproth (1783-1835) is considered to be one of the most important orientalists of his time and one of the founders of East Asian studies. Above all, he conducted substantial research into the geography and the languages of the Asian continent. But it was precisely Klaproth's linguistic writings that were criticized many times by his contemporaries as a collection of purely lexical material. I would like to show through an analysis of Asia polyglotta (1823) that with this major work Klaproth was not only one of the first scholars to draw up an extensive classification of the languages of the Asian continent. Even more interestingly, it is precisely Klaproth's thinking on methodology that shows that he classified languages not just according to geographical but also to clearly defined linguistic criteria. Klaproth himself understood his work Asia polyglotta to be a revision of the largest contemporary collections of languages. Thus, he additionally planned the publication of a Mithridates français, i.e. a new edition of the Mithridates by Adelung and Vater that was the most comprehensive collection of languages at that time.

Brigitte Schlieben-Lange/Harald Weydt

In his prize-winning paper concerning the comparative study of the major languages of Europe, the Berliner theologist Daniel Jenisch makes an assessment of the 14 major European languages, in which the literary works of their best poets orient his approach. First of all, in a brief theoretical section, Jenisch establishes four criteria - richness, emphatic quality, clarity/precision, and harmony - for his comparison of the languages. These are regarded by Jenisch (and similarly by Humboldt later) as individuals whose character is manifested in literary texts. Jenisch, however, rejected the question about the ideal language that was part of the prize question of the Berlin Royal Academy. He views each language as having merits but also disadvantages which distinguish it from the others. Jenisch's comparative study of languages brings to an end a method of comparing languages that goes back to Dante, namely the comparison of languages based on the works of their best authors.

Claudio Marazzini

The Italian theologist and historian Carlo Denina lived in Berlin between 1782 and 1804, where he wrote his major linguistic work, La clef des langues (1804). In Berlin, he was not only able to prepare this work by giving numerous talks at the Berlin Royal Academy but, for the first time, he also had access to important texts belonging to the European tradition of language studies.

In La clef des langues, Denina undertakes a comparative analysis of the European languages, i.e. his inquiry concerns the origin of language and the origin of sounds with reference to the Scythian theory. The new researches into Sanskrit are only marginally taken into account so that one can call Denina's research paleocomparativismo, in that it is a preliminary stage of the comparative method of historical linguistics.

Furthermore, it is important for the history of the Italian language that Denina is one of the first scholars who considered the Italian dialects and the standard language to be of equal value. In my paper, therefore, emphasis is laid on this part of La clef des langues, i.e. on Denina's comparative linguistic studies of the Italian (Piemontian) dialects.

Jean Rousseau

The Prüfung der Untersuchungen über die Ureinwohner Hispaniens vermittelst der Vaskischen Sprachen (1821) was not only the first linguistic work by Wilhelm von Humboldt to be published; it differs considerably from his other language studies that were published simultaneously or appeared later more so because of its ethnographic perspective. For Humboldt used his knowledge of the Basque language in order to answer the question of whether one can gain information about the original inhabitants of South Western Europe through a comparative analysis of place names and proper names as taken to be the oldest evidence of language. A theoretical point of reference for Humboldt's analyses is the Allgemeine Nordische Geschichte (1771) by August Ludwig Schlözer, a work with which Humboldt was in many ways in agreement. For the first time, the ideas and thoughts that Humboldt adopted from Schlözer in relation to the theory and practice of comparing languages in the Prüfung will be presented here. It can be demonstrated that Humboldt not only valued Schlözer's work greatly, but that it also influenced him enormously after 1802. Consequently Humboldt, at least with regard to his study of Basque, continues the tradition of a form of language research that goes back to Leibniz. The attempt to trace the lineages of philosophical thinking about language in the 18th century in Humboldt's work, however, does not diminish his reflections on language. Rather, it is to be understood as an attempt to capture Humboldt's reflections on language in its entire complexity and wealth.

Denis Thouard

How was it possible to move from a general perspective, envisaging a universal model that took into account the grammar of every language, to the serious and methodical study of language diversity? The year in which Bernhardi died prematurely, on June 19th 1820, Wilhelm von Humboldt presented his programme of comparative linguistic studies, his Vergleichendes Sprachstudium. This work contains a theory of language diversity, and seems to make a clean break with the universal paradigm illustrated by Bernhardi. But then, the status that both Bernhardi and Humboldt give to interlocution runs deep into the heart of their thinking about language and creates a continuity between them. In my paper, evidence of the indispensable character of philosophical grammar for Humboldt's project is revealed not in order to declare the latter obsolete but, on the contrary, to underline the benefits that all his empirical inquiries were able to draw from it both with regard to their method and their reflection. The categories of pure grammar make it possible to identify the grammatical forms of particular languages, which are the rules that take into account the production of utterances in a given language. In other words, elaborating a "general" grammar does not mean that there has to be an archetypal language to which all individual languages have to refer, but it offers the possibilty of reflecting on the rules inherent to each particular language. These rules are seen as a purely transcendental supposition of a systematic ensemble of relations or categories of language.

Isabel Zollna

In Bernhardi's Sprachlehre (1801-1803) and Destutt's Idéologie (1801-1815) two completely different concepts are expressed as to what language is and what it is meant to be. On the one hand, Bernhardi sees an ideal language, in the idealistic tradition with strong Romantic influences, as the subjective expression of the individual. On the other hand, Destutt de Tracy, in the sensualist tradition, is concerned with an ideal language that is the representation of a rationally organized external world (nature). Despite many common essential features and starting points (principle of imitation, logical structure of reason, universal grammar) both of them - not least because of political circumstances - come to very different, even conflicting judgements. Thus, for Destutt de Tracy poetry and the use of metaphor in rhetoric become a danger to reason and hence the epitome of danger to human happiness. On the other hand, Bernhardi's ideal language is expressed in the Periode, i.e. in a mature design that reaches its highest perfection through rhetoric, in which logic and musicality (quantity and quality) carry equal weight. My paper points out the common features and the oppositions of both approaches, and pursues their integration in cultural and educational contexts as well as their consequences for an ideal language.

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