E. F. K. Koerner

“Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so small.” One thing that gets tiresome about gossipy, reminiscy Koerner’s book is that he seems to see himself as the guy who sets the record straight and makes everyone play nice. Scolds others for getting Saussure wrong, or for editing in a self-interested fashion to remove criticism of their own work from an article being published in their journal, or for just disagreeing—mind you, linguistics is full of jerkwards—egos and crazies and schoolmarms and sucks.

The first couple of articles here are verbose reminders that Konrad Koerner is the self-appointed doyen of “the historiography of linguistics, or linguistic historiography for short.” Then there is an interesting piece collecting some of the titular projspects, yet-to-be-dones—the historiography of the search for the Indo-European homeland, the historiography of Nazi linguistics, the mere reminding people that linguistics is ideologically bound like all social sciences. Then the article I got the book for, tracing the Whorf hypothesis back to the German philologers directly in a way that makes sense instead of just handwaving about “influence.” A piece on “revolutions” that is like the piece on “ideology” but still interesting—how e.g. Bopp, a relatively minor figure in his time, became the face of comparative grammar because of the way he and his followers worked the post-Waterloo, massively expanding Prussian university system; and other such notions. But like the whole second half of the book is about Saussure’s secret influence on various modernists—to Koerner, who wrote his dissertation on Saussure, his centrality to all matters knows no bounds. Pretty blah. And then a pointless anecdote about how he met Chomsky and took his picture, and a pointless shaggy dog story about his own career and journals he’s edited and people he’s known, surely a delightful bagatelle to people in the field if delivered over drinks and if it wasn’t so passive-aggrandizing, but it has no place in here. And then there’s an actual list of his recent papers, basically a CV. Indulgent trash, the charitable interpretation being that he needed something to fill up a book.… (lisätietoja)

In contrast to the other grosser Deutscher in the field of linguistic historiography, Hans Aarsleff, Koerner is less of a battler over theories and legacies and more of a quiet righter of wrongs, investigator of overlooked areas, suggester of better formulations. (Him and Aarsleff hate each other, by the way. Seriously, they're like twelve-year-olds.)

Perhaps that's why, in a field with more than its share of needless truculence, Koerner's suggestions and corrections come off mostly so careful, so reasonable. (Not that he doesn't know it--in the introduction to this book, he's all "And perhaps I may be permitted to acknowledge that in my own small way, I have always fought for the underdog, in my work as in my everyday life." Eyeroll.) Some of these essays are either fairly widescope themselves or have easily drawn implications or parallels for other fields: the chapter on the "Sonderweg" taken by linguistics during the Nazi era, for instance, where he argues that there wasn't so much a "Nazi linguistics" as a "linguistics conducted with an eye toward making the Nazis happy"--a crucial distinction in terms of the legitimacy of the work (often hopelessly compromised as opposed to mendacious and evil), and one that it's weird to realize it's still "brave" to make. (Also brave-in-quotation-marks is his extended comparison of the treatment of Indo-European languages under the Nazis with the not dissimilar treatment under the Bharatiya Janata Party in India--a reminder that when we say "cryptofascist" we sometimes just mean "fascist," and that while national socialism was the worst shit, placing it in too much a class of badness of its own actually serves to let other filth off the hook).

Or his hilarious, meticulous humiliation of the young Chomsky (now thoroughly disavowed by the old Chomsky, conveniently for Chomsky). Koerner shows how Chomsky's vicious attacks on Bloomfieldian linguistics and sweet pats on the head for his neutered supervisor, Zellig Harris, were all marketing, all an effort to claim emergent generative grammar as Noam(man's)land. In fact, Bloomfield by the time Chomsky was publishing Transformational Grammar in the late fifties had already done similar work, cited by Chomsky in early papers that were then revised to remove said citations when they were reprinted after he became "the world's greatest living thinker." The comments on his erasing his immediate predecessors, appropriating a more ancient and less threatening lineaage in Cartesian Linguistics, and strutting around like the world began with him are right on. The paper concludes that Chomsky is basically a Bloomfieldian who put the theoretical cart before the empirical horse and was super dishonest about it, and calls Bloomfield his intellectual "father," ha. The chapter title quotes Chomsky on "the responsibility of an intellectual." Ouch.

Some of the other topics are obscurities at best (what's that you say? Wenker was not actually attacking the contention of the Neogrammarians that sound-laws are exceptionless when he published his dialect survey? Get out!), but even these contain tidbits and small delights (about the establishment by Jesuits in Paraguay in the early sixteenth century of "reductions," socialist-theocratic pagan-Catholic communities [short-lived!]; about the title given to Champlain in Quebec: "vice-king"). Deets, dates, cites, dense but clear. Learning is amazing.… (lisätietoja)