Hugo Schuchardt
Encyclopedia
Hugo Ernst Mario Schuchardt (4 February 1842, Gotha
(Thuringia
) – 21 April 1927, Graz
(Styria)) was an eminent linguist
, best known for his work in the Romance languages
, the Basque language
, and in mixed languages, including pidgin
s, creoles
, and the Lingua franca of the Mediterranean.
and Bonn
with many important linguists of the time, notably August Schleicher
and Kuno Fischer
in Jena, as well as Friedrich Ritschl and Otto Jahn
in Bonn. In 1864, Schuchardt earned a doctorate with a dissertation entitled De sermonis Romani plebei vocalibus ('On the vowels of Vulgar Latin'). Based upon a perusal of "an incredible amount of texts never really considered before him", it was subsequently published 1866-1868 in a three volume German language edition as Der Vokalismus des Vulgärlateins. In 1870, Schuchardt was promoted to professor ('habilitation
') at the University of Leipzig
, and in 1873 he became professor of Romance Philology
at the University of Halle which was then a stronghold of the neogrammarians. During this time, Schuchardt primarily worked on traditional topics in Romance philology with a strong historic orientation, but also developed an interest in language contact
and language mixing (as found in mixed languages and creole language
s).
, with the help of Johannes Schmidt
. He did field work in Wales (1875) and Spain (1879) where he collected material for his Celtic
and Basque/Romance research. Schuchardt became interested in two new fields, creole
and Basque
linguistics, thereby becoming a respected forefather of both linguistic subdisciplines. He is also the first linguist to have promulgated seriously the idea that creole language
s are in no way inferior to other languages. With his 1888 publication "Auf Anlass des Volapük
s" he promoted the creation of a new auxiliary world language
for all nations. In the same period (1885), he published an influential critique of the methods of the neogrammarian
s with the title "Über die Lautgesetze. Gegen die Junggrammatiker".
Schuchardt may be most eminent as a vascologist. In 1887, L.L. Bonaparte arranged Schuchardt's journey to the village of Sara
(Labourd
, Basses Pyrénées) where he did field work and seems to have learned the Basque language. Following this journey, he published numerous (>100!) works on Basque and Romano-Basque, but he never returned to the Basque Country. In various publications, Schuchardt discussed possible relationships of Basque with other language families—today Basque is known as a language isolate
. Schuchardt firmly sided with the outdated viewpoint of the Vasco-Iberian
hypothesis, which stands in stark contrast to his earlier open-mindedness.
Similarly, in the then-current discussion on ergativity, Schuchardt firmly defended the idea of the ergative construction as an obligatorily passive clause (as opposed to a similarly questionable theory of the ergative construction being a nominalized
clause); with this viewpoint, he specifically opposed Nikolaus Finck in Vienna with whom he had a scientific dispute in a succession of articles (e.g., N. Finck (1907), "Der angeblich passivische Charakter des transitiven Verbs", Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung 41:209-282).
The last two decades of his life, he worked predominantly on Basque. Disappointed by the "unjust peace"
following World War I, Italian irredentism and French nationalism ('chauvinism
'), he was no longer interested in Romance research, partly even giving up contacts with colleagues from these countries. In an article (Bekenntnisse und Erkenntnisse 1919), he gives some oral history insights into his youth and historic events of that time as well as his viewpoint of the outcome of World War I.
. Today, of course, his contribution is mainly of historiographic interest. For the Basque community, he is one of the most eminent foreign scholars, beside Wilhelm von Humboldt
and only few others.
His huge library became part of the university library of Graz; his 'Villa Malvine' hosted the Romance philology department for a long time, but is today an administrative building of the university. Researchers in Graz have constantly worked on Schuchardt ever since, among them Michaela Wolf and the linguist Bernhard Hurch (himself being a bascologist with a strong interest in historiography of linguistics) who finally even managed to compile an online archive of the entire work of Schuchardt (see external links).
His most lasting contributions to modern linguistics, though, are the elaboration, with Johannes Schmidt
, of the Wave Model
of language change
and his substantial work laying the foundations of modern creolistics
.
Gotha (town)
Gotha is a town in Thuringia, within the central core of Germany. It is the capital of the district of Gotha.- History :The town has existed at least since the 8th century, when it was mentioned in a document signed by Charlemagne as Villa Gotaha . Its importance derives from having been chosen in...
(Thuringia
Thuringia
The Free State of Thuringia is a state of Germany, located in the central part of the country.It has an area of and 2.29 million inhabitants, making it the sixth smallest by area and the fifth smallest by population of Germany's sixteen states....
) – 21 April 1927, Graz
Graz
The more recent population figures do not give the whole picture as only people with principal residence status are counted and people with secondary residence status are not. Most of the people with secondary residence status in Graz are students...
(Styria)) was an eminent linguist
Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study: language form, language meaning, and language in context....
, best known for his work in the Romance languages
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
, the Basque language
Basque language
Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
, and in mixed languages, including pidgin
Pidgin
A pidgin , or pidgin language, is a simplified language that develops as a means of communication between two or more groups that do not have a language in common. It is most commonly employed in situations such as trade, or where both groups speak languages different from the language of the...
s, creoles
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
, and the Lingua franca of the Mediterranean.
In Germany
Schuchardt grew up in Gotha. From 1859–1864, he studied in JenaJena
Jena is a university city in central Germany on the river Saale. It has a population of approx. 103,000 and is the second largest city in the federal state of Thuringia, after Erfurt.-History:Jena was first mentioned in an 1182 document...
and Bonn
Bonn
Bonn is the 19th largest city in Germany. Located in the Cologne/Bonn Region, about 25 kilometres south of Cologne on the river Rhine in the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, it was the capital of West Germany from 1949 to 1990 and the official seat of government of united Germany from 1990 to 1999....
with many important linguists of the time, notably August Schleicher
August Schleicher
August Schleicher was a German linguist. His great work was A Compendium of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages, in which he attempted to reconstruct the Proto-Indo-European language...
and Kuno Fischer
Kuno Fischer
Kuno Fischer, born Ernst Kuno Berthold Fischer, was a German philosopher, a historian of philosophy and a critic.-Biography:After studying philosophy at Leipzig and Halle,...
in Jena, as well as Friedrich Ritschl and Otto Jahn
Otto Jahn
Otto Jahn , was a German archaeologist, philologist, and writer on art and music.He was born at Kiel...
in Bonn. In 1864, Schuchardt earned a doctorate with a dissertation entitled De sermonis Romani plebei vocalibus ('On the vowels of Vulgar Latin'). Based upon a perusal of "an incredible amount of texts never really considered before him", it was subsequently published 1866-1868 in a three volume German language edition as Der Vokalismus des Vulgärlateins. In 1870, Schuchardt was promoted to professor ('habilitation
Habilitation
Habilitation is the highest academic qualification a scholar can achieve by his or her own pursuit in several European and Asian countries. Earned after obtaining a research doctorate, such as a PhD, habilitation requires the candidate to write a professorial thesis based on independent...
') at the University of Leipzig
University of Leipzig
The University of Leipzig , located in Leipzig in the Free State of Saxony, Germany, is one of the oldest universities in the world and the second-oldest university in Germany...
, and in 1873 he became professor of Romance Philology
Romance languages
The Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family, more precisely of the Italic languages subfamily, comprising all the languages that descend from Vulgar Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
at the University of Halle which was then a stronghold of the neogrammarians. During this time, Schuchardt primarily worked on traditional topics in Romance philology with a strong historic orientation, but also developed an interest in language contact
Language contact
Language contact occurs when two or more languages or varieties interact. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics.Multilingualism has likely been common throughout much of human history, and today most people in the world are multilingual...
and language mixing (as found in mixed languages and creole language
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
s).
Moving to Graz, Austria
In 1876, Schuchardt became chair for Romance Philology at the University of GrazUniversity of Graz
The University of Graz , a university located in Graz, Austria, is the second-largest and second-oldest university in Austria....
, with the help of Johannes Schmidt
Johannes Schmidt (linguist)
Johannes Friedrich Heinrich Schmidt was a German linguist. He developed the Wellentheorie of language development.-Biography:Schmidt was born in Prenzlau, Province of Brandenburg...
. He did field work in Wales (1875) and Spain (1879) where he collected material for his Celtic
Celtic languages
The Celtic languages are descended from Proto-Celtic, or "Common Celtic"; a branch of the greater Indo-European language family...
and Basque/Romance research. Schuchardt became interested in two new fields, creole
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
and Basque
Basque language
Basque is the ancestral language of the Basque people, who inhabit the Basque Country, a region spanning an area in northeastern Spain and southwestern France. It is spoken by 25.7% of Basques in all territories...
linguistics, thereby becoming a respected forefather of both linguistic subdisciplines. He is also the first linguist to have promulgated seriously the idea that creole language
Creole language
A creole language, or simply a creole, is a stable natural language developed from the mixing of parent languages; creoles differ from pidgins in that they have been nativized by children as their primary language, making them have features of natural languages that are normally missing from...
s are in no way inferior to other languages. With his 1888 publication "Auf Anlass des Volapük
Volapük
Volapük is a constructed language, created in 1879–1880 by Johann Martin Schleyer, a Roman Catholic priest in Baden, Germany. Schleyer felt that God had told him in a dream to create an international language. Volapük conventions took place in 1884 , 1887 and 1889 . The first two conventions used...
s" he promoted the creation of a new auxiliary world language
International auxiliary language
An international auxiliary language or interlanguage is a language meant for communication between people from different nations who do not share a common native language...
for all nations. In the same period (1885), he published an influential critique of the methods of the neogrammarian
Neogrammarian
The Neogrammarians were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change...
s with the title "Über die Lautgesetze. Gegen die Junggrammatiker".
Schuchardt may be most eminent as a vascologist. In 1887, L.L. Bonaparte arranged Schuchardt's journey to the village of Sara
Sare
Sare is a village in the traditional Basque province of Labourd, now a commune in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department in south-western France....
(Labourd
Labourd
Labourd is a former French province and part of the present-day Pyrénées Atlantiques département. It is historically one of the seven provinces of the traditional Basque Country....
, Basses Pyrénées) where he did field work and seems to have learned the Basque language. Following this journey, he published numerous (>100!) works on Basque and Romano-Basque, but he never returned to the Basque Country. In various publications, Schuchardt discussed possible relationships of Basque with other language families—today Basque is known as a language isolate
Language isolate
A language isolate, in the absolute sense, is a natural language with no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other languages; that is, one that has not been demonstrated to descend from an ancestor common with any other language. They are in effect language families consisting of a single...
. Schuchardt firmly sided with the outdated viewpoint of the Vasco-Iberian
Iberian language
The Iberian language was the language of a people identified by Greek and Roman sources who lived in the eastern and southeastern regions of the Iberian peninsula. The ancient Iberians can be identified as a rather nebulous local culture between the 7th and 1st century BC...
hypothesis, which stands in stark contrast to his earlier open-mindedness.
Similarly, in the then-current discussion on ergativity, Schuchardt firmly defended the idea of the ergative construction as an obligatorily passive clause (as opposed to a similarly questionable theory of the ergative construction being a nominalized
Nominalization
In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation is the use of a verb, an adjective, or an adverb as the head of a noun phrase, with or without morphological transformation...
clause); with this viewpoint, he specifically opposed Nikolaus Finck in Vienna with whom he had a scientific dispute in a succession of articles (e.g., N. Finck (1907), "Der angeblich passivische Charakter des transitiven Verbs", Zeitschrift für vergleichende Sprachforschung 41:209-282).
Late period
Although Schuchardt was invited to professorships in Budapest and Leipzig (around 1890), he refused to leave Graz. In 1900, however, Schuchardt retired early from his chair. Being then free from his teaching duties, he undertook extended trips to Southern Italy, Egypt, and Scandinavia. He then built a huge villa in Graz (Johann Fux Gasse nr. 30) for himself and his huge library, and named it 'Villa Malvine', after his beloved mother (Malvine von Bridel-Brideri).The last two decades of his life, he worked predominantly on Basque. Disappointed by the "unjust peace"
Treaty of Versailles
The Treaty of Versailles was one of the peace treaties at the end of World War I. It ended the state of war between Germany and the Allied Powers. It was signed on 28 June 1919, exactly five years after the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The other Central Powers on the German side of...
following World War I, Italian irredentism and French nationalism ('chauvinism
Chauvinism
Chauvinism, in its original and primary meaning, is an exaggerated, bellicose patriotism and a belief in national superiority and glory. It is an eponym of a possibly fictional French soldier Nicolas Chauvin who was credited with many superhuman feats in the Napoleonic wars.By extension it has come...
'), he was no longer interested in Romance research, partly even giving up contacts with colleagues from these countries. In an article (Bekenntnisse und Erkenntnisse 1919), he gives some oral history insights into his youth and historic events of that time as well as his viewpoint of the outcome of World War I.
Schuchardt today
Hugo Schuchardt is one of the most eminent linguists of the Germanic tradition within Romance PhilologyPhilology
Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin...
. Today, of course, his contribution is mainly of historiographic interest. For the Basque community, he is one of the most eminent foreign scholars, beside Wilhelm von Humboldt
Wilhelm von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt was a German philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of Humboldt Universität. He is especially remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of language and to the theory and practice...
and only few others.
His huge library became part of the university library of Graz; his 'Villa Malvine' hosted the Romance philology department for a long time, but is today an administrative building of the university. Researchers in Graz have constantly worked on Schuchardt ever since, among them Michaela Wolf and the linguist Bernhard Hurch (himself being a bascologist with a strong interest in historiography of linguistics) who finally even managed to compile an online archive of the entire work of Schuchardt (see external links).
His most lasting contributions to modern linguistics, though, are the elaboration, with Johannes Schmidt
Johannes Schmidt (linguist)
Johannes Friedrich Heinrich Schmidt was a German linguist. He developed the Wellentheorie of language development.-Biography:Schmidt was born in Prenzlau, Province of Brandenburg...
, of the Wave Model
Wave model (linguistics)
In historical linguistics, the wave model or wave theory is a model of language change in which new features of a language spread from a central point in continuously weakening concentric circles, similar to the waves created when a stone is thrown into a body of water. According to the model,...
of language change
Language change
Language change is the phenomenon whereby phonetic, morphological, semantic, syntactic, and other features of language vary over time. The effect on language over time is known as diachronic change. Two linguistic disciplines in particular concern themselves with studying language change:...
and his substantial work laying the foundations of modern creolistics
Creolistics
Creolistics, or Creology, is the scientific study of creole languages and, as such, is a subfield of linguistics. Someone who engages in this study is called a creolist.-Controversy:...
.
External links
- Free electronic edition of the opera omnia (over 700 publications in both pdf and online), including translations, texts, necrologies, selected correspondences, materials, necrologies and online publications on Schuchardt
- Full information and online edition of all works at the university of Graz (Austria)