The Dutch historian Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), famous for his The Waning of the Middle Ages, began his academic "career" as a linguist - he studied Dutch language and literature in Groningen from 1891 until 1897 when he wrote his doctoral dissertation under the supervision of the classical scholar J.S. Speyer (1849-1913) on the Vidûsaka in Indian theatre. Although he was not quite successful as a linguist - an article on "die Vernachlässigung der Wortbedeutung in der vergleichenden Sprachwissenschaft" (1898) was rejected by Karl Brugmann for publication in the journal Indogermanische Forschungen - Huizinga all his life stressed the fact that he knew something about language. Language, he still maintained in 1929, was an essential component of cultural sciences. In his historical work Huizinga has contributed enormously to the description of European culture.

Although Huizinga considered himself to be a linguist, his way to do linguistics was more or less untimely (15). He was mainly interested in the psychological and more speculative dimension of language. This dimension he did not find in 19th-century mainstream Neo-grammarian linguistic thought like Karl Brugmann's (1849-1919), although Brugmann himself was very much interested in psychological problems concerning the meaning of words as Noordegraaf and Tros maintain. It is a pity that the editors just state this fact and do not explain Brugmann's rather blunt rejection of Huizinga's 'psychological' insights regarding Brugmann's 'psychological' work. It, nevertheless, was mainly Huizinga's dislike of any formal analysis of language which raised his interest in a comparative description of cultural aspects of languages.

Huizinga wanted to analyze the expression of vision and sound in Indo-Germanic languages. More specifically he asked himself: how can it be explained that our concepts for sensory perceptions are not exclusively linked to just one way of perceiving the world (e.g. visual or audible) but can also be used to denote other ways of perceiving the world of sensory objects? Sharp, for instance, can be said of things smelled, tasted, felt, etc. (95). This topic, Huizinga writes in his introduction, was already discussed by Jacob Grimm (1785-1863). Huizinga's supervisor, Barend Sijmons (1853-1935), shared Grimm's view that the study of Dutch or other Germanic languages should be done on a historical-comparative basis. Huizinga took over Grimm's view that linguistic phenomena historically led to moods (Stimmungen) which are expressed differently in a language family. Therefore, one must conclude that Huizinga, in the line of thought of Grimm, was mainly interested in the life of words, not their formal linguistic status. He therefore rejected for instance Max Müller's (1823-1900) etymological work which led Müller to reconstruct Indo-Germanic roots and their meanings. These meanings, however, precede linguistic entities and cannot be understood on their basis (19). In the published manuscript Huizinga, after having rejected the opinions of many contemporary linguists, continues with a classification of words in different Indo-Germanic languages and their underlying mood. What he aims at is an understanding of the principles of the use of words (principia van woordgebruik). He does not suggest, however, that there is an original meaning which constitutes different words in different Indo-Germanic languages having the same mood (e.g. those which show the affinity between 'light' (licht) and 'pleasure' (welbehagen).

This carefully edited and annotated edition of Huizinga's unpublished doctoral dissertation contributes to a better understanding of the international place of Dutch linguistic research and interests around 1900. The editors have succeeded in giving a detailed and highly informative account of the context of Huizinga's linguistic work. The summary in English (pp. 93-96) is very useful for those who want to have a short overview of the original Dutch introduction.

Frank Vonk, Doetinchem