Hans-J. Niederehe's plea for a history of linguistic historiography complements the importance of Occitan, whose excellency is grounded in the literature of the Troubadours, with works by Enrique de Villena (1433?), Antonio de Nebrija (1492) and Juan de Valdés (1535) in which early principles of historiography can be found. This pertains to the Ausbau 1 of a language in its text-types, including literature, and the parallelisation of linguistic and political developments. The growth and decline of an empire entails the growth and decline of the language of its people. There then follow the early histori(ographi)es of Spanish by Andrés de Posa (1587) 2 and Bernardo Aldrete (1606) whose turning towards the assumed pre-Roman origins of Spanish signals a growing distance from Latin. Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar's work on the history of the language, finally, incorporates a historiography of the science.
Ramón Sarmiento, in a paper written in Spanish, compares three models of traditional Spanish grammaticography, as to be found between 1771 and today, namely the philological, the normative, and the philosophical. The philological follows canonical texts, the normative follows oral performance, and the philosophical follows language use insofar as it depends on thinking.
Erich Poppe shows that the Irish treatise Auraicept na nÉces of the second half of the seventh century is part both of the hibernian and of the Roman-Christian traditions and thus presents itself as one link in the chain of early works on a vernacular (and written in it) which aims to improve the vernacular's status by describing it with the help of Latin categories. Thematic examples are case morphology and the comparison of adjectives, and also the terms 'genus' and 'species'.
Miguel Ángela Esparza Torres sketches the relevant works of four representatives of Spanish grammarians (Antonio de Nebrija, 1482-83; Andrés Gutiérrez de Cerezo, 1485; Petro Madariaga, 1582, and Juan Sánchez, 1586) in the so-called Golden Age (1492-1600) who use the vernacular for the description of Latin and in doing so occupy an important place in the grammaticography of their mother-tongue.
Andreas Gardt sketches plans for a dictionary of language theory in the Baroque and the Enlightenment, which will document metalinguistic statements from German works between 1600 and 1780 according to lemmata like 'language, thinking, reality', 'language origin', 'universal grammar', 'upgrading of German vs. Latin', etc. The dictionary is currently being compiled at the University of Heidelberg. 3 Gardt's report is the first of a group of papers devoted to German, continued by Jörg Hardy with a complex discussion of the 'logic' of linguistic research in Wilhelm von Humboldt's works. By this is meant an integrating scientific concept by which linguistic theory is made part of a comprehensive anthropology in the perspective of cultural history. It works by comparison and looks for the unity of human actions expressed by individual, i.e. national, linguistic means. This leads to many gaps and contradictions in argumentation, because Humboldt never topicalised this metalevel of his research but 'simply' employed it as an inherent programme.
Maria Herrlich shows that Jacob Grimm's Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, evaluated as odd by experts, is a project sound in its theoretical planning project, notwithstanding its obviously false statements on the origin of German. The history of language is here embedded in the history of culture which is in turn embedded in the history of peoples. This prefigures later developments, e.g. the so-called Wörter-und-Sachen-research. Ulrike Haß-Zumkehr is concerned with the same period. She portrays the lexicographer Daniel Sanders, an enlightened mand and a liberal one (both in the general as well as the party-political sense), whose Jewish origins and the fact that he dared to criticize Grimm's dictionary thwarted his career and his recognition by contemporary linguists. Topics arising in the course of this portrait are Sanders' concept of the linguistic rule, of language as a system of signs, and of polysemy, all of which make him a successor of Adelung rather than a member of the romantic Germanistik.
Mark Atherton's paper, in English, follows Henry Sweet's pathway from an associationist concept of language learning in the wake of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, as explained in an early (unpublished) draft of his Practical Study of Languages, to a synthetic concept of longer linguistic units to be learned as 'masses of apperception' (Vorstellungsmassen) in the wake of Friedrich Herbart, as explained in the final version of the book. In particular, Hermann Paul and Wilhelm Viëtor, the representative of the so-called Reform, guided him in this direction.
The last two papers are devoted to general topics. Brigitte Bartschat compares Jakobson's and Hjelmlev's concept of 'case' according to aims and methods of analysis. The point of comparison is the endeavour to find a universal case system with semantic functions behind the various language-bound paradigms. Finally, Frank Vonk gives an overview of psycholinguistic schools, beginning with early scientific models, aiming to assign to linguistics, with its own questions and problems, a proper place within an interdisciplinary complex woven from psychology, sociology, cultural science and a science of human behaviour (Handlungswissenschaft). A critical role in this is played by the Hungarian psychologist Géza Révèsz, who emigrated to the Netherlands and subsequently worked there.
The status and the quality of these papers inevitably varies. The contributions by Herrlich and Haß-Zumkehr are concise versions of a dissertation and a Habilitationsschrift respectively. The contributions by Torres, Bartschat and Vonk are called 'preliminary' by their own authors. Andreas Gardt reports on a project in progress. This leaves five contributions (Niederehe, Sarmiento, Poppe, Hardy, Atherton) as topical analyses in their own right. A certain imbalance results from this state of affairs, although this need not diminish the interests for readers, many of whom will be expecting to find brief accounts both of forthcoming work and recently completed studies.
The book has a few editorial blemishes. The contribution by Miguel Ángel Esparza Torres has a Spanish title in the table of contents, but a German one in the text. It is in fact written in German. On page 9, the difference between 'der Verdienst' and 'das Verdienst' in German is overlooked. There are further misprints on pages 11 and 12. In the contribution on early Irish, a paper which is written in German, it is irritating that Irish texts are translated into German, while Latin texts, if translated at all, are given in English. Temporal deixis should not be obsolete when a book appears (p. 97). On page 109 an important quotation from Humboldt is wrong; on page 119 an unexplained and unusual abbreviation is introduced ('PSF' for Philosophie der symbolischen Formen by Ernst Cassirer). A reference on page 131 is not intelligible. There are some additional minor slips. Finally the title: The reviewer admits that he does not understand the pairing of Theorie and Rekonstruktion. 'Reconstruction' refers to a certain methodological point of view in historiography. But 'theory'? There is no clue in the papers how to understand this pair of terms.
What in a conference may provide a pleasing and colourful arbitrariness of topics cannot in a book wholly avoid leaving an impression of incoherence. Nevertheless, this collective volume is of value as a token of work in progress. Its merits lie in the mine of topical information where readers may find exactly what they seek and what they need. The value is furthermore derived from the broader context in which the book originated, i.e. the conference tradition and programme of the Studienkreis, whose meetings cut a tranche de la vie historiographique out of the vast enterprise of uncovering the often-hidden realities of the history of linguistics.