historical and political thought in the seventeenth - RePub - Erasmus ...

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Chapter 6. New tidings
But the most important difference seems to be Boxhorn’s thorough historical
approach to the study of languages that has earned him the title of being ‘the
first historical linguist’. 36 Since Boxhorn believed that almost all European languages
derived from one common source, he was not so much interested which
language had priority over wich language. Instead, he was more interested in
how the changes in words that had in time developed into different languages
(or ‘dialects’ as he calls them) had come about. 37 This quest demanded a systematic
approach. Here Boxhorn made use of the same method and principles of De
Laet, who in his notes on Grotius’s Dissertatio de origine gentium Americanarum
(Dissertation on the Origin of the American Peoples) had fulminated against the
attempts of the renowned Dutch scholar to construct a relationship between the
different languages of the world ‘by changing letters, by exchanging, adding, or
subtracting syllables’. Central to De Laet’s approach is that differences between
languages should be acounted for by means of rules that are always valid, and
that similarities between the endings of verbs and nouns are such that they cannot
be attributed to chance. 38 Correspondences should have a systematic character
and ‘comparisons should not involve mere look-alikes’. Loanwords like
‘camel’ should therefore not be confused with inherited vocabularly. 39
Comparisons should not stop at looking at lexical similarities, but should
also focus attention on correspondences in grammar and in flexional morphology.
The strongest evidence, according to Boxhorn, for linguistic relationships
consisted of shared grammatical anomalies and morphological irregularities.
‘That these peoples [i.e. the Greeks, the Romans, and the Germans-JN] too
acquired their language from a single mother is also evidenced by the common
ways in which words and names are variously treated, viz. by the ways
in which they are declined, and conjugated and in other ways as well; especially
by the anomalies themselves.’ 40 Series of lists with comparative words scattered
over the Antwoord were meant to substantiate these claims. 41
36 Jack Fellman, “The First Historical Linguist”, in Linguistics: An International Review, Vol. 137
(1974), pp. 31-33; Hofman, “Marcus Zuerius Boxhorn (1612-1653)”, p. 157; Van Driem, Languages of the
Himalayas, p. 1044; Droixhe, L’étymon des dieux, p. 8.
37 Dekker, “The Light under the Bushel”, p. 211.
38 Droixhe, L’étymon des dieux, pp. 160-61. Johannes de Laet, Notae ad dissertationem Hugonis Grotii De
origine gentium Americanarum et observationes aliquot ad meliorem indaginem difficillimae illius quaestionis (Elzevier;
Amsterdam, 1643). Hugo Grotius, Dissertatio de origine gentium Americanarum (?; Paris, 1642). For the critique
of De Laet on Grotius, see Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Hugo Grotius’s Dissertation on the Origin of the American
Peoples and the Use of Comparative Methods”, in Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 52, No. 2 (1991), pp. 221-44.
39 Boxhorn, Antwoord, p. 65, and Van Driem, Languages of the Himalayas, pp. 1044-45.
40 Ibidem, p. 80. ‘Dat oock dese volckeren van eene moeder hare tale geleert hebben, blijct mede
uyt de ghemeine maniere van met de woorden ende namen verscheidentlijck om te gaen, soo in het
declineren, als conjugeren, ende anders, ja oock uyt de anomalien self.’ English translation quoted from
Van Driem, Languages of the Himalayas, p. 1046.
41 Ibidem, pp. 6-7, 67-68, 78-80, 88-99.