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Volume 2 treats, in great detail and, at times quite innovatively, the individual stages of development of the study of language as an autonomous discipline, from the growing awareness in 17th and 18th century Europe of genetic relationships among a host of languages to the establishment of comparative-historical Indo-European linguistics in the 19th century, from the generation of the Schlegels, Bopp, Rask, and Grimm to the Neogrammarians and the application of the comparative method to non-Indo-European languages from all over the globe. Typological linguistic interests, first synthesized by Humboldt, as well as the development of various other non-historical endeavours in the 19th and the first half of the 20th century, such as language and psychology, semantics, phonetics, and dialectology, receive ample attention.
The aim of this book is to provide a fresh view of the history of nineteenth-century language study by focusing on the writings of three linguists (Whitney, Bréal and Wegener) in three countries (the United States, France and Germany).
The relative importance of heredity or environmental influence remains an enduring, hotly debated issue, while the legacy of scientific racism and sexism still tarnishes the twenty-first century. This unique study analyzes how theories of inherited difference – including race and gender – affected French social scientists in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The prevailing assumption has been that French ethnographers highlighted the cultural and social environment while anthropologists emphasized the scientific study of head and body shapes. Martin Staum shows that the temptation to gravitate towards one pole of the nature-nurture continuum often resulted in reluctant c...