Acasă Articole RTR Poly- or “Decaglottism”? On the Hierarchization of Languages in Nineteenth Century Comparative...
Poly- or “Decaglottism”? On the Hierarchization of Languages in Nineteenth Century Comparative Linguistics
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Abstract: The starting point of this article is the ambivalence of Hugo Meltzl’s position: while he establishes a broad principle of polyglottism for Acta Comparationis Litterarum Universarum, he ultimately selects only ten working languages for the journal—specifically, ten European languages that he considers capable of producing major literatures. Building on this linguistic hierarchy, I aim to examine how historical and comparative linguistics in nineteenth-century Europe not only classified languages but also ranked them. I explore the criteria underpinning these hierarchies, the arguments used to justify them, as well as their occasional contestation and eventual abandonment in the latter half of the century with the rise of Neogrammarian approaches in linguistics. In the final section, I assess the extent to which the dominant linguistic hierarchies in historical and comparative linguistics remain relevant to the decaglot canon advocated by Meltzl.
Keywords: polyglottism, decaglottism, linguistic hierarchy, historical and comparative linguistics.
Acknowledgement: This work was funded by the EU’s NextGenerationEU instrument through the National Recovery and Resilience Plan of Romania—Pillar III-C9-18, through the project A Global History of Romanian Comparatism: A Case Study in Inter-Imperial Comparative Literature (1877-1944), PNRR-III-C9-2023-I8-CF 22/ 27.07.2023, contract no. 760276/ 26.03.2024.
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