What language did Adam and Eve speak in the Garden of Eden? Today the question might seem not only quaint, but daft. Thus, the philologist Andreas Kempe could speculate, in his “Die Sprache des Paradises” (“The Language of Paradise”) of 1688, that in the Garden God spoke Swedish to Adam and Adam replied in Danish while the serpent—wouldn’t you know it?—seduced Eve in French. Others suggested Flemish, Old Norse, Tuscan dialect, and, of course, Hebrew. But as James Turner makes clear in his magisterial and witty history, which ranges from the ludicrous to the sublime, philologists regarded the question not just as one addressing the origins of language, but rather as seeking out the origins of what makes us human; it was a question at once urgent and essential.1 After all, animals do express themselves: they chitter and squeak, they bay and roar and whinny. But none of them, so far as we know, wields grammar and syntax; none of them is capable of articulate and reasoned discourse. We have long prided ourselves, perhaps excessively, on this distinction. But on the evidence Turner so amply provides, we might also wonder whether the true distinction lies not simply in our ability to utter rational speech, but in the sheer obsessive love of language itself; that is, in philology, the “love of words.”
This abiding passion for words, cultivated fervently from antiquity into modern times—or at least until around 1800, in Turner’s view—encompassed a huge range of subjects as it developed: not only grammar and syntax, but rhetoric, textual editing and commentary, etymology and lexicography, as well as, eventually, anthropology, archeology, biblical exegesis, linguistics, literary criticism, and even law. It comprised three large areas: textual philology, theories about the origins of language, and, much later, comparative studies of different related languages. Two texts predominated: Homer, considered sacred by the ancient Greeks, and the Bible, a contested area of interpretation for both Jews and Christians. As for theories of language origins, these go back to the pre-Socratics and Plato; the controversy was over whether language was divinely given, with words corresponding to the things they named, or arrived at by convention (the nomos versus physis debate). As for comparative studies, these arose in the eighteenth-century, largely as a result of Sir William Jones’s discovery of the common Indo-European matrix of most European languages. Encounters with “exotic,” that is, non-European, peoples in the course of the Renaissance voyages of discovery were another important source; here American Indian languages in their variety and complexity offered an especially rich, if perplexing, new field of inquiry.
To follow Turner’s account of all this is akin to witnessing the gradual construction of a vast and intricate palace-complex of the mind, carried out over centuries, with all its towers and battlements, crenellations and cupolas, as well as its shadier and sometimes disreputable alleyways and culs-de-sac, only to witness it disintegrate, by almost imperceptible stages, into fragmented ruins, a kingdom in splinters. The remnants of that grand complex, its shards and tottering columns, as it were, are our discrete academic disciplines today with their strict perimeters and narrow confines. To illustrate the difference, take Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), one of Turner’s heroes (and the subject of his Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton of 2002): Norton was the first professor of art history at Harvard and, indeed, one of the founders of the discipline, but he was also, among many other things, an expert on Dante who “taught and wrote art history as a philologist, an interpreter of texts.” Nowadays a polymath like Norton would not be hired, let alone get tenure, at any American university; he would be viewed as a dubious interloper on others’ turf.
In fact, traditional philology nowadays is less a ruin than the shadow of a ruin; no, even less than that, the vestige of a shadow. Turner acknowledges, and laments, this from the outset; he notes that “many college-educated Americans no longer recognize the word.” He adds that, “for most of the twentieth century, philology was put down, kicked around, abused, and snickered at, as the archetype of crabbed, dry-as-dust, barren, and by and large pointless academic knowledge. Did I mention mind-numbingly boring?” Worse, “it totters along with arthritic creakiness.” With friends like these, we might ask, can philology sink any further into oblivion than it already has? But the unspoken question here—“shall these bones live?”—is one that Turner poses and resolves triumphantly. He breathes life back into philology. There is not a dull page in this long book (and I include here its sixty-five pages of meticulous and sometimes mischievous endnotes). He accomplishes this by setting his account firmly in a detailed if inevitably brisk historical narrative interspersed with vivid cameos of individual scholars, the renowned as well as the notorious, the plainly deranged alongside the truly radiant.
Here I should disclose a distant interest. I once flirted with the idea of devoting myself to philology. I was soon dissuaded by my encounters with philologists in the flesh. The problem was not that they were dry; in fact, their cool, faintly cadaverous aplomb was a distinct relief amid the relentlessly “relevant” atmosphere of the 1960s. Dry but often outrageously eccentric, they were far from being George Eliot’s Casaubon toiling, and making others toil, to leave some small but significant trace in the annals of desiccation. No, it was rather their sheer single-mindedness coupled with a hidden ferocity that gave me pause. When I first met the late Albert Jamme, the renowned epigrapher of Old South Arabian, this Belgian Jesuit startled me by exclaiming at the top of his voice, “I hate my bed!” When I politely suggested that he get a new mattress, he shot back with “No, no! I hate my bed because it keeps me from my texts!” And the undiluted vitriol of Jamme’s opinions of his colleagues (all three of them!), both in conversation and in print, was scary; from him and others I learned that nothing distills venom more quickly than disagreement over a textual reading. At times there was something decidedly otherworldly about other philologists I met. In the 1970s, when I studied at the University of Tübingen and had the good fortune to work with Manfred Ullmann, the great lexicographer of Classical Arabic, he startled me one day by excitedly brandishing a file card on which was written the Arabic word for “clitoris” (bazr) and exclaiming, “Kli-tO-ris! What do ordinary folk know about Kli-tO-ris?” (More than you imagine, I thought.) Needless to say, it was the word—its etymology, its cognates, its morphology—that captivated him.
As for philological single-mindedness, when a celebrated German Assyriologist of my acquaintance (who shall remain nameless) got married, he rose abruptly from the wedding banquet to announce “Jetzt zur Arbeit!” (“Now to work!”) and headed for the door, a volume of cuneiform texts tucked under one arm; only the outraged intervention of his new mother-in-law kept him from leaving. Such anecdotes about philologists—their pugnacity, their obsessiveness, their downright daffiness—could fill a thick volume. Such anecdotes taught me not only that I wasn’t learned enough to become a philologist, I wasn’t unhinged enough either.
by Eric Ormsby, TNC | Read more:
Image: Papyrus of Callimachus's Aetia. via
This abiding passion for words, cultivated fervently from antiquity into modern times—or at least until around 1800, in Turner’s view—encompassed a huge range of subjects as it developed: not only grammar and syntax, but rhetoric, textual editing and commentary, etymology and lexicography, as well as, eventually, anthropology, archeology, biblical exegesis, linguistics, literary criticism, and even law. It comprised three large areas: textual philology, theories about the origins of language, and, much later, comparative studies of different related languages. Two texts predominated: Homer, considered sacred by the ancient Greeks, and the Bible, a contested area of interpretation for both Jews and Christians. As for theories of language origins, these go back to the pre-Socratics and Plato; the controversy was over whether language was divinely given, with words corresponding to the things they named, or arrived at by convention (the nomos versus physis debate). As for comparative studies, these arose in the eighteenth-century, largely as a result of Sir William Jones’s discovery of the common Indo-European matrix of most European languages. Encounters with “exotic,” that is, non-European, peoples in the course of the Renaissance voyages of discovery were another important source; here American Indian languages in their variety and complexity offered an especially rich, if perplexing, new field of inquiry.To follow Turner’s account of all this is akin to witnessing the gradual construction of a vast and intricate palace-complex of the mind, carried out over centuries, with all its towers and battlements, crenellations and cupolas, as well as its shadier and sometimes disreputable alleyways and culs-de-sac, only to witness it disintegrate, by almost imperceptible stages, into fragmented ruins, a kingdom in splinters. The remnants of that grand complex, its shards and tottering columns, as it were, are our discrete academic disciplines today with their strict perimeters and narrow confines. To illustrate the difference, take Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), one of Turner’s heroes (and the subject of his Liberal Education of Charles Eliot Norton of 2002): Norton was the first professor of art history at Harvard and, indeed, one of the founders of the discipline, but he was also, among many other things, an expert on Dante who “taught and wrote art history as a philologist, an interpreter of texts.” Nowadays a polymath like Norton would not be hired, let alone get tenure, at any American university; he would be viewed as a dubious interloper on others’ turf.
In fact, traditional philology nowadays is less a ruin than the shadow of a ruin; no, even less than that, the vestige of a shadow. Turner acknowledges, and laments, this from the outset; he notes that “many college-educated Americans no longer recognize the word.” He adds that, “for most of the twentieth century, philology was put down, kicked around, abused, and snickered at, as the archetype of crabbed, dry-as-dust, barren, and by and large pointless academic knowledge. Did I mention mind-numbingly boring?” Worse, “it totters along with arthritic creakiness.” With friends like these, we might ask, can philology sink any further into oblivion than it already has? But the unspoken question here—“shall these bones live?”—is one that Turner poses and resolves triumphantly. He breathes life back into philology. There is not a dull page in this long book (and I include here its sixty-five pages of meticulous and sometimes mischievous endnotes). He accomplishes this by setting his account firmly in a detailed if inevitably brisk historical narrative interspersed with vivid cameos of individual scholars, the renowned as well as the notorious, the plainly deranged alongside the truly radiant.
Here I should disclose a distant interest. I once flirted with the idea of devoting myself to philology. I was soon dissuaded by my encounters with philologists in the flesh. The problem was not that they were dry; in fact, their cool, faintly cadaverous aplomb was a distinct relief amid the relentlessly “relevant” atmosphere of the 1960s. Dry but often outrageously eccentric, they were far from being George Eliot’s Casaubon toiling, and making others toil, to leave some small but significant trace in the annals of desiccation. No, it was rather their sheer single-mindedness coupled with a hidden ferocity that gave me pause. When I first met the late Albert Jamme, the renowned epigrapher of Old South Arabian, this Belgian Jesuit startled me by exclaiming at the top of his voice, “I hate my bed!” When I politely suggested that he get a new mattress, he shot back with “No, no! I hate my bed because it keeps me from my texts!” And the undiluted vitriol of Jamme’s opinions of his colleagues (all three of them!), both in conversation and in print, was scary; from him and others I learned that nothing distills venom more quickly than disagreement over a textual reading. At times there was something decidedly otherworldly about other philologists I met. In the 1970s, when I studied at the University of Tübingen and had the good fortune to work with Manfred Ullmann, the great lexicographer of Classical Arabic, he startled me one day by excitedly brandishing a file card on which was written the Arabic word for “clitoris” (bazr) and exclaiming, “Kli-tO-ris! What do ordinary folk know about Kli-tO-ris?” (More than you imagine, I thought.) Needless to say, it was the word—its etymology, its cognates, its morphology—that captivated him.
As for philological single-mindedness, when a celebrated German Assyriologist of my acquaintance (who shall remain nameless) got married, he rose abruptly from the wedding banquet to announce “Jetzt zur Arbeit!” (“Now to work!”) and headed for the door, a volume of cuneiform texts tucked under one arm; only the outraged intervention of his new mother-in-law kept him from leaving. Such anecdotes about philologists—their pugnacity, their obsessiveness, their downright daffiness—could fill a thick volume. Such anecdotes taught me not only that I wasn’t learned enough to become a philologist, I wasn’t unhinged enough either.
by Eric Ormsby, TNC | Read more:
Image: Papyrus of Callimachus's Aetia. via
