Discussion
As a general rule, disciplines are at their most methodologically innovative in the period preceding their institutionalisation, after which they become the basis for both research projects and the training of new scholars. Before this occurs, however, a number of disparate perspectives vie against orthodoxies and, on the whole, the field becomes characterised by an invigorating critique, an open and reactive creativity, which is characterised by its ability to transgress existing disciplinary boundaries. It is also in this transitional phase that the concealed ideologies of the reigning orthodoxies are most directly considered. Finally, the ‘lost paradigms’ reveal to us a set of divergent perspectives on how a scientific account of language might have looked, in addition to enriching our understanding of the roles which Russian higher learning played in critiquing European scholarship from the 1850s onwards.
This paper considers both the critique and proposed methodological alternatives that were offered by three scholars who were peripheral to the instituted centre of the Neogrammarian School in the 1870s, that had become entrenched in a number of German academic institutions. The argument is made that despite the fact that Marr, Schuchardt and Schmidt all launched their critiques independently of one another, there are considerable similarities in their methods, especially in their understanding of language as characterised by historically stratified layers and as constantly mixing and crossing, both exogenously with other cultures and languages, and endogenously with dialects of the same language or with closely related languages. They all also foregrounded the emerging field of archaeology and posited a deep relation between material culture and language change, which led them, in their own ways, to posit a regional over a genetic (later racial) account of historic language change and connection.
These theories were not adopted in European institutions until long after the Neogrammarian movement had dissipated, instead an emerging orthodoxy, influenced by the descriptive linguistics of Baudouin de Courtenay (and his students) and that of Saussure led to the instituting of one of the possible scientific accounts of language. It is something of an irony that each of the proposed ‘critics’ of the Neogrammarians were given their own place within Stalinism or German National Socialism in the late 1920s and early 1930s, whilst their early work, from the 1870s onwards, is remarkably consistent with the aspirations of structural linguists, especially the desire to bracket out the romanticism of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century comparative philology. Their future instituting, however, does not provide a sufficient picture of the value of their ideas at the turn of the twentieth century and how they related to the respective institutions that they formed a part of.
