Abstract
Throughout the nineteenth century, language sciences played an eminently political role in Central Europe. They helped to produce or lessen differences, to create narratives of exceptionality or togetherness, or to underscore cultural historicity. The Habsburg Monarchy, where manifold languages were in use, was linguists’ preferred field of inquiry. Often migrating throughout the Monarchy and thus dealing in various ways with Central European cultural diversity, these linguists could thereby easily become political intellectuals. While many of them did indeed openly engage in political activity, I will deliberately leave those cases aside and concentrate on linguists who continued to perceive themselves as scholars; a position Johannes Feichtinger, referring to Pierre Bourdieu, called “autonomously engaged” (Feichtinger 2010, 35–36). As I will argue, however, the factor of scholars entrapped in the culturalizing monarchy, where language, history and finally ethnicity began to shape scholarly inquiry, had a pronounced influence on the production and transformation of language knowledge and the ways in which it became intertwined with politics.
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Notes
- 1.
Following usage in the nineteenth-century Habsburg Empire, I use the broad concept of “linguistics” here to include studies of language and literature.
- 2.
This chapter was prepared within the framework of the HSE University Basic Research Program and funded by the Russian Academic Excellence Project ‘5-100’.
- 3.
On circulation and thus also mobility as space, cf. Raj 2013.
- 4.
See the translation and original text in Greenberg (2004, 168–71); the English translation is, however, misleading, as narod is translated so as to emphasis the folk meaning of the word and thus does not convey its historical ambiguity; the points of particular interest are 1c and 2b.
- 5.
Ruthenian was a Ukrainian vernacular spoken in Eastern Galicia, codified at the time into literary language. It was one of the three languages most seriously considered for Ruthenians, with Russian being unwanted for political reasons and rejected by nationalists, and Old Church Ruthenian, the language of the Greek-Catholic clergy, being the second. Old Church Ruthenian was supported by the clergy, but rejected by most secular intellectuals.
- 6.
See, for example, critiques of the local inclination of Polish Slavic philology in Rybicka-Nowacka (1990) and Rusek (1990): professors for ‘foreign’ philologies in Galicia—Edward Porębowicz (Romance philology, L’viv), Roman Dyboski (English philology, Cracow) and Józef Tretiak (Ruthenian, Cracow)—preoccupied with literature, with a strong inclination towards translations and research on linguistic influences. There are, of course, exceptions: Antoni Kalina (Cracow) in the 1880s also published a monograph on the Romani language in Slovakia (in French) and on the Bulgarian language (in Polish); Vienna-educated Jan Jarník, at the Czech University in Prague from 1882, published widely on the Albanian and Romanian languages.
- 7.
Wladimir Fischer, for example, mentions the crucial but understudied role of the way Pannonian theory was shaped by its development within the Habsburg Empire (Fischer 2010, 612).
- 8.
See for example the prominent Russian Pan-Slavist Mikhail Pogodin, co-translator of Dobrovský‘s Institutiones linguae slavicae dialectiveteris, (although he was also a proponent of Norman theory) (Zlatar 2006).
- 9.
Myhajlo Maksymovyč, a linguist, historian and folklorist with extensive contacts in Galicia, published the History of Old Russian Literature (Istorija drevnej russkoj slovesnosti) in 1839, which presented the thesis of exceptionality of Cossack literature and its difference from Russian language and literature (Tomenko 1994).
- 10.
The most notable students of Meyer-Lübke were Dumitru Caracostea, Matthias Friedwagner, Eugen Herzog, Elise Richter, Leo Spitzer and Sextil Puşcariu (Kramer 2010).
- 11.
In 1901, the Chernivtsi Philosophy Faculty proposed Meyer-Lübke as professor, and he apparently agreed, but the Ministry of Religion and Education did not agree to his relocation: Austrian State Archives, Allgemeines Verwaltungsarchiv, Ministry of Education and Religion, fasc. 896, PA Cornu, Z. 3365, 4.4.1901.
- 12.
These particular examples are taken from the Ruthenian-German dictionary of Jevhen Želehivs’kyj (also Russian: Evgenii Zhelehovskii/Jevgenij Želehovskyj) published posthumously in 1886 in L’viv (Želehovskyj, Nedïl’skij 1886).
- 13.
The most widespread alphabets were kulišivka, drohomanivka, želehivka, later also hrinčenkivka (1907). The names of the different versions of alphabets are derived from the names of the scholars who proposed them, here respectively: Pantelejmon Kuliš, Myhajlo Drahomanov, Želehivs’kyj and Borys Hrinčenko. See Ohijenko 2001 [1949].
- 14.
Zhelehivka was finally officially abandoned during the All-Ukrainian Orthographic Conference (Všeukraïns’ska pravopysna konferencija), held in 1927 in Kharkiv under the leadership of Mykola Skrypnyk with the participation of scholars from Ukrainian SSR and L’viv Ševčenko Society.
- 15.
Officially the governor presided over the Board, but the vice-president deputized him.
- 16.
As Philipp Hofeneder notes, Gartner and Smal’-Stots’kyj use the expression ‘Ukrainian language’ instead of the previously used ‘Ruthenian’ only from the 1914 edition onwards (Hofeneder 2009, 254).
- 17.
All translations by Jan Surman, unless otherwise indicated.
- 18.
The presentation of Gartner’s involvement in the project follows Kostner 2001.
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Surman, J. (2020). How Romance Studies Shaped the Ukrainian Language and How the Ukrainian-Romanian Conflict Helped to Create Ladinian: A (Very) Entangled History of A-Political Science. In: Feichtinger, J., Bhatti, A., Hülmbauer, C. (eds) How to Write the Global History of Knowledge-Making. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, vol 53. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-37922-3_4
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