Leonard Bloomfield and Albanese

ABSTRACT

Among the numerous engaging puzzles from the history of linguistics is Leonard Bloomfield’s use of the language name Albanese for the national language of Albania, as when he writes in Language that ‘Later, Armenian and Albanese, and a few ancient languages known to us only from scant written records, proved also to belong to the Indo-European family’. Given that the most common English term for this language was and is Albanian, this is an odd terminological choice on Bloomfield’s part, as has occasionally been acknowledged, e.g., by Charles Hockett in the foreword to the 1984 reprint of Language. This note offers argumentation suggesting just how this detail of Bloomfield’s usage is to be accounted for, building on an earlier study by Hinrichs, Erdmann, and Joseph. We propose that Bloomfield’s use of Albanese instead of Albanian is most directly due to his teacher and mentor Eduard Prokosch. This claim is based on Prokosch’s own usage of the term Albanese, Bloomfield’s deep admiration of Prokosch, and Bloomfield’s interactions with Prokosch at a very early stage of his academic career. Bloomfield’s use of the term was then reinforced by his exposure to Germanophone scholars and scholarship, as argued by Hinrichs et al.

KEYWORDS:

• Leonard Bloomfield
• Albanian
• Eduard Prokosch
• linguistic terminology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Albanian is now also the national language of the Republic of Kosovo and is spoken by significant numbers of speakers elsewhere as well (especially the Republic of North Macedonia, Montenegro, southern Italy, and parts of Greece). Even though this geographic distribution is more or less the same as it was in the era of Bloomfield and others we write about here, the main focus then was the region in the western Balkans known as Albania that was part of the Ottoman Empire until independence in 1912.

² A search of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA; https://www.english-corpora.org/coca/), conducted on 18 October 2021, yielded similar results: there were 151 hits, all of which are for people whose last name is Albanese. A search of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED; www.oed.com), conducted on 3 June 2022, yielded slightly different results: the usage is labelled ‘rare’ in the OED. The OED cites eleven examples of Albanese or Albinese being used for the language, including Bloomfield’s own usage (in Bloomfield 1933), e.g. ‘ … the exposition of the Albinese in Romaic and Italian’ from 1812 (Lord Byron, Childe Harold). The most recent such usage for the language is from a 1989 article in the New York Times: ‘He spoke Albanese with the chemist of the town.’ The OED results show that Albanese is still in very occasional use for the language, but do not contradict the arguments made here. (For instance, we note that the 1989 example is attributed to the movie director Francesco Rosi, who is a native speaker of Italian. His usage of Albanese in English is therefore presumably interference from Italian.)

³ A reader of an earlier version of this paper points out that the Romance languages all have similar names for the language, e.g. French albanais, Italian albanese, and suggests that this usage also influenced Bloomfield. We find this point unconvincing: while Bloomfield was clearly well-versed in the Romance languages, as illustrated by the number of Romance-language works cited in Bloomfield (1933), Romance-language scholarship certainly had less of an impact on Bloomfield’s own scholarship than German-language scholarship did.

⁴ Prokosch was born in Eger (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, now in the Czech Republic and normally called Cheb) in 1876, and graduated from the Gymnasium there in 1894. He studied law in Prague and Vienna, passing the state bar examinations in 1897, before moving to the United States in 1898. Prokosch returned to Europe in 1904 to continue his education in Heidelberg and Leipzig, earning a doctorate from Leipzig in 1905. His dissertation, Beiträge zur Lehre vom Demonstrativpronomen in den altgermanischen Dialekten [‘Contributions to the Study of the Demonstrative Pronoun in the Early Germanic Dialects’] (Prokosch 1905), was supervised by Eduard Sievers. We suggest that the account presented in Hinrichs, Erdmann, and Joseph (2016) of Bloomfield’s use of the term could apply directly to Prokosch, as in our view, Prokosch’s usage in English reflects the prevailing usage in his native German in the late 19th century and early 20th century.

⁵ Bloomfield was trained extensively in Germanic linguistics and published a considerable amount of research in this area. Perhaps most importantly for the matter at hand, he studied in Leipzig and Göttingen in 1913–1914, where he worked with some of the giants in the field, including Karl Brugmann, August Leskien, and Jacob Wackernagel. An anonymous referee reminds us that Bloomfield may well also have known Gustav Weigand, an important Albanologist in Germany at the time (as demonstrated by works like Weigand 1913, 1914), during his stint in Leipzig. See Moulton (1970) and Pierce (2009) for additional details on Bloomfield’s Germanic work.

⁶ Since, however, Hans Kurath states in the foreword to Prokosch (1939) that ‘Galley proof of the book had been read’ by Prokosch, we do not want to make too much out of the timing of the publication.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Marc Pierce

Marc Pierce is an Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies and an affiliated faculty member in the Department of French and Italian at the University of Texas at Austin, where he has worked since 2007. His research focuses on historical linguistics, Germanic linguistics, the history of linguistics, Texas German, and phonology. He is currently preparing a book on the history of Germanic linguistics in North America.

Brian D. Joseph

Brian D. Joseph is Distinguished University Professor of Linguistics, and The Kenneth E. Naylor Professor of South Slavic Linguistics, at The Ohio State University, where he has taught since 1979. His degrees are in Linguistics, from Yale (A.B., 1973), and Harvard (A.M., 1976; Ph.D., 1978). He has held fellowships from NEH, ACLS, and Fulbright, and holds three honorary doctorates (La Trobe University, 2006; University of Patras, 2008; Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, 2022). He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Linguistic Society of America, and is a member of the American Philosophical Society. He served as President of the Linguistic Society of America in 2019. His research focus is historical linguistics, especially regarding the Greek language, from Ancient through Modern, in its genealogical context as an Indo-European language and its geographic context within the Balkans.