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Abstract
Leibniz’s philosophical and philological interests overlapped at many points, and some of his fundamental philosophical notions shaped his views on language, particularly his thinking about language history, in decisive ways. Although he is better known for his work on universal language, his writings on natural language and language history are worth consideration both for their subtlety and for the insight they give into the complex history of thought on this topic. The principles of sufficient reason, praedicatum inest subjecto, and his doctrine of marks and traces are echoed in his work on natural languages and in his account of their histories. He attempted to reconcile philosophical investigations of the natural languages with the Biblical accounts of the confusion of languages at Babel, and in his approach to etymology he participated in a long tradition of thinking about language and its essence as hidden or secret, the truth of which remains scattered in signs and which etymology alone may occasionally reveal.
Notes
1. The German of my title comes from Leibniz’s poem Jesu, dessen Tod und Leiden (1684).
For an earlier treatment that sees a conflict between the two areas, see, for example, Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, 130–32. For a corrective to this, see Heinekamp, “Natürliche Sprache,” and Rutherford, “Philosophy and Language in Leibniz,” 248–52. Leibniz’s work on the universal characteristic begins with his 1666 Dissertatio de arte combinatoria (A VI 1 163ff.; G IV 30ff.), but he takes up the idea in many of his works; see Pombo, Problem of a Universal Language. Van Hal’s “Recent Work on Leibniz’s Investigations” is a good survey of recent scholarship on Leibniz and natural languages. On the medieval and Renaissance preoccupation with a lingua universalis, see Strasser, Lingua Universalis. For Leibniz in this context, see Walker, “Leibniz and Language,” and Blank, “Leibniz und die Lingua Universalis.”
2. A fascinating account of these figures and many others can be found in Eco, Search for the Perfect Language.
3. Walker, “Leibniz and Language,” 294.
4. Leibniz, G II 56: “In every true affirmative proposition, whether necessary or contingent, universal or particular, the notion of the predicate is in some way included in that of the subject. Praedicatum inest subjecto; otherwise I do not know what truth is.”
5. Walker, “Leibniz and Language,” 295‒96.
6. It is difficult to judge how advanced Leibniz’s thinking on this subject was. In “Leibniz und die Lingua Universalis,” Blank notes that Louis Couturat (ob. 1914) claimed there were a thousand unexamined manuscript pages of work on the lingua universalis in the Hannover library, “Wieviel davon inzwischen ediert wurde, konnte ich noch nicht erfahren” (27).
7. Widmaier, Die Rolle der Chinesischen Schrift.
8. Leibniz, RB 279. Leibniz refers here to Philippe Labbé’s Grammatica lingue universalis missionum et commerciorum (1663).
9. But see Schulenburg, Leibniz als Sprachforscher; Hoenigwald, “Comparative Method since Leibniz”; Robins, “Leibniz and Wilhelm von Humboldt Rutherford”; and Van Hal, “Recent Work on Leibniz’s Investigations.” For a more integrated reading of Leibniz’s life and work in general, see Antognazza, Leibniz: An Intellectual Biography.
10. Jerome, Epist. ad Damasum papam 18.
11. For Boehme’s Adamicism and Leibniz’s connections to Adamicism and Boehme, see Courtine, “Leibniz et la Langue Adamic,” and Losonsky, “Leibniz’s Adamic Language of Thought.” For a general introduction to Boehme, see Stoudt, Sunrise to Eternity, and Weeks, Boehme.
12. In De Vulgari Eloquentia 1.6‒7, Dante refers to a forma locutionis, created by God along with the first soul. Dante identifies this with the Hebrew that was spoken until the dispersal of Israel (qui antiquissima locutione sunt usi usque ad suam dispersionem). At 1.9 he notes that all languages arising after Babel, but not the divinely created language, are subject to corruption.
13. Dante, Divine Comedy, Paradiso 26.124‒138. This is a sentiment curiously reminiscent of Glaucus’ famous simile of the generations of leaves in Iliad 6.145‒49, but which Mazzocco in Linguistic Theories (171), considers a paraphrase of Horace’s Ars Poetica, 60‒63.
14. Mazzocco, Linguistic Theories, 159‒81 (chapter 9: “Dante’s Reappraisal of the Adamic Language”).
15. On Leibniz and his classical sources, see Bregman, “Classical Greek Influence,” Beeley, “Leibniz und die vorsokratische Tradition,” and Brown, “Leibniz and the Classical Tradition.”
16. Rutherford, “Philosophy and Language in Leibniz,” 240‒41; Walker, “Leibniz and Language,” 299.
17. Waterman, “Leibniz on Language Learning,” 88.
18. Robins, “Leibniz and Wilhelm von Humboldt,” 85‒86; Turner, Philology, 101‒2.
19. Robins, “Leibniz and Wilhelm von Humboldt,” 90.
20. Hoenigswald, “Comparative Method since Leibniz,” 123.
21. Leibniz, RB 280‒1, CE II 285.
22. The Scythian theory is often associated with Saumais’s De Hellenistica commentarius (1643) or Boxhorn’s Antwoord (1647), though in “On ʻthe Scythian Theoryʼ” and “Earliest Stages of Persian‒German,” Van Hal has persuasively argued that the “initial” and “decisive impetus to the development” (“On ʻthe Scythian Theory,ʼ” 71) of this theory was Elichmannʼs Tabula Cebetis. His early death prevented Elichmann from publishing his ideas, but Van Hal has pieced them together from various sources, including letters and Saumaise’s preface to Elichmann’s posthumous Arabic edition of the Tabula Cebetis (1640). According to Van Hal, Saumaiseʼs and Boxhornʼs views on the Scythian theory are more or less derived from Elichmann.
23. On Boxhorn, see especially Fellman, “The First Historical Linguist”; on the Scythian hypothesis more generally, see Muller, “Early Stages of Language Comparison”; Fellman, “On Sir William Jones,“ and “Further Remarks”; Droixhe, “Avant-Propos,” 5‒15; Villani, “Scythae”; Metcalf, On Language Diversity, 34‒39; Considine, “Why Was Claude de Saumaise”; and the works by Van Hal cited in the previous note.
24. Alessandrini, “Images of India,” esp. 52‒54.
25. It was, in fact, Leibniz who coined the derogatory term ‘goropism’ (RB 285).
26. Hoenigswald, “Comparative Method since Leibniz,” 121‒22.
27. Robins, “Leibniz and Wilhelm von Humboldt,” 86.
28. Walker, “Leibniz and Language,” 304.
29. Leibniz, CE II 273.
30. Although many scholars, including Leibniz, noticed isolated examples of Germanic divergence from the cognate languages, a reliable and systematic explanation of these changes was first articulated by the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask in a prize essay for the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters (Rask, Undersögelse); however, the law is named after the elder Grimm brother, Jacob (1785‒1863), who incorporated Rask’s work into his great Deutsche Grammatik and Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, and whose formulation of the rules was perhaps more widely accessible (Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik (1822), 584‒92, Deutsche Grammatik (1840), 8, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, 392‒434).
31. Walker, “Leibniz and Language,” 304.
32. For the development of Neogrammarian thinking and the notion of exceptionlessness, see Hale, “Neogrammarian Sound Change,” and Historical Linguistics, 124‒45.
33. Leibniz, CE 311, Etymologica res coniecturis, non demonstrationibus agitur; et credo, veras interdum esse origines, quae minime sunt verisimiles: casus enim in linguarum mutationibus magis quam consilium dominatur.
34. Leibniz, G VI 602, AG 209‒10, “nothing takes place without sufficient reason, that is, that nothing happens without it being possible for someone who knows enough things to give a reason sufficient to determine why it is so and not otherwise.”
35. Leibniz, AG 217, “[the principle] of sufficient reason, by virtue of which we consider that we can find no true or existent fact, no true assertion, without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise, although most of the time these reasons cannot be known to us.”
36. Leibniz, A VI iv 1540–41, AG 41.
37. Ibid., A VI iv 1541, AG 41. In “Die Säkularisierung des tertium comparationis,” Tilman Borsche explains this with admirable clarity: “Leibniz takes all empirical studies to be auxiliary studies. It is their purpose to lead us to knowledge, because our mind virtually contains all possible ideas. But we depend on external occasions and suggestions to realize it, because we have no actual knowledge of ideas and no intuitive access to it. Consequently, we have to rely on signs that represent ideas and which can lead us symbolically to their knowledge. In this sense the study of languages may be most useful and is indeed indispensable. The historical variety of words and expressions may offer us changing glimpses of the unchanging truths, which are held to be the invariant focus of linguistic comparisons” (117).
38. Leibniz, A II.i 413, quoted in Rutherford, “Philosophy and Language in Leibniz,” 255 n. 1.
39. Walker, “Leibniz and Language,” 306.
40. Heraclitus 22B93 in Diels and Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker.
41. “To the robust linguistic practitioner Leibniz is a puzzle and a scandal” (Hoenigswald, “Comparative Method since Leibniz,’ 119). “Le précepteur Pangloss était l’oracle de la maison” is how Voltaire introduces his disciple of Leibniz in Candide, where however the satire is aimed at Leibniz’s philosophical optimism, not his views on language.
42. Leibniz, G VII 184: Nam eruditissimi homines, cum aliquid hujusmodi obiter apud ipsos attigissem, fassi sunt non intelligere quid dicerem.
43. Müller, Lectures on the Science of Language, 129. I owe this reference to Van Hal, “Sprachen, die Geschichte schreiben,” 177.