Explications: Etymology as language science, 1822--1941

This dissertation argues that the 19th century "science" of etymology, which had largely disappeared from the arsenal of mainstream linguists by the early 20th century---due in part to the shift toward synchrony so famously called for by Ferdinand de Saussure---actually reemerges in a new and perhaps even more powerful form at the moment of its apparent displacement. With the publication, in 1822, of the second edition of Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik, the 19 th century study of language had become synonymous with the study of its rule-governed transformation over time. Grimm's famous formulation of the so-called "sound laws" provided a criterion for distinguishing true etymologies from false ones, and in doing so turned this traditionally dubious mode of inquiry into the foundational methodology of a fledgling language science. When, therefore, later linguists choose to look elsewhere for their methodological ground, their apparent rejection of 19th century etymological techniques implied a 20th century shift in the understanding of language-in-time. My primary contention is that this shift---which also, of necessity, implies a shift in the understanding of history per se---occurs less as a real rejection than as a subversive reinterpretation. The etymology of Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik does not vanish from linguistics with the introduction of the Saussurean sign or the Jakobsonian phoneme; it merely relinquishes its historicist baggage. How exactly this transformation occurs is the subject of Part I of the dissertation, which reads the Saussurean critique of historical linguistics against the backdrop of the 19th century paradigm. What this transformation has to do with 20th century theories of poetic language is the subject I explore in Part II, where I argue that structuralist poetics, with its radically anti-historicist approach to Germany's most "originary" poetic forms (from the Nibelungen material to the Stabreim verse), functions as testing ground for the more general rethinking of language origins.