[A table of contents is given at the end of the review.]
1. Overview
In 1918/19, Jacob Wackernagel (1853-1938), one of the greatest and most prolific classical linguists of all times, held two courses on ‘the elements of syntax with special reference to Greek, Latin and German’ at the University of Basel (his native city), where he occupied first the chair of Greek, and subsequently the chair of linguistics and classical philology. Urged by students and colleagues, Wackernagel agreed to the publication of these introductory lectures, on the basis of notes taken by two of his students. A ‘first series’, published in 1920 and dealing mainly with number, voice, tense, mood, and the non-finite forms of the verb, was so successful that it was soon followed, in 1924, by a ‘second series’, on gender, nouns and adjectives, pronouns, the article, prepositions, and negation; both series then appeared in a second edition of 1926 and 1928 respectively. Ever since, both the clarity and originality with which the arguments are presented and their lively elegant style have ensured that Wackernagel’s ‘Lectures’ are still essential for anyone interested in Greek and Latin linguistics, because of the author’s wise avoidance of any sort of unnecessary theorizing they are almost ageless,1 and the wide range of observations included means that they can be read with great benefit not just by linguists and/or classicists with a particular interest in morphosyntax (including the history of the relevant grammatical terminology), although this area undoubtedly forms the core of the work. ‘Syntax’ in a narrower sense (clause structure, complex sentences, word order) was treated by Wackernagel as well, in some later lectures, but these unfortunately remain unpublished (and probably, given their fragmentary documentation, unpublishable).2
The book reviewed here presents, above all, a masterful translation from German into English of these ‘Lectures’. Given the lasting importance of Wackernagel’s work and the lack of anything even vaguely comparable in character, scope, and quality, the need for such a translation is undeniable—though at the same time, and on a very general level, it is also regrettable since it reflects the fact that even important contributions to classical scholarship are increasingly ignored in the English-speaking academic world when they happen not to be written in, or translated into, English. However, Langslow’s translation of Wackernagel is far more than just a translation, for what Langslow presents is a veritable update on Wackernagel, through numerous well-balanced and usually most helpful notes to the translated text, in which additional background information is given and more recent bibliography cited. To compile and compose these notes must have been a Herculean task in itself, and thanks to Langslow’s dedication to it the accomplished end product (which unites Wackernagel’s two books in one single monumental volume) should find its way into every well-equipped Classics library, despite its forbidding price tag and even if Wackernagel’s original already sits on the shelves.
In the following sections of this review, each of the three aspects of Langslow’s work as a translator and editor will be considered individually: the introduction and arrangement, the translation, and the notes. In the sections on the translation and the notes the overall assessment is supplemented by a number of detailed observations and/or corrections in the footnotes; that these are somewhat atomistic in nature is an unavoidable consequence of the fact that this is not (and should not be) a review of Wackernagel’s ‘Lectures’, but a review of Langslow’s work on these ‘Lectures’.
2. Introduction and arrangement
In his 15-page ‘editor’s introduction’, Langslow first produces a brief sketch of Wackernagel’s background, personality (‘modest and sober’, p. xiii),3 and academic career; this includes an assessment of Wackernagel’s place in scholarship and, importantly, a concise description of Wackernagel’s modus operandi : ‘He typically started from an anomalous, often overlooked, point of detail …, which he first described and analysed minutely, and then set and explained in its wider context, with illuminating consequences for the larger picture. His focus was always on the individual language at issue, and, if space was allowed for reconstruction of prehistoric phases of the language, then on internal … rather than comparative reconstruction’ (p. xi). In this respect, Wackernagel certainly differed not just from many of today’s comparative philologists, but also from a good number of his contemporaries; but Langslow is right when he stresses that this attitude ‘enabled his works to hold the attention, and even to win the trust and respect of classicists’ (p. xii), thus implying that one (and perhaps the most important) lesson to be learnt from Wackernagel’s ‘Lectures’ does not even concern syntax.
The ‘Lectures’ themselves, their setting and genesis, and their immediate success and afterlife (during which Wackernagel ‘continued to annotate and add supplementary material … until the year of his death’ (p. xvii)) are introduced in a second section. Crucially, Langslow had access to the ‘copious handwritten notes that fill most of the blank pages of his personal, interleaved copy of both 1st and 2nd editions of volumes 1 and 2’, and decided, felicitously, to insert—with appropriate flagging—the more important ones into the translated text; this feature, too, makes Langslow’s new edition invaluable.
Finally, a third section lays out the guiding principles of Langslow’s edition. As far as these concern the translation and the notes, more will be said below, but here it is worth mentioning that Langslow has introduced ‘running headers’ which greatly facilitate the orientation in a work whose original table of contents is rather brief and which is otherwise divided frugally into sections labelled ‘lecture I, 1’, ‘lecture I, 2’, etc. Also to be noted is the fact that the substantial indices and the large bibliography cover both Wackernagel’s text and Langslow’s notes; this is particularly welcome since Langslow has traced, checked, and occasionally corrected all the references which were given by Wackernagel himself often only in a rather allusive form. More problematic, by contrast, is the decision not to differentiate typographically between occasional bracketed insertions into the text made by Langslow—for instance ‘in order to fill out an elliptical form of expression in the interests of clarity’ (p. xviii)—and bracketed remarks by Wackernagel himself; the boundaries between Wackernagel’s original and Langslow’s edition are thus blurred unnecessarily, when the use of e.g. square vs. round brackets would have been possible (cf. also below on editorial changes in the translation).4
3. Translation
A hallmark feature of Wackernagel’s ‘Lectures’ is their accessible style, which makes them easy to read from cover to cover. Langslow impressively succeeds in preserving this feature: while not being slavish, his translation is both accurate5 and idiomatic.6 Unlike Wackernagel, Langslow also translates all the passages and words in Greek and Latin.7 The most remarkable—but certainly intentional—imprecision occurs in the subtitle: Wackernagel’s ‘mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von Griechisch, Lateinisch und Deutsch’ turns into ‘with special reference to Greek, Latin, and Germanic’ (not: ‘German’; contrast p. 10). One wonders whether this editorial interference is merely due to the wish to make the book more marketable in Britain or America. It is true that Wackernagel often refers not only to German, but also to Gothic and modern English (cf. e.g. pp. 64-65), but if, as Wackernagel himself notes, ‘[o]n many occasions … the German language is not analysed systematically but serves to illuminate individual points in what is said about Greek and Latin’ (p. 397), the focus is even less on Germanic as such; hence, to create such an expectation by introducing the word into the subtitle seems a little unfair to the dead author.
Elsewhere too Langslow makes some allowance for a readership whose native language is English rather than German,8 and occasionally there is a (usually small) price to pay for such editorial changes. Thus, Wackernagel’s ‘Der Ausdruck Konjunktiv (oder, wie die Franzosen zu sagen vorziehen, Subjunktiv) ist doppelt irreführend’ becomes ‘The term “subjunctive” (or, as the Germans prefer to say, “Konjunktiv”) is misleading in two ways’ in Langslow’s translation (p. 303). Someone who does not have Wackernagel’s original at hand might wrongly infer from Langslow’s text for instance that Wackernagel himself (or all the Swiss, as opposed to the Germans) use the term ‘Subjunktiv’. At any rate Langslow’s text here is no longer quotable verbatim as being that of Wackernagel A somewhat similar issue arises when Langslow updates Wackernagel’s terminology, notably in the discussion of aspect and related issues; but here, I feel, Langslow’s decision to change Wackernagel’s ‘Aktionsart’ into ‘aspect’ where appropriate (cf. p. 200 n. 13) is fully justified (though forgotten in one instance, on p. 327).
Finally, one passage must be signalled where a slight—and to the reader unnoticeable—rearrangement of Wackernagel’s words unfortunately results in a factual error (but in a text of nearly 800 pages this is certainly forgivable, and it must be held against at least one other passage where Langslow clearly improves on Wackernagel without highlighting it9). On p. 703, Langslow’s version implies that the Greek preposition
4. Notes
The aim of Langslow’s notes is fourfold (p. xix): ‘(i) to provide some brief, basic, dictionary-style information and bibliography about people and things mentioned in the lectures which I expect to be less familiar to the readers of this edition than to Wackernagel’s original audience …; (ii) to explain Wackernagel’s comments and assumptions and to relate them to their contemporary scholarly contexts in classical studies and linguistics; (iii) to update the scholarship where this materially affects the argument; and (iv) where appropriate, to add further observations from the vantage point of modern understanding of Greek and Roman literary and social history, and especially of the history and linguistics of Greek and Latin’. Although Langslow is fully aware that some idiosyncratic choices are unavoidable, and that the annotation may be uneven in some places, he splendidly fulfils this part of his task too. He rarely indulges in putting forward new ideas of his own (as on p. 29 n. 3), and, while adding much of interest, he does not allow his notes to become unfocussed. There are few places where I felt that an explanatory note was missing, as the overall coverage is very broad indeed.10 As far as I can tell, inaccuracies are rare, and outright mistakes almost inexistent.11 The only regrettable thing—which is related to something stated above in the introductory paragraph—is that in providing additional bibliographical references Langslow has ‘deliberately … tended (although not at all costs) to favour recent, readily available publications in English’ (p. xix). Langslow is too modest if he thinks that his notes would be of use only to the non-specialist (or the not-yet-specialist) anyway, but for the specialist it does of course make a difference whether the selection of material is based on a criterion that is as academically irrelevant as the language of a scholarly publication. Having said that, however, Langslow’s ‘not at all costs’ is to be taken at face value, so that much less harm is done than one might worry at first. In fact, although of course any specialist reader could occasionally think of appropriate bibliographical additions here and there,12 I was hardly ever left with the impression that a reference is omitted only because of the language in which it is wirtten.13
5. Conclusion
By way of conclusion it may be said that Langslow’s re-edition of Wackernagel’s ‘Lectures’ is a great success. The book is beautifully produced, it contains few typos—though perhaps too many accent mistakes in the Greek quotations, many of which could have been avoided by merely copying faithfully Wackernagel’s original,14 and the layout is reader-friendly in every respect. More importantly, the publication ensures that one of the ‘Classics’ of Greek and Latin linguistics remains readily available (not least because the German original went out of print 13 years ago). Of course Wackernagel’s ‘Lectures’ always deserved full attention, but Langslow’s new edition truly rejuvenates them. If you do not know them yet, now is the time to discover them for yourself.
References Baldi, P. (1976). ‘The Latin imperfect in *ba-‘. Language 52: 839-850.
Benveniste, E. (1966). Problèmes de linguistique générale, I. Paris.
Breyer, G. (1993). Etruskisches Sprachgut im Lateinischen unter Ausschluss des spezifisch onomastischen Bereiches. Leuven.
Buijs, M. (2007). ‘Aspectual differences and narrative technique: Xenophon’s Hellenica & Agesilaus’, in R. J. Allan and M. Buijs (eds.), The Language of Literature: Linguistic Approaches to Classical Texts. Leiden, 122-153.
Colpe, C. (1975). ‘Synkretismus’. Der Kleine Pauly 5: 1648-1652.
Coulson, M. (2006). Teach Yourself Sanskrit (rev. edn. by R. Gombrich and J. Benson). London.
Cowgill, W. (1960). ‘Greek
Cowgill, W. (1985). ‘The personal endings of thematic verbs in Indo-European’, in B. Schlerath (ed.), Grammatische Kategorien: Funktion und Geschichte. Wiesbaden, 99-108.
Duhoux, Y. (2000). Le verbe grec ancien (2nd edn.). Louvain-la-Neuve.
Dunkel, G. E. (1987). ‘A typology of metanalysis in Indo-European’, in C. Watkins (ed.), Studies in Memory of Warren Cowgill (1929-1985). Berlin and New York, 7-37.
Dunkel, G. E. (1990). ‘J. Wackernagel und die idg. Partikeln *so, *-ke, *-kem und *an‘, in H. Eichner and H. Rix (eds.), Sprachwissenschaft und Philologie: Jacob Wackernagel und die Indogermanistik heute. Wiesbaden, 100-130.
Forbes, K. (1958). ‘The relations of the particle
Heine, B., and Kuteva, T. (2006). The Changing Languages of Europe. Oxford.
Kastner, W. (1967). Die griechischen Adjektive zweier Endungen auf
Kretschmer, P. (1909). ‘Zur Geschichte der griechischen Dialekte’. Glotta 1: 9-59
Lyons, C. (1999). Definiteness. Cambridge.
Meiser, G. (2003). Veni, vidi, vici: Die Vorgeschichte des lateinischen Perfektsystems. Munich.
Petit, D. (1999). *Sue- en grec ancien: La famille du pronom réfléchi. Leuven.
Puddu, N. (2005). Riflessivi e intensificatori: greco, latino e le altre lingue indoeuropee. Pisa.
Rix, H. (1992). ‘Uridg. *gheslo- in den südidg. Ausdrücken für “1000”‘, in Studia etymologica indoeuropaea memoriae A. J. van Windekens dicata. Louvain, 225-231.
Rijksbaron, A. (2002). The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek (3rd edn.). Amsterdam.
Ruijgh, C. J. (1958). ‘Les datifs pluriels dans les dialectes grecs et la position du mycénien’. Mnemosyne 4th ser., 11: 97-116.
Silverstein, M. (1976). ‘Hierarchy of features and ergativity’, in R. M. W. Dixon (ed.), Grammatical Categories in Australian Languages. Canberra, 112-171.
Thumb, A., and Hauschild, R. (1958/59). Handbuch des Sanskrit (2 vols., 3rd edn.). Heidelberg.
Thumb, A., and Scherer A. (1959). Handbuch der griechischen Dialekte, II (2nd edn.). Heidelberg.
Tronci, L. (2005). Gli aoristi con -(
Wachter, R. (2002). ‘Vergleichende Sprachwissenschaft’, in R. Wachter (ed.), Sprachwissenschaft in Basel 1874-1999. Basel, 112-126.
Willi, A. (2007). ‘Of aspects, augments, aorists—or how to say to have killed a dragon’, in C. George, M. McCullagh, B. Nielsen, A. Ruppel, and O. Tribulato (eds.), Greek and Latin from an Indo-European Perspective. Cambridge, 34-48
Willmott, J. (2007). The Moods of Homeric Greek. Cambridge.
Table of contents Editor’s Introduction
I First Course of Lectures
Author’s Prefaces
1-13 General Introduction
13 The Parts of Speech
14-18 Number
19-21 Personal Forms of the Verb
21-25 Voice
25-36 Tense
36-42 Mood
43-45 Infinitive
46 Supine and Gerund
47-48 Participles
49-51 The Cases
II Second Course of Lectures
Author’s Prefaces
1-5 Gender
6-8 Nouns and Adjectives
9-13 Pronouns
14-16 The Article
17-26 Prepositions
27-33 Negation
Abbreviations and References
Indices
Notes
1. Very occasionally Wackernagel’s text includes negative evaluations of certain linguistic developments, whose prescriptivism might be shunned (in print) by many linguists today (cf. p. 61 on ‘the ugly use of Er and Sie‘, p. 618 ‘one reads alas all too frequently es obliegt ihm‘; to avoid misunderstandings the former might have deserved an explanatory note by Langslow to make it clear that Wackernagel is not, of course, referring here to the perfectly standard use of German Sie (plural) as a polite (singular or plural) form of address). Similarly, Wackernagel’s belief that the rise of the definite article in Greek is a sign of linguistic ‘progress’ as compared to the ‘slower intellectual evolution’ of article-free Latin (pp. 558-559) strikes the modern reader as unusual.
2. Wackernagel acknowledges (in the preface to the first edition of the ‘second series’, p. 397 of the present edn.; cf. also p. 566 on the article) that there is some unevenness in the treatment of certain topics. Thus, case syntax is not dealt with extensively (with the exception of the vocative), mainly because Wackernagel intended to look at this in the context of sentence structure (cf. p. 383). Conversely, (too?) much space is allocated in the ‘second series’ to the use of prepositions and negations, so that Wackernagel himself was not entirely satisfied with the rather more bookish outcome in this final part of the ‘Lectures’ (cf. p. 397).
3. This explains the almost complete absence, in the ‘Lectures’, of side remarks, personal anecdotes, and the like (though cf. p. 696 for an exception); nonetheless, Wackernagel’s teaching appears to have been extremely engaging (cf. p. xiv-xv). To Langslow’s references on Wackernagel in Basel add Wachter (2002).
4. Fortunately p. 117 seems to be unique in showing such an ambiguously bracketed insertion by Langslow which is factually misleading and whose erroneous ascription to Wackernagel would therefore be particularly harmful: there is no reason why the imperative
5. A rare (perhaps the only) instance of a real misunderstanding of the German original occurs on p. 122 where Langslow translates Wackernagel’s sample word Alp with ‘nightmare’. From the context (with its discussion of words whose singular and plural differ semantically, while belonging together formally) it is clear that Wackernagel is talking about the homonymous word Alp in the sense of ‘alpine pasture’; note that the plural of Alp = ‘nightmare’ would be Alpe, not Alpen. Only slighly misleading, by contrast, is the rendering of Wackernagel’s remarks on the use of the Latin conjunction cum + ind. (p. 308): ‘In Plautus the indicative is well established. The subjunctive is admitted only where its use goes without saying (in a main clause with subjunctive verb … and so on)’. Here Wackernagel’s original of course does not say ‘in konjunktivischem Hauptsatz’, but ‘bei konjunktivischem Hauptsatz’ (i.e. when the main clause [already] contains a subjunctive verb).
6. This may explain why Wackernagel’s ‘romanische Sprachen’ on p. 249 is translated as ‘Romance dialects’; but Wackernagel would hardly have thought of ‘Swiss Rhaeto-Romance’ (as Langslow aptly renders Wackernagel’s ‘Churwälsch’, which I do not think referred only to Sutsilvan and Surmiran) as a dialect rather than a language.
7. On p. 137, Thuc. 4.15.1 is slightly mistranslated (correct: ‘they decided that the authorities should go down and deliberate’), on p. 166 the gloss of
8. Given this fact it is odd that both ‘Plattdeutsch’ on p. 74 and ‘Soll’ (of accounts books) on p. 101 remain untranslated; an English reader without German can hardly be expected to know that the first is a synonym of ‘Niederdeutsch’, i.e. Engl. ‘Low German’, and the second refers to the ‘debit (side)’.
9. On p. 444 Langslow’s formulation about the gender of Lat. dies in the Romance languages as reflected by the word for ‘Sunday’ is more correct than that of Wackernagel: although one might wrongly conclude from Langslow that French dimanche is feminine, he does not say so, whereas the (equally wrong) inference from Wackernagel’s text that French dimanche, in view of its masculine gender, derives from Lat. (dies) dominicus (not: dominica) is almost unavoidable.
10. But for instance on p. 154 a note on the background of the—according to Wackernagel ‘arbitrary’—comparison of
11. But note the following: p. 43 n. 4 (the Germanic ‘strong’ inflection of adjectives is not really ‘less well characterized for gender than the “weak”‘; contrast p. 458 n. 33); p. 52 n. 4 (Halicarnassus was no longer (exclusively) Doric-speaking in Herodotus’ time, cf. Thumb and Scherer 1959: 245); p. 56 n. 15 (the question how faithfully Arrian reproduced Epictetus is rather more complex than Langslow makes it sound, and Wackernagel may have been less off the mark than Langslow’s comparison with Xenophon’s portrayal of Socrates suggests); p. 109 n. 25 (Wackernagel’s views on the Homeric text are deeply influenced by the ‘analytic’ school, and hence somewhat different from those adopted by Kirk in his commentary); p. 154 n. 9 (Aeolic is not generally assibilating); p. 162 n. 8 (can it really be said that the Sanskrit infinitives in -dhyai are ‘corresponding to
12. For example, I might have included references to Silverstein (1976) in p. 139 n. 14 (animacy hierarchy and grammatical number), Meiser (2003) in p. 218 n. 8 (origin of Lat. vidi), Baldi (1976) in p. 244 n. 4 (Skutsch’s theory on the Latin imperfect), Cowgill (1985) in p. 278 n. 19 (on
13. But note for instance the preference given to Coulson (2006) over Thumb and Hauschild (1958/59) and the absence of Duhoux (2000) from the bibliography. If they had been in English, Langslow would probably also have included, as directly relevant to the topics under discussion, e.g. Breyer (1993) in p. 142 n. 1, Tronci (2005) in p. 180 n. 4, Kastner (1967) in p. 460 n. 41, and Petit (1999) (and perhaps Puddu 2005) in p. 517 n. 18. Oddly, Colpe (1975) is cited in p. 378 n. 5, although this article in German does not deal with linguistic syncretism at all.
14. The most serious accentual mistake is the repeated (4x) printing of