Putting the conceptual pair on the scholarly agenda
Chapter 13 illustrates how the eighteenth-century Dutch orientalist Albert Schultens repeatedly defined the term dialectus in a highly systematic fashion. Schultens analysed the conceptual pair principally in Aristotelian terms but tied it also to geographical factors and framed it in a language-historical scheme. He, moreover, contrasted the analogy of language to the anomaly of dialect. The Dutch orientalist extended the language,/,dialect distinction so as to include a third concept, that of degenerate offshoot, which, unlike a dialect, did not preserve the core of the language intact. He also insisted on the linguistic classes in which related dialects allegedly differed from one another. Schultens was a key figure, since he put the conceptualization of dialect on the scholarly agenda, albeit always as a matter of instrumental importance only, and triggered numerous follow-up discussions among his pupils and readers.