Summary
In the last two decades of the 19th century the Dutch linguist Jan Marius Hoogvliet (1860–1924) developed an individual approach to non-historical linguistics, in which he sought to take expressly into account data from non-Indo- European languages. His linguistic views prompted him to attack the ideas of the proponents of the ‘world language’ Volapük, which was popular in the Netherlands in the 1880s. In 1903 his major work, Lingua, appeared. This book can aptly be characterized as a specimen of a universal grammar with psychological underpinnings; it was intended as a grammar for all languages in the world.
Hoogvliet’s main opponent, Jacobus van Ginneken (1877–1945) considered Lingua ‘a good book’, but he found various serious shortcomings in it. First, he thought the empirical bases too narrow; second, whereas Hoogvliet had based his thinking on rational psychology, van Ginneken preferred pathological psychology as put forward by Pierre Janet (1859–1947) in his L’automatisme psychologique (1889). Van Ginneken’s Principes de linguistique psychologique (1907) can be regarded as an elaboration on his Lingua review from 1903. However, the works of Hoogvliet and van Ginneken do have several points in common: both start from the psyche of the speaking individual and both take into account data from non-Indo-European languages. The controversy that arose between them can be traced back to their different views of language. Hoogvliet considered an unconscious and invariable ‘Normallogik’ to be the kernel of language, whereas van Ginneken regarded feeling as the innermost essence of language.
While van Ginneken still tried to incorporate the results of German historical comparative grammar into a grand, historically coloured synthesis, Hoogvliet’s writings were characterized by very sharp anti-German tones. The universal, logical classification of the parts of speech expounded in Lingua must be regarded as a direct reaction to Hermann Paul’s (1846–1921) Prinzipien der Sprachgeschichte (1880). Moreover, Hoogvliet defended the scientific character of a non-historical approach of language against Paul. With that he is the most remarkable Dutch synchronic linguist of the last quarter of the 19th century. Hoogvliet’s theory, however, was highly idiosyncratic and many a reader was also repelled by his new and unconventional terminology. Only few linguists, among whom the Dutch structuralist Hendrik J. Pos (1898–1955), have studied Hoogvliet’s views thoroughly later on.
Inês de Castro in England
