Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Prix Volney: Its History and Significance for the Development of Linguistic Research. Volumes 1a and 1b, and: The Prix Volney: Early Nineteenth-Century Contributions to General and Amerindian Linguistics: Du Ponceau and Rafinesque. Volume 2, and: The Prix Volney: Contributions to Comparative Indo-European, African and Chinese Linguistics: Max Muller and Steinthal. Volume 3 (review)

2002; Linguistic Society of America; Volume: 78; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/lan.2002.0137

1535-0665

Margaret Thomas,

Historical Linguistics and Language Studies

Reviewed by: The Prix Volney: Its history and significance for the development of linguistic research ed. by Joan Leopold, and: The Prix Volney: Early nineteenth-century contributions to general and Amerindian linguistics: Du Ponceau and Rafinesque ed. by Joan Leopold, and: The Prix Volney: Contributions to comparative Indo-European, African and Chinese linguistics: Max Müller and Steinthal ed. by Joan Leopold Margaret Thomas The Prix Volney: Its history and significance for the development of linguistic research. Volumes 1a and 1b. Ed. by Joan Leopold. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999. Pp. xxvi, 995. The Prix Volney: Early nineteenth-century contributions to general and Amerindian linguistics: Du Ponceau and Rafinesque. Volume 2. Ed. by Joan Leopold. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999. Pp. viii, 340. The Prix Volney: Contributions to comparative Indo-European, African and Chinese linguistics: Max Müller and Steinthal. Volume 3. Ed. by Joan Leopold. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1999. Pp. ix, 518. Cloth $1200.00 (three-volume set). The ‘Prix Volney’ for scholarship in linguistics has been presented by the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres since 1822. It derives from a bequest made by Constantin-François Chassebœuf de Boisgirais (1757–1820), who in the style of his day invented for himself the name ‘Volney’, combining the first syllable of Voltaire’s name with the last syllable of the name of Voltaire’s estate, ‘Ferney’. Volney was an adventurer and a ‘rationalist and freethinker’ (8) born into the provincial gentry. As one of the ‘Idéologues’, he was fully enmeshed in the intellectual and social turmoil of his day. He criticized the French bureaucracy, clergy, and nobility, and, on principle, opposed censorship and colonialism. Volney spent substantial intervals traveling around Egypt, Syria, and the United States. He was a friend to (among others) Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon while at another point in his life he served a prison term for debt. His writings are in such fields as would now be labeled history, ethnography, sociology, education, and philology. In Volney’s study of language, he neither allied himself with the tradition of general grammar linked to the late eighteenth-century Port-Royal grammarians nor participated in the on-coming wave of comparative-historical linguistics emanating from Germany. Instead, he learned Arabic, studied Sanskrit, dabbled in the Algonquian language Miami (deploring the loss of Native American languages already underway), and contributed to contemporary debates about the origin of language and the classification of languages. A particular interest of his was the invention of a ‘harmonic alphabet’, that is, a uniform script that could be used to transcribe all languages. Volney’s will provided for a prize to be awarded for the best essay, submitted anonymously, on the transcription question or more generally about ‘the philosophical study of languages’ (25). Judges were to be appointed from the membership of French academic societies. The earliest submissions addressed the transcription issue, and for a time the Volney Commission announced a topic for each year’s competition. Some topics were quite specific: a grammatical analysis of [End Page 335] Basque (1829), or the distinction between verbal nouns or adjectives and infinitives or participles (1830). After 1839, the competition was opened to essays on any topic in comparative philology, except that Volney’s will excluded work on French. That constraint has not always been observed, but essays submitted for the Prix Volney do show a strong representation of work informed by languages of sub-Saharan Africa, the Americas, and the Pacific. The prize itself initially consisted of a gold medal. Since the 1850s monetary awards of various sums have been offered, with the cash value of the award recently standing at 5,000 francs. In some years, the Prix Volney has not been awarded, and there was a hiatus between 1969 and 1981 after which point the competition was re-established on a five-year cycle. Among awardees with the greatest name-recognition today are August Friedrich Pott (1845), Max Müller (1849, 1862), Heymann Steinthal (1851, 1854), August Schleicher (1863, 1867), Franz Bopp (1866), Hugo Schuchardt (1867, 1885), Antoine Meillet (1898), Otto Jespersen (1906), Émile Benveniste (1937), André Martinet (1938, 1958), and Jerzy Kuryłowicz (1957). The three most recent winners are...