On Lehmann and Neogrammarians

[CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU]

I don't know how I missed this one when it was first circulated, but I did.  I
think I ought to reply and clarify things now, even though our moderator has
already done so.  So here goes:

On Fri, 16 Apr 1999, "Patrick C. Ryan" <proto-language at email.msn.com> wrote:

>From: <CONNOLLY at LATTE.MEMPHIS.EDU>
>Sent: Thursday, April 15, 1999 11:09 AM

>> Lehmann's book is a monument not only to structuralism, but also to
>> Neo-Grammarian notions of the 19th centuries -- both of these as the basis
>> for use of the laryngeal theory (in this instance, four additional PIE
>> consonants not recognized by the Neogrammarians) to explain some odd
>> developments in the Germanic languages.  Not surprisingly, the book is a
>> mess.

>It is profoundly irresponsible to label anything written by Lehmann as a
>"mess".  He is one of the preeminent IEists of the 20th century, and to
>cavalierly dismiss his work as "Neogrammarian", as if a label could discount
>his achievements and contributions, is tragically unjustified.

I agree completely that Lehmann is one of the preeminent Indoeuropeanists of
the century.  But even the best of us make mistakes ("Et dormitat Homerus", as
one of my old Latin teachers used to say), and the eminent get to be eminent by
being bold, which *always* entails the possibility of being spectacularly wrong
in one thing or another.  We respect him because he is right more often than he
is wrong.  But that's not the problem.

I should add that I do not use "Neogrammarian" as a put-down.  Nor
"structuralist".  Nor "laryngealist", or even "Nostraticist"!  Without the
Neogrammarians, we wouldn't even have the traditional IE framework that some of
us love to fulminate against.  Their contribution is enormous, far more than
yours or mine.  They, and later the structuralists, produced almost coherent
systems which accounted for a great many facts -- of IE, of synchronic theory,
etc.  Lehmann attempted to combine the two, while adding Sturtevant's version
of laryngeals to the stew, and then used this to try to explain some very odd
features of Germanic languages.  But if one studies his explanations
critically, it turns out that most of them are either wrong or else no better
than other available explanations which do not involve laryngeals.  I'll spare
you the details, but I've reconsidered and corrected several of his proposals
in some articles published between 1977 and 1983.  (I also accepted some of his
proposals about which I now have grave doubts.)  The book is, I'm afraid, a
mess -- but an original, valuable, and highly stimulating mess.  Kind of like
Chomsky's _Syntactic Structures_.  (I wonder if there's even one word in that
book that Chomsky would now accept?  No matter; he stimulated us, and sometimes
that's the only thing that matters.  So too with Lehmann's work.)

Leo

Leo A. Connolly                         Foreign Languages & Literatures
connolly at latte.memphis.edu              University of Memphis