History of linguistics 2008: Selected papers from the 11th international conference on the history of the language sciences (ICHOLS XI), Potsdam, 28 August – 2 September 2008. Ed. by Gerda Hassler. (Studies in the history of the language sciences 115.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. Pp. xi, 468. ISBN 9789027246066. $180 (Hb).
Reviewed by Julie M. Winter, Heinrich Heine University

This book contains thirty-two articles selected from among some 220 presented at the eleventh International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences in Potsdam. The articles, chosen to represent major foci and the broad range of themes at the conference, cover the time periods extending from antiquity to the present day. They reveal that humans across cultures have long had a strong interest in studying language and have done so from various perspectives. Linguistic science today is a broad field reflecting the wide range of traditions and approaches that have come before.
The thirty-two articles selected are divided into five sections: methodological considerations, linguistics, and philology; antiquity; renaissance linguistics; the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; and the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

What unifies the articles is that they all represent the attempt to understand the history of linguistics using modern methodological approaches—in particular, the ability to collect and analyze linguistic data electronically—and the broad, interdisciplinary approach to studying a particular topic. A further underlying unifying element is that each of the contributions supports the idea that we can best understand the field of modern linguistics by having an understanding of the history of linguistics and how the field developed.

The remarkable variety of periods and topics dealt with in this collection precludes a summary of the themes in this short book notice; a few examples of the types of articles included must suffice. The contribution from John Walmsley, ‘“A term of opprobrium”: Twentieth century linguistics and English philology’, explores how modern linguistics grew out of philology, the term used to signify the study of language and literature before the twentieth century. Walmsley describes how linguistics distinguished itself from philology and what has been gained and lost as linguistics developed.
As another example, Daniel J. Taylor illuminates the type of work carried out in the study of language in ancient times with ‘Rewriting the history of the language sciences in classical antiquity’. In this article he examines the work of Marcus Terentius Varro (116–27 BC) and demonstrates that Varro’s contributions, as well as other Graeco-Roman linguistic endeavors, are of high quality and must be reevaluated in order to assess their value accurately.

Reflecting the diverse range of topics, we also have the contribution from Clemens Knobloch, ‘“Cultural morphology”: A success story in German linguistics’. Knobloch explains how the sociologically oriented approach of cultural morphology gave new direction to German dialectology and gave the discipline status in the humanities in early twentieth century Germany, a time period in which emphasis on the Volk was particularly important.

This book is valuable as the articles shed light on areas that help us understand the history of linguistics in a broad way and furthermore highlight the fact that while the actual science of linguistics saw a rapid rise in the twentieth century, the study of language has been around for a long time. The various areas, schools of thought, nuances, and approaches all contribute to the field of linguistics today and should not be neglected. Linguistic science is indebted to what scholars turned to and discovered in the past.