Perhaps, dear reader, you are at a linguistics department, while your friend – studying very similar courses at a different university – is in a philology department. Some departments used to call themselves one way but later renamed themselves, such as Harvard’s Department of Linguistics, originally Comparative Philology. What differences are there and why does the name seem to matter? A highly readable and enjoyable article containing both qualitative and quantitative data tackled this issue over three decades ago – Margaret Winters & Geoffrey Nathan’s 1992 “First he called her a philologist and then she insulted him” (a worthwhile longer account can be found in Momma 2012).
And a likewise highly readable and enjoyable book has existed since 2025, bringing the reader right into the core of the historical time period in which linguistics was in the process of being established and gradually diverged from the older discipline, philology. In this book, the two protagonists exchange letters over nearly half a century, giving insight into changes underway in the academic fields, contrasting research methods and questions (in particular the Neogrammarian debate on Sound Laws), while peppering in contemporary events that affected society. These two characters are Gaston Paris (a French philologist, 1839-1903) and Hugo Schuchardt (born 1842 in the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, and based in Graz, Austria-Hungary, from 1877 to his death in 1927). The title of the book is Gaston Paris – Hugo Schuchardt. Correspondances, edited by Ursula Bähler, Bernhard Hurch, and Nicolas Morel.
Not without my own biases and ignorance, I went looking in the volume for insight in these letters about dialects, language contact, and Creoles, particularly regarding how the study of these fields was shaped by the foremost researchers of the time. Hugo Schuchardt produced a prodigious number of scientific texts in and about a broad range of languages, while Gaston Paris, a leading figure in philology and medieval studies, founded an important journal, Romania, to which Schuchardt contributed in the 1870s and 1880s. These years coincided with Schuchardt’s focus on Creoles, and indeed he published a few articles in Paris’ journal, Romania, on the subject. Soon afterwards, the editorial policy changed and excluded scientific publications on Creoles (see introduction p. xx, which cites Paris’ letter to Schuchardt, dated and numbered 101 in the edition: “la règle de la R[omania] de ne plus accueillir d’art. sur les patois” [Romania’s rule to no longer accept articles on patois]). This meant that the foremost outlet for Romance studies shut itself off from Creole research, a clear setback for the field (but one can easily disprove the claim in the introduction that no other French journal published on Creoles – in fact a counterexample is provided in the footnote 22 on p. xx, in addition to the flourishing colonial-oriented journals such as La revue exotique). Despite this conservatism and isolationism, even Paris – who was far from being a globetrotter – realized while looking for language informants as a favor to Schuchardt that he knew someone from school (Jules Fleury, an engineer) who had emigrated to La Réunion. By getting in touch with Fleury, he was able to help Schuchardt get sources for Creole material (possibly including this sheet music). Not only is this an illustration of globalization and the power of networks in the pursuit of scientific aims, it also demonstrates the importance of the colonies and the languages spoken there – despite the rigid policies of the journal.
Once again concerning informants on Creole, Schuchardt comes in for some unfair criticism when the editors state that “Schuchardt ne cite jamais le docteur Bos” [Schuchardt never cites Dr. Bos]. The doctor in question was a traveling ship medical doctor who wrote to Schuchardt from across the French colonies between 1882-1891 (letters to Schuchardt available here, transcribed for the Hugo Schuchardt Archiv by Frank-Rugter Hausmann). This error is easy to trace because it appears published by Bähler and Morel in their 2023 article (p. 271) and unfortunately two years later was still not corrected. As those who are familiar with Schuchardt’s texts know, he was extremely meticulous in citing his sources and giving credit to his informants – very uncommon in the field at the time. In fact, he sometimes embeds flowery thank-yous directly into his scientific texts (no mere acknowledgement footnote!) to informants he never met – these men, women, and sometimes even children, who took the time to answer his questions by post, lived thousands of kilometers away, and would likely never get to read their name thus immortalized in print, not having access to such scientific publications. As it happens, Schuchardt cites Alphonse Bos in his 1888 study on Vietnamese Pidgin French.
Famous names and occurrences appear in the pages, and not just those of linguists. Discussions in an informal tone – light-hearted, and often still relatable to the modern reader – also bring to light forgotten bits of culture. While joking about the lack of food options for tourists at a hotel in southeastern France due to the Easter holiday, Schuchardt refers to the “hunger artists” Stefano Merlatti and Giovanni Succi, who at the turn of the century starved themselves as a way to entertain the public (and inspired Kafka’s novella The Hunger Artist). Serious matters also arise: the Dreyfus affair comes up in the letters number 136-139 and 150-154. Schuchardt urges Paris to take action to right the miscarriage of justice; but Paris remains utterly unmoved, even as the situation deteriorates, tensions increase, and Schuchardt begins to use harsher words to point out his correspondent’s pusillanimity. In the end it was Paris’ colleague and co-founder of Romania, Paul Meyer, who got involved, bringing his expertise in handwriting – a transferable skill from the study of manuscripts – to bear on the case, showing that Dreyfus could not possibly have written the letter that betrayed military secrets.
Finally, a short but essential note about the language of the book. It is nearly entirely in French, Paris’ native language and the native language of Schuchardt’s mother, but also a dominant language of the nineteenth century for scientific publications. The correspondence gives an occasion to reflect on this change as well, a testimony to earlier tensions and obstacles which we hardly come across now, as science tends to be more monolingual in our day, with heavy reliance on English (this blog being a notable and commendable exception!). The digital edition of these letters, available through the online HSA, can easily be translated with a browser plugin, the book probably with somewhat more effort.
Nevertheless, the book has clear merits. Available as a completely free, open access PDF (used in preparing this review), it brings together all the letters in a highly dense text with a multitude of entry points – through the introduction that highlights themes, an index of names (part of the very thorough index of names collected over the years by the many contributors to the online Hugo Schuchardt Archiv (Hurch 2022-), showing the richness of connections) and a nice but small selection of images. Much of the documentary material presented in this volume is freely available online, mostly through the Hugo Schuchardt Archiv (including the recent scanning and uploading of all the manuscripts to Europeana) and the French national library’s platform Gallica. It is precisely the fact that the digital age has given rise to this massive amount of material – available to us so readily, but mainly only as images rather than text – that demonstrates the added-value of this well-researched, incisive, and reflective edition, brought to us in distilled and helpfully-annotated form by the three editors.
About the book:
Bähler, U., Hurch, B., & Morel N. (2025). Gaston Paris – Hugo Schuchardt. Correspondance. SISMEL.
https://www.mirabileweb.it/api/galluzzo/content/2400?lang=it
DOI: 10.36167/EUPHICO05PDF
Further reading:
Bähler, U. & Morel, N. (2023). Naviguer et tanguer avec le docteur Alphonse Bos, “bachi-Bouzoukh” de la philologie romane. Grazer Linguistische Studien, 94: 259-273. https://unipub.uni-graz.at/download/pdf/8828011.pdf
Hausmann, F.R. (2021). Alphonse Bos. In B. Hurch (Ed.): Hugo Schuchardt Archiv. https://gams.uni-graz.at/o:hsa.person.1181.
Kafka, F. (2012). A hunger artist and other stories. Oxford University Press.
Momma, H. (2012). From philology to English studies: Language and culture in the nineteenth century. Cambridge University Press.
Schuchardt, H. (1888). Kreolische Studien VIII. Ueber das Annamito-französische. Sitzungsberichte der philosophisch-historischen Classe der Kaiserlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 116: 227-234. https://gams.uni-graz.at/o:hsa.bibl.2
Winters, M. & Nathan, G. (1992). First he called her a philologist and then she insulted him. In D. Brentari, G. Larson & L. MacLeod (Ed.), The Joy of Grammar: A festschrift in honor of James D. McCawley (pp. 351-368). John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.55.22win
Sarah Melker studied and continues to carry out research at the University of Graz – a place she had only heard about because of Schuchardt. And is grateful to him for opening up a world of people, places, and languages beyond the city too.
Boganmeldelse: Var der fred før lingvistikkrigene? En udgave af brevvekslingen mellem Hugo Schuchardt (lingvist) og Gaston Paris (filolog) 
Around Europe in Sixty Languages by Gaston Dorren. Book review. 
Book review: ‘European Language Matters’ by Peter Trudgill 
Book Review: ‘In the Land of Invented Languages’ by Arika Okrent 
Book review: When language grows larger than reality 
Creativity as an approach: the frame(works) of egos in academia & beyond – Some Islands 3 video review