All Scholars

Louis Havet’s father was skeptic of religion whose method relied on close textual reading of Christian texts and examination of contemporary contexts. Critical reading based on deep knowledge of the ancient languages was transmitted to his son, who immersed himself in classical languages at his Lycée before becoming one of the first students at the newly-founded École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE). There he studied linguistics under the founder of the modern study of semantics, Michel Bréal (1832-1915) and expanded his knowledge of ancient tongues by learning Sanskrit with Eugéne-Louis Hauvette-Besnault (1820-88). While just out of his teens he translated Friedrich Max-Müller’s Stratification of Language (1868) in the year after its publication. 

      Havet worked within the academic reforms of the Third Republic, which emphasized science to offset the dicta of the Catholic Church. Havet believed in the theory of Proto-Indo-European, the assumed original language from which al Indo-European languages developed. With the Swiss linguist Rudolf Thurneysen-(1857-1940) he developed what is known as Thurneysen-Havet’s Law which describes vowel changes in 2^nd & 3^rd century Latin, particularly the o-grade of ablaut. He addressed Sanskrit palatals and hiatus in Memoires de la société de Linguistique de Paris. 

      He is best known for his Manuel de critique verbale appliquée aux textes which systematically lists, with examples, over 500 types of Medieval scribal error from copyist omissions to intrusive editorial glosses. He examined the archetypes of the received texts of Cicero and Virgil and later wrote on the corruptions in Lucretius and Terence. He applied his methods to the text of Plautus’s Amphitruo and in his study of Aesop’s fables as told by Phaedrus and adapted through time up to Jean de La Fontaine (1621-95). He wrote on the adaptation by Roman poets of the rhythms of Greek poetry and used the structures of Symmachus to analyze the prose of late antiquity. His method of treating emendations was called “critique verbal” and involved not only language but psychology, meter, and cultural context. His studies guided other text editors how to avoid the errors of past editors. 

      In 1885 he was awarded the newly created chair of Latin philology at the Collège de France. Though his lectures could often be mere recitals of text-critical readings, his lectures on linguistics were highly influential as evidenced by the 30 contributors to his Festschrift. He could list among his students the lexicographer and linguist Antoine Meillet (1866-1936). During a lectureship in Paris he met the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) and extensively reviewed his early Mémoire (1879) which he called “all of Indo-European linguistics synthesized” (Joseph, 146).  

      Perhaps he took the most pride in helping to found the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme at the time of the Dreyfus Affair (1894-1906). Havet contributed a stylistic analysis of the bordereau, a slip of paper with intelligence found by a spy in the German Embassy in Paris. The slip was attributed to Captain Alfred Dreyfus (1859-1935), but Havet proved that the style of the note did not match Dreyfus’s. Havet devoted much of this period writing pamphlets on the rights and duties of citizens.