All Scholars

Jacob Wackernagel was one of the most important linguists and Indo-European scholars who ever lived. He was at once a classical scholar as well as a Sanskritist and linguist, and a man of permanent importance as a philological linguist or a “Sprachforscher philologischer Richtung,” as he is reported to have called himself. Like the exponents of the so-called “Berlin school,” Johannes Schmidt (1843-1901) and Wilhelm Schulze (1863-1935), Wackernagel pursued the sort of language comparison that relied on the reexamination of the textual tradition along philological lines. His studies in historical linguistics do not rely upon the data found in grammars or dictionaries but always upon factual material drawn from the texts themselves, which he interpreted by a fixed method. Wackernagel’s recognition of various phenomena in the general field of Indo-European philology caused certain characteristics of the Indo-Iranian languages to be identified as part of a common Indo-European heritage. Thus, today’s Indo-European linguistics owes to Wackernagel important contributions to Greek grammar, to syntactical studies, and, above all, to the investigation of Old Indo-Aryan, to which field he contributed his fundamental and monumental Altindische Grammatik, though this masterpiece (first continued byAlbert Debrunner) is even now not complete.

Jacob Wackernagel was born in Basel (Switzerland) on 11 December 1853 to Wilhelm Wackernagel (1806-1869), who was born in Berlin, but from 1833 was Professor of German Language and Literature in Basel, and his second wife, Maria Salome, née Sarasin, of an illustrious old Basel family. The man who stood godfather to the newborn child (in absentia) was none other than Jacob Grimm (1785-1863), one of the founders of modem linguistics and of German philology. Grimm was quite delighted to have the little boy named after him and wished that “er moge gedeihen und einmal Ihnen und mir rechte Ehre machen!,” and in fact Jacob Grimm’s genanne did so!

In Basel he attended the Pädagogium, whose teachers included celebrities like the historian Jacob Burckhardt(1818-97), the Greek scholar Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), and the Germanist Moritz Heyne (1837-1906). After the finest classical education possible, he matriculated in Basel University in 1871, but by autumn 1872 he went abroad to the Georgia Augusta in Göttingen, where he stayed for nearly two years and studied Sanskrit and comparative philology. He was greatly influenced by Theodor Benfey (1809-1881), who taught him Vedic and Sanskrit. It is obvious that this pioneer, who had a more philological proclivity than the other linguists and comparatists of those days, exerted a special attraction for Wackernagel, and as a result Old Indo-Aryan was always the basis of his comparative linguistic studies. Except for this great Sanskritist, influences of his university teachers or of certain schools upon Wackernagel seem to be nearly nonexistent. “He was his own creation” as Von der Mühll put it, especially in his classical scholarship. For the winter term 1874-75 he went up to Leipzig University, where he attended the classes of Ernst Kuhn, Georg Curtius, and August Leskien among others before he returned to Basel to take the doctor’s degree in 1875 with a purely philological study of the beginnings of phonology in the ancient Greek grammarians. The oral examination committee comprised Friedrich Nietzsche (Greek philology), Franz Dorotheus Gerlach (Latin philology), Heyne (German philology), and Wilhelm Vischer (history).

From the beginning Wackernagel went his own way, and even in his thesis the remarkable independence of thinking so typical of all his later writings is conspicuous. This booklet, which shows its young author to have familiarized himself thoroughly with the history of ancient linguistics as well as with particulars of the Greek grammarians, proves that the queer doctrine of the πάθη, i.e. the phonetic changes of the words by addition, omission, transposition of sounds, etc., is the invention of the Alexandrian grammarians (presumably Tryphon) and that it had its sources in dialectology. In other words, it may be said that present in that “pathology” are the beginnings of a scientific phonology. In a sense this study may be regarded as a program for Wackernagel’s entire lifework, i.e., a program for a linguistics based on historical principles and on a philological foundation.

A few months after receiving his doctorate Wackernagel made his habilitation (summer 1876) as a private lecturer (Privatdozent) in Greek philology and Sanskrit at Basel, where a chair in Sanskrit and comparative philology had been established in 1874 (while he was at Göttingen), to which Franz Misteli (1841-1903) was appointed. In 1879 Wackernagel was nominated Professor Extraordinarius of Greek Language and Literature to succeed Nietzsche (who had resigned owing to his illness), and he advanced to Ordinarius in 1881; he was thus Professor of Greek at that university where in the age of the Humanists Johannes Reuchlin (1455-1522) had for the first time taught the Greek language. By the terms of his office Wackernagel had to lecture on Greek authors for many years, but he alone of his colleagues included lectures on Greek grammar and syntax. In that period he married (23 March 1886) Maria, nee Stehlin, with whom he had eight children, among them the sons Jakob (1891-1967), who later was a Basel Professor of law, and Hans Georg (1895-1967), who later was professor of history, also in Basel. In his first term as Rector of Basel University in 1890, Wackernagel gave an interesting outline of the study and investigation of antiquity in Switzerland since the Renaissance in his rectoral address Das Studium des klassischen Altertums in der Schweiz.

He declined an invitation to fill Johannes Schmidt’s (1830-1913) chair at Berlin in 1901, but in the following year he decided to go to Göttingen, succeeding Wilhelm Schulze (1863-1935) (who had been called to Berlin) as professor of comparative philology. But he resigned his professorship in this flourishing center of linguistics and philology in 1915 (despite having served as prorector in 1912-13), when the nationalist policy of the Germans in World War I and especially the infringement of the Belgian neutrality had repelled the neutral Swiss professor working at a Prussian university. So he returned to Basel where he held his former chair of Greek until, following Max Niedermann’s (1874-1954) departure for Neuchatel, the linguistics chair fell vacant in 1926. Wackernagel, who in the meantime had won manifold recognition, was an honorary doctor of several universities, a member of various academies, and had held the position of Rector a second time for the two difficult years 1918-19. Finally, he retired in 1936, having completed his sixtieth year as a lecturer, and he died on 22 May 1938 in his native town, Basel.

During his first Basel professorship Wackernagel began to collect material for a grammar of Old Indo-Aryan, which was to become the most comprehensive and exhaustive scientific treatment an old Indo-European language has ever received. The surprise was enormous in 1896 when Wackernagel published his first Indo-Aryan study, volume 1 of the Altindische Grammatik; in Switzerland the witticism was common that the Zurich Professor of Sanskrit (Adolf Kaegi:1849-1923) wrote a Greek grammar (the famous Griechische Schulgrammatik, which has gone through many editions), while the Basel Professor of Greek wrote an Indo-Aryan one. In any case Wackernagel’s book presented a fundamental view of the history and comparative grammar of Old Indo-Aryan and became a standard work and an indispensable instrument for every fellow researcher. It is the model of a linguistic handbook, combining both stringent linguistic method and philological accuracy as well as critical insistence and astonishing completeness in facts and bibliography; notable also is the use of the native Indian grammatical writings of Panini and his followers, which are here fully exploited for the first time.

Volume 1 first presents in the introduction a lucid summary of the history of Old Indo-Aryan language and linguistics, then gives a full and precise description of the language along with an historical and comparative background from the Indo-European mother tongue up to Middle Indo-Aryan (always investigating the development within Indo-Aryan and stressing the primacy of Vedic). Unlike the later volumes, the phonological section is in part outdated, since the young Wackernagel relied too much on his teacher Benfey, whereas he later reveals the influence of the great Vedic scholar and Göttingen colleague (from 1908) Hermann Oldenberg (1854-1920). In this same Gottingen period he began more intensive work at the Grammatik and he also began to learn Old Iranian, culminating in a partnership with the Göttingen Iranist Friedrich Carl Andreas (1846-1930) and in the publication of some Zarathustrian Gâthâs upon the principles of Andreas’s (today refuted) theory about the textual history of the Avesta.

Volume 2, part 1 (on word formation) of Altindische Grammatik appeared in 1905 (the second half being completed only posthumously by Albert Debrunner) and, in 1930, volume 3, wherein Wackernagel devoted special attention to pronouns and numerals. This one volume, with its astonishing composition and careful exposition both of manifold examples and of the history of former efforts, has become a standard for the historical and comparative treatment of an Indo-European language. It is thus small wonder that Antoine Meillet (1866-1936) welcomed the appearance of that book with these enthusiastic words (BSL 30, 2 [1929] 66): “Voici qu’on retrouve cette rigueur de méthode linguistique, cette exactitude de philologue parfait, cette critique jamais en défaut, cette pénétration toujours présente, cette production exhaustive et des faits et de la bibliographie, que M. Wackernagel porte avec aisance: on pense à la liberté avec laquelle J. Séb. Bach écrivait des contrepoints compliqués aussi facilement qu’un musicien ordinaire un chant à une voix.” Though remaining a torso, the Altindische Grammatik is a standard work of such uniqueness that Indian scholars often call its author a “modern Panini.”

At Göttingen Wackernagel also wrote Sprachliche Untersuchungen zu Homer, which shows his equal mastery of the philological and linguistic methods. The main part of the book deals with Wackernagel’s view that the presence of Atticisms in the Homeric poems shows the strong influence of an Attic redaction of the Iliad and Odyssey. In this connection he resumes the question of the so-called “epische Zerdehnung.” In an 1878 article, he had explained forms like ὁρόωντες as subsequent deformations of uncontracted forms like ὁράοντες (as the poet[s] used them) caused by the influence of the later (Ionic or Attic) contracted forms like ὁρῶντες, the placing of which had mutilated the hexametric verses. According to Wackernagel the forms in question therefore have been artificially restored from the contracted ones and in fact had never been spoken in this manner.

Another chapter treats the “gaps” of Homeric Greek, i.e. the intrusion of post-Homeric developments, archaic features foreign to the Aeolic and Ionian dialects that form the basis of the Homeric language, and, finally, vulgar and improper matters that had to be avoided in an aristocratic poetry like the Homeric epics (i.e. verbs like πέρδεσθαι, “to fart,” or ὀμείχειν, “to piss,” or nouns such as πέος, “penis,” ὄρχις, “testicle,” ὄρσος, “arse,’’ and the like).

Wackernagel frequently gave a course of lectures on syntax; by popular request he published two of these series, which were to become his best known and most widely read book, the Vorlesungen über Syntax. This work begins with an explanation of syntax and treats both general notions like the functions of the various “parts of speech” and categories such as gender, number, person, genus verbi, tense, mood, etc. (where needed, also outside the Indo-European field), and it is something absolutely novel. It is full of interesting observations and splendid interpretations of linguistic particularities. Its relative popularity (for a book on linguistics) is attributable above all to its lively presentation of a rather difficult subject matter and its sometimes humorous and appealing style. In these two volumes the reader gains a striking impression of Jacob Wackernagel as a professor and of his didactic skill: He must have been a very versatile and stimulating teacher (on this see especially Rüegg, 9ff.) who had the power to present the subject in such an impressive and suggestive but also charming and thrilling manner that no one could resist him, not even his slightly older contemporary Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff (1848-1931), who praised the work as the model of grammatical lectures and wrote in his Erinnerungen 1848-1914, that he himself in his old age wished to sit at Wackernagel’s feet: “vor ihn möchte ich mich auch heute auf die Bank setzen” (289). In this rather personal book, which is neither a dry grammar nor strives for a systematic interpretation, Wackernagel really seems to speak to us in person, as he reveals through many acutely observed and vividly demonstrated examples the vitality of human speech, so that even nonexperts can understand the phenomena dealt with. Thus one gains much new information and often the solution of syntactic problems scarcely touched upon or even imagined before.

Despite these Vorlesungen Wackernagel is reported to have emphasized again and again that he was not interested in general linguistics. Nevertheless, it was he who advanced the discussion of general linguistic problems in a decisive way by his detailed philological studies. That may be why he set a higher value on his articles than on his books. It is these numerous articles (now completely reprinted in the Kleine Schriften) that show his efficiency and versatility. His first two papers of virtually comparative character, “Zum homerischen Dual” and “Der griechische Verbalaccent” demonstrate that Homeric Αἴαντε does not mean “the both Ajaxes, i.e. Ajax Telamonius and Ajax Oiliades” (as Homeric scholars had supposed), but stands for “Ajax and his sibling Teucrus” in the same way as we find, e.g., Vedic Mitrâ for “Mitra and Varuna”. This small but brilliant discovery is a good example of Wackernagel’s deductive method of stringent argumentation resulting from critical examination of the sources. Likewise he demonstrated that in the finite verb forms, the Greek verbal accent following the law of the three morae is a new formation based on the original Proto-Indo-European state, fully preserved in Vedic, where the finite verb is accentuated only in subordinate clauses, whereas in main clauses it is enclitic. As so often in his studies we find here the characteristic of combining the Greek with the Indo-Iranian evidence, which seems to be, as it were, the secret of his success. Of course, Veda and Homer, Old Indo-Aryan and Greek are the keystones of all Indo-European comparative studies, but it is obvious that Wackemagel read these texts more carefully than most of his colleagues. It was he, rather than Wilhelm Schulze (1863-1935), who bound Indo-European studies closely to the data of textual tradition and thus contributed most to that Copernican turn from comparative reconstruction as a goal in itself toward an “Indo-European philology” that takes into account not only the linguistic development of prehistoric times, but chiefly the processes of development in the history of the separate languages, thereby imbuing linguistics with the spirit of history.

All of his great discoveries arise from noticing specific points (as a rule something in Greek, Latin, or Indo-Aryan texts), and move on to conditions that are valid for all Indo-European languages. This holds true, e.g., for his studies: (A) on the placing of enclitics originally in the second position in the sentence, a rule he established in 1892 (in the article entitled “Über ein Gesetz der indogermanischen Wortstellung”) on the basis of rich materials (not only Greek, Indo-Iranian, and Latin, for also Germanic and Celtic show traces of that feature), now known as “Wackernagel’s law” (“Wackernagel’s law I” according to Collinge, 217ff.) and one of only a few generally accepted syntactic basic features of Proto-Indo-European and its earliest descendants; (B) on the Greek perfect (Studien zum griechischen Perfektum, 1904) which by sketching the history and showing the semantic structure of that tense, proved that the Greek perfect primarily indicated the achieved state and only later (after Homer) developed the sense of the “resultative perfect,” causing Antoine Meillet and some of his students to trace similar aspects in some cognate languages; (C) on Das Dehnungsgesetz der griechischen Composita (1889), where the vowel lengthening in the beginning of the second element of Greek compounds like στρατᾶγος from *στρατο-αγός is explained by an earlier Proto-Indo-European contraction (treated as “Wackernagel’s law II” by Collinge, 238-239), from which it has widely spread, however; (D) on “Wortumfang und Wortform” (1906) showing the reluctance of several Indo-European languages to employ verbal and nominal short monosyllables (becoming evident, e.g., in the use of the augment and in avoiding a monosyllabic form like σχέ alongside ἔσχε); and (E) on “Genetiv und Adjektiv” (1908) connecting the Latin genitive in A with the corresponding Old Indo-Aryan adverb of formations like mithunî bhû “to become paired, to copulate” (of the type the Indian grammarians label cvi) and combining all that with Latin constructions such as lucrî facere “to make a profit.”

Among the students of Wackernagel are the linguists Max Niedermann and Albert Debrunner (1884-1954) as well as the Greek scholars Giorgio Pasquali (1885-1952) and Peter Von der Mühll (1885-1970). Dissertations directed by him include those of Hans Barth, De Coorum titulorum dialecto (Basel, 1896), Theophil Gubler, Die Pacronymica im AltAndischen (Basel, 1902; printed Gottingen, 1903), and Herman Lommel, Studien uber Indoger- manische Femininbildungen (Gottingen, 1912).

Jacob Wackernagel, whose characteristics were an intimate knowledge of the sources, encyclopedic learning, fine attentive observation, a brilliant memory, and a feeling for the smallest detail, never lost the ground under his feet and was free of speculations and fancies, so that von der Mühll (13-14 = Von der Mühll, Ausgewählte Kleine Schriften, 539) could say, that there will be only few people ever, “who made so few mistakes as Wackernagel.” He proceeded upon the principle written down in the draft for the unfinished third series of Vorlesungen über Syntax (quoted by Lohmann, 58) that “besser als von vorgefaßten Theorien lassen sich von der Betrachtung des Ererbten aus die in einer Sprachgeschichte wirksamen Tendenzen erfassen.” So we understand that Wackernagel never engaged in the discussion about the then-burning question of the ways to reconstruct the Indo-European protolanguage and about the still more disputed problem of the principle of phonetic laws without exceptions, as it was postulated above all by the Leipzig school of the so-called Neogrammarians. Wackernagel was independent from the linguistic theories of his age (including those of Ferdinand de Saussure) but rather argued for the philological foundation of all linguistic research. Such an attitude on the part of linguists greatly benefited philology by interpreting, correctly understanding, or even emending passages in ancient texts. That is what we can learn best from Jacob Wackernagel even today.