Centre de recherches en histoire et épistémologie comparée de la linguistique d'Europe centrale et orientale (CRECLECO) / Université de Lausanne // Научно-исследовательский центр по истории и сравнительной эпистемологии языкознания центральной и восточной Европы
-- Patrick SERIOT (Lausanne) : The notion of Sprachbund, from H. Schuchardt to P. Savitsky: the refusal of genetic relationships between languages
Abstract :
H. Schuchardt's rebuttal of the family tree model was ambiguous enough to give birth to two different interpretations, or counter-models : the wave-theory (J. Schmidt, the Italian neo-linguists) and the convergence theory (the Eurasianists like P.Savitsky, the Marrist). Both are quite different.
Schuchardt was not isolated: his work had something to do with the «spirit of the time», i-e. i.e. the crisis of positivism and of the explanation of similarities by common ancestry, both in linguistics and biology (L. Berg in Russia and his nomogenesis). Strangely enough, the refusal of the divergence model is nowadays the basis of some right-wing nationalist interpretations of the history of languages among Uralists (in Estonia and Finland) and among Slavists in Eastern Europe, but then in a totally un-historical way of describing the situation of languages in neolithic Neolithic Europe as being the same as it is nowadays : there are no more common ancestors. We will study the different various consequences of the refusal of the family tree model initiated by H. Schuchardt in European linguistics.