Bibliographic Correspondence
I was for a short visit in New York and called on you for a talk but without success…
Thus opens a perfectly ordinary—one might say “unmarked”—letter from Roman Jakobson to Joseph Greenberg, dated March 9, 1953. The letter, shown below, is one of many that I copied in the Roman Jakobson Papers, held by the Department of Distinctive Collections at MIT. With all due qualifications about period, profession, and personality, in my experience, archival research usually involves sifting through piles and piles of such quotidian exchange. These are not the kinds of letters that draw one in or elicit audible reaction. They are the letters that I often note down out of a vague sense of duty to comprehensiveness…who knows, maybe it could be useful?…it would be a shame to leave something behind…
Roman Jakobson to Joseph Greenberg, 9 March 1953. Roman Jakobson Papers, MC-0072, box 41, folder 57. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Distinctive Collections, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Why this collection and why this letter, in particular? My last entry in this series introduced the method of citation indexing as a potential tool for understanding conceptual affinities and dynamics in the history of science. Applying this method to key works on language universals by Greenberg and Chomsky shows that the work of Roman Jakobson was a common touchstone in the typological and generative traditions alike. This is what prompted me to look at his correspondence, which affords a richly international perspective on the development of twentieth-century linguistics.
In his landmark paper on word order, for instance, Greenberg acknowledged Jakobson as the source of his appreciation for universals of the “implicational” type. He subsequently expanded on this in an autobiographical comment that contextualizes the 1953 letter presented here in terms of his involvement with the Linguistic Circle of New York, and its chief organ, Word. Greenberg recalled,
By 1953-1954 then, I had clearly been influenced by the Prague structuralism that I encountered at Columbia and in the Linguistic Circle…Somehow, typology, linguistic change, marking and universals must be connected. However, it was not until I did my paper on word order, first given at the Behavioral Sciences Center at Stanford in 1959, where also during the same academic year the Memorandum on Language Universals was written by Jenkins, Osgood and me in preparation for the Dobbs Ferry Conference on Language Universals held in 1961, that the interconnections between marking, typology and universals began to take form…I recall that at one point, as the key role of implicational universals became clear to me, I had what German psychologists called the Aha-Erlebnis. So this was what Jakobson was driving at all these years!
Even if the foregoing gives some indication of the significance of Jakobson’s archive to the project, the question of how to interpret his March 9th letter remains. Following the opening line about a missed connection, the note goes on to mention three separate research products in private circulation—Herbert Galton’s draft paper, “Did Sandhi Exist in Old Slav?” (rejected by Jakobson for publication in Word, but subsequently published in Indogermanische Forschungen), Tadeusz Milewski’s 1947-8 monograph Zarys językoznawstwa ogólnego [Outline of general linguistics], and an offprint of Greenberg’s own chapter for A. L. Kroeber’s Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory.
Greenberg and Jakobson overlapped briefly as editors at Word and it was, until recently, standard practice to share offprints with colleagues. Nevertheless, this ordinary letter, read alongside hundreds more like it has contributed to my own Aha-Erlebnis concerning the centrality of private bibliographic initiatives to the correspondence that circulated among mid-century linguists. My sense is that fully 30-40% of the letters I looked at in the Jakobson Papers involved efforts to identify, describe, source, or recover books—especially books in languages other than English, German or French. By analyzing these exchanges, historians can gain new insight into the materiality of scientific communication and the extent to which linguistics is aligned with the development of librarianship and information science.
Works cited:
Galton, Herbert. 1956. “Did Sandhi Exist in Old Slav?” Indogermanische Forschungen 62: 167-176.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1953. “Historical Linguistics and Unwritten Languages.” In A.L. Kroeber, Ed., Anthropology Today: An Encyclopedic Inventory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 265-286.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1990 [1963]. “Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements.” In On Language: Selected Writings of Joseph H. Greenberg. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 40-70.
Greenberg, Joseph. 1994. “The Influence of WORD and the Linguistic Circle of New York on my Intellectual Development.” Word 45 (1): 19-25.
Milewski, Tadeusz. 1947-1948. Zarys językoznawstwa ogólnego. Lublin : Towarzystwo Ludoznawcze.
