William Dwight Whitney. Albumen silver print, c. 1868, by Garrett Brothers.
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of the Emma Willard School. Whitney, William Dwight (9 Feb. 1827-7 June 1894), linguist, Sanskrit scholar, and lexicographer, was born in Northampton, Massachusetts, the son of Josiah Dwight Whitney, a businessman and banker, and Sarah Williston. At age fifteen he joined the sophomore class of Williams College, graduating three years later in 1845 as the class valedictorian after having spent “no small part of his time . . . roaming over the hills and through the valleys, collecting birds for the Natural History Society,” according to his autobiography (repr. in Silverstein, p. 1). This early interest in natural science was sustained throughout Whitney’s life and played an important role in his approach to the study of language.
For three years Whitney worked as a clerk in his father’s bank, spending his leisure time collecting plants and birds and studying modern European languages. In 1848 he turned to Sanskrit at the recommendation of his father’s pastor, George E. Day, who was from 1866 a professor of Hebrew and then the dean of the divinity school at Yale. Whitney left the bank in the spring of 1849 and, with the second edition of Franz Bopp’s Sanskrit grammar (1832) borrowed from his older brother Josiah Whitney’s library, he continued his self-study of Sanskrit over the summer. During this period he also was a member of the U.S. Geological Survey of the Lake Superior Region, headed by Josiah, who would later hold the post of professor of geology at Harvard. In the autumn Whitney went to Yale for a year of postgraduate study with Edward Elbridge Salisbury, a professor of the Arabic and Sanskrit languages who had studied with Bopp in Berlin and who was the only trained orientalist in the United States until Whitney himself returned from three years of further study of Sanskrit in Europe in 1853. The following year Whitney assumed the professorship in Sanskrit at Yale, initially established and funded by Salisbury. In 1856 he married Elizabeth Wooster Baldwin; they had six children.
During his years in Europe, Whitney studied with several prominent German Sanskritists, including Rudolph Roth, with whom he coedited what became the definitive text of one of the oldest and most important Vedic scriptures, the Atharva Veda, published as Atharva Veda Sanhita (1856), after Whitney had copied the manuscripts available in Berlin and collated them with others in Paris, Oxford, and London. Whitney followed this work with numerous articles, editions, translations, and notes on various Sanskrit texts and treatises, several of which appear in his Oriental and Linguistic Studies (1874). But his most important work on Sanskrit was Sanskrit Grammar, Including Both the Classical Language, and the Older Dialects, of Veda and Brahmana, first published in 1879, with a second edition in 1889, and a formal supplement, The Roots, Verb-Forms and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language, in 1885.
The Sanskrit Grammar stood apart from other such work and has withstood the test of time. Rather than adopting the framework of traditional Indian Sanskrit grammarians or applying the comparative method then dominating European linguistic scholarship, Whitney went his own way, providing a descriptive account of the Sanskrit language that drew directly on recorded Sanskrit literature. This was very much in keeping with his overall view of language as a human institution and his unwillingness to generalize beyond the empirical data of extant texts. Indeed, it was precisely on this matter that he most disagreed with the ancient Sanskrit grammarians, arguing that their grammatical rules were too abstract and produced forms that never actually occurred in the texts; for him their accounts were thus lacking in “scientific truth.” Yet, as familiar as Whitney was with the literature of Sanskrit, he could never achieve the insights of the native grammarians whose own knowledge–as for all native speakers of every language–went far beyond a corpus. While his reluctance to generalize the principles of the language beyond what he could observe directly was prudent, it was also overly cautious by the standards of a more modern linguistics that seeks such generalizations. However, the grammar that he produced remains an impressive monument to the power of empirical description.
By also refraining from the comparative study of Sanskrit with Greek, Latin, and other ancient languages, the aim of which is normally the determination of those changes that produced these languages from a common ancestor (the reconstruction called Proto-Indo-European), Whitney disengaged from the dominant, largely German comparative philology that constituted much of the linguistic work of his day. This is not to say that his work was not historical, however. Indeed, for Whitney all study of language was historical, for he believed that in the history of a language, its speakers, and their culture lay the explanations for why that language was what it had become. The Sanskrit Grammar, as its subtitle indicates, drew on texts that included both the classical language and the older dialects, and this enabled Whitney to show how the language had changed over the centuries. For example, in the chapter on aorist systems of the verb, Whitney provides counts of aorist forms in classical Sanskrit, demonstrating their infrequency in comparison to earlier texts where aorist formations are quite common. This use of frequency data has sometimes been referred to by twentieth-century commentators as “statistical.”
Of broader interest are Whitney’s two books on linguistic science, Language and the Study of Language (1867) and The Life and Growth of Language (1875), both aimed at a general educated readership. The former resulted from a lecture series first delivered at the Smithsonian Institution in March 1864 and then at the Lowell Institute in Boston in December 1864 and January 1865. It also served as the basis of Whitney’s lectures in the science of language at Yale College. To dissuade Whitney from accepting an attractive offer made by Harvard in 1869, Salisbury, his former teacher and predecessor, added to his endowment, and his professorship at Yale was expanded to include comparative philology. As a result, Whitney decided to remain at Yale.
Whitney made considerable efforts to distinguish comparative philology, narrowly defined, from the new linguistic science that he saw as still taking shape, stating, “The former deals primarily with the individual facts of a certain body of languages, classifying them, tracing out their relations,” while linguistic science “makes the laws and general principles of speech its main subject, and uses particular facts rather as illustrations” (The Life and Growth of Language, p. 315). For Whitney, human language was “in itself of a variety which is fairly to be termed discordance . . . a congeries of individual languages . . . [that] differ among themselves in every degree” (p. 3), so the general principles were not to be found in fundamental properties of linguistic structure. Indeed, Whitney did not see any human language as a system with its own internal structure and, therefore, cannot be considered a precursor to twentieth-century structuralism.
The general principles of language for Whitney were instead to be identified in processes of historical change as these were exemplified, specifically, in words: “the broad principles, the wide-reaching views, the truths of universal application and importance, which constitute the upper fabric of linguistic science, all rest upon word-genealogies,” that is, upon the results of the study of etymology (Language and the Study of Language, p. 55). And etymological study, he concluded, would yield a single unilinear pattern of change in all human languages, the pattern being that of the Indo-European languages. Through etymology, “a chief portion of linguistic analysis” consisted of distinguishing roots from affixes, with the latter traceable back to independent roots as well, as with modern English forms such as fearful and truthful, godlyand lovely, in which the suffixes derived historically from the roots full and like. Recognizing that not all modern words would yield to such analysis, Whitney applied the principle of uniformitarianism to maintain that since this pattern could be found in some modern forms, it was reasonable, indeed scientific, to conclude that other forms, whose history was obscure, could nevertheless have followed the same pattern.
Whitney’s uniformitarianism surely relates directly to the influence of his geologist brother, Josiah, and his own early field experiences in geology, which in the nineteenth century made important use of the principle that all geological phenomena, past and present, may be explained as resulting from observable processes that have operated in a uniform manner across time. His extension of this principle to diachronic linguistics was an important contribution, although in the case of his theory of the development of languages from independent roots to later inflectional forms, he was misled by the narrow range of languages, all within the Indo-European family, with which he was familiar.
Although Whitney did cite Native-American languages from time to time in his general linguistic works, he conducted no fieldwork and relied here, as for languages of many other parts of the world, on accounts prepared by others. He erroneously believed that all Native-American languages were of “a single type or plan upon which their forms are developed and their constructions made, from the Arctic Ocean to Cape Horn,” a type he called “incorporative or polysynthetic” and that he judged to involve “the excessive and abnormal agglomeration of distinct significant elements in its words . . . tedious and time-wasting polysyllabism . . . and what is of yet more importance, an unwieldy aggregation, verbal or quasi-verbal, is substituted for the phrase or sentence” (Language and the Study of Language, pp. 348-49). With such secondhand and faulty characterizations of Native-American languages, Whitney was to play no role in what became, under the leadership of anthropologist and linguist Franz Boas, a prominent topic of American linguistic work at the end of the nineteenth century and the start of the twentieth.
Whitney’s professional involvement with modern languages arose initially from the need to supplement his Yale salary by giving private lessons and later by teaching classes at the Yale Sheffield Scientific School in German and in French. He published grammar books (1869, 1885), readers (1870, 1876), a dictionary (1877) for the former, and a grammar for the latter (1886); but all of these were pedagogical, as was his unremarkable Essentials of English Grammar for the Use of Schools (1877). His most important contribution to modern languages was his service as editor in chief of the ten-volume Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia (1889-1891), his most extensive but not his only venture in lexicography. He had earlier contributed to the 1864 Webster’s Dictionary of English. Further, he provided the entire vocabulary of the Atharva Veda for the St. Petersburg, Russia, Lexicon of Sanskrit (1852-1875), coedited by Rudolph Roth and Otto von Böthlingk.
This latter work became the initial impetus for a decades-long public feud on matters pertaining both to Sanskrit and to general linguistics between Whitney and the European linguist Max Müller, a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, who began by criticizing the Russian lexicon. Whitney in turn challenged Müller’s A History of Ancient Sanskrit Literature (1859), attacking Müller for having “given too loose a rein to poetic fancy . . . when more exact scientific statement had been preferable” (rep. in Oriental and Linguistic Studies, p. 95). The arguments went on for years, with Whitney especially virulent in his denunciation of Müller’s “metaphysical” belief in the identity of language and reason. Even as late as 1892 Whitney, nearly totally incapacitated by heart disease, published his final volley, Max Müller and the Science of Language: A Criticism.
Despite his disagreements with aspects of Müller’s work and with a variety of linguistic principles in the works of well-known European scholars such as Wilhelm von Humboldt, Richard Lepsius, August Schleicher, and Chaim Steinthal, Whitney’s work was generally well received abroad. His linguistic books were promptly translated into several European languages, circulated widely, and referred to in the publications and teachings of major European linguists such as Karl Brugmann, Jan Baudouin de Courtenay, F. F. Fortunatov, and Ferdinand de Saussure. At home in the United States, Whitney was an influential builder of scholarly institutions, elected early in life to the American Oriental Society (1850) in which he held the offices of librarian (1855-1873), corresponding secretary and editor (1857-1884), and president (1884-1890). He also served as a cofounder and the first president of the American Philological Association (1869-1870), and he held membership in the Modern Language Association of America, the American Dialect Society, and the Spelling Reform Association. Whitney died in New Haven, Connecticut.
Although little in modern American linguistics can be traced or attributed uniquely to Whitney’s work, his writings on general linguistics have continued to be regularly praised for their “sanity,” a term reflecting his clarity of style, the care he took to provide examples drawn from actual language usage in support of thoughtful, empirically based statements, and his avoidance of the “metaphysical” mysticism of some of his contemporaries. The writing table at which he stood to prepare so many of his 360 books and articles was eventually obtained by the Linguistic Society of America, founded in 1924, and is passed on to each successive editor of that society’s journal, Language, as an honor of the office.
Bibliography
Correspondence to Whitney is held at the Yale University Archives. A brief autobiography was published in Forty Years’ Record of the Class of 1845, Williams College(1885), which Whitney edited, and is reprinted in Michael Silverstein, ed., Whitney on Language: Selected Writings of William Dwight Whitney (1971). That volume also contains Silverstein’s essay “Whitney on Language”; Roman Jakobson, “The World Response to Whitney’s Principles of Linguistic Science”; an extended excerpt from Language and the Study of Language; and eleven articles representative of Whitney’s linguistic work. For a complete bibliography of Whitney’s writings, as well as the memorial tributes at the First American Congress of Philologists in Dec. 1894, see Charles Rockwell Lanman, ed., The Whitney Memorial Meeting (1897). See also Brigitte Nerlich, Change in Language: Whitney, Bréal, and Wegener (1990), and the substantial section on Whitney in Julie Tetel Andresen, Linguistics in America, 1769-1924(1990). A discussion of Whitney is presented in Craig Christy, Uniformitarianism in Linguistics (1983), and in E. F. K. Koerner, Ferdinand de Saussure (1973). An obituary is in the American Journal of Philology 15 (1894): 271-98, and is reprinted in Thomas A. Sebeok, ed., Portraits of Linguists, vol. 1 (1966).