Adelung, JohannChristoph b.August 8, 1732; Spantekow, Prussia d. September 9, 1806; Dresden, Saxony

Eminent German linguist with significant works about the German language and comparative linguistics, including the first comprehensive analysis and reference work of the known American Indian languages (Mithridates, 1806—1817).

Adelung, chief librarian at the court in Dresden, became widely known for his Versuch eines vollstandigen grammatisch- kritischen Worterbuches der hochdeutschen Mundart, mit bestandiger Vergleichung der ubrigen Mundarten, besonders aber der Oberdeutschen (German Dictionary, 1774—1786), which was the most substan­tial and methodologically most advanced dictionary of the time; he also gained recognition for his other works in German grammar, lexicography, stylistics, and lan­guage history. His last project, the Mithri­dates, is a comparison and classification of all the known languages of the world at the time, mainly by using translations of the Lord’s Prayer. The Mithridates consists of four volumes. Adelung completed volume 1 and parts of volume 2. Vater continued the work by adding the first comprehensive comparison and analysis of American In­dian and African languages in volume 3. The fourth volume contains corrections and an article about the Basque language by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Before the Mithridates, Adelung had already pub­lished four American Indian poems with translations in 1799, and Vater had pub­lished the first results of his studies about American Indian languages in 1810. In the Mithridates, language samples and their German translations, typological and grammatical information, and ethno­graphic information about the speakers are given. Adelung’s goal was to find relation­ships between peoples by finding the rela­tionships between their native languages. The Mithridates was the only widely recog­nized work by Adelung for several decades but is nevertheless missing in many lin­guistic bibliographies in Europe during the nineteenth century.

Adelung’s ethnographic-historical con­cept saw language as being closely con­nected to society, history, and culture. Thus every chapter of the Mithridates starts with ethnographic information about the lan­guage users, including the settlement areas of the tribes and possible relationships to each other. Chosen by Adelung to complete the Mithridates, Vater applied Adelung’s language concept to his analysis of Ameri­can Indian languages and emphasized the influence of historical migration of the tribes on the ethnic and linguistic structure of the Americas. Vater favored the theory of migration movements of Asian tribes from Asia to the Americas, pushing autochtho­nous American tribes toward South Amer­ica. Consequently, Vater started his analysis of American Indian languages in South America, where he assumed he would find the oldest American peoples. Influenced by the evolving discipline of comparative anatomy, Vater also integrated anatomical data in his analysis, mainly to clarify the possible genealogical relationship between the North, Central, and South American Indians and between American Indian and Asian peoples. Vater concluded that some anatomical and linguistic similarities pointed to connections between the Amer­icas and Asia, and he emphasized the lin­guistic diversity of the Americas, caused by communicative isolation in those sparsely populated continents.

The core of the Mithridates is the com­parison of language samples, mainly ver­sions of the Lord’s Prayer in different lan­guages, but it also includes shorter texts, poems, and word lists. Adelung considered a broad database as crucial and therefore collected as many text samples as possible from earlier language studies and synoptic collections of the Lord’s Prayer, which were already used as sources by other linguists before him. Adelung chose the Lord’s Prayer as the main language sample to have a text long enough to contain grammatical structures that was also available in numer­ous different languages around the world. Adelung and Vater also compiled all avail­able grammars for American Indian and African languages, which were mostly writ­ten by missionaries or explorers, or derived grammars themselves from language sam­ples.

One problem for Adelung and Vater was that they did not know most of the languages they analyzed and had never heard those languages spoken. Neverthe­less, they tried to give an impression of the phonology of the language with their tran­scription of the language samples. To pro­vide as much accessible data as possible, Adelung and Vater also included unpub­lished information from other researchers. (For his study about American Indian lan­guages, for example, Vater used Alexander von Humboldt’s unpublished data about American Indians.) Nevertheless, few reli­able sources were available for most of the languages. Adelung saw this as a basic problem of his study. Vater pointed out that the inconsistent availability of sources made a totally balanced comparison of all languages impossible because the selection of languages depended on the availability of material. Nevertheless, he expressed sur­prise about the large amount of data he could find about African and American In­dian languages.

Language classifications in the Mithri­dates are determined by the restricted data­base and Adelung’s language concept. Adelung theorized that languages histori­cally evolve from basic words with one syl­lable to more and more complex structures with multiple syllables and elaborate gram­mar. Adelung considered such a morpho­logic and grammar-based language classifi­cation as impossible without detailed linguistic information and therefore only classified the Asian languages according to this scheme as monosyllabic or polysyl­labic; however, they are subdivided accord­ing to geographical distribution, as is typi­cal in other language collections of the eighteenth century. For the European lan­guages, he choose roughly the classification (e.g., Slavic, Romantic, or Germanic lan­guage groups, etc.) still used today, even though he did not describe all relationships correctly. Vater did utilize Adelung’s syl­labic categorization for African and Ameri­can Indians languages but classified them according primarily to geographical and historical-genealogical factors.

For the American Indian languages, Vater identified several language groups: eleven for South America, four for Central Amer­ica, and five for North America, including Greenland. However linguistically deter­mined, the language groups are named and organized according to their geographical distribution.

Adelung and Vater did not use com­pletely new methodological or theoretical approaches to linguistics but differed from their immediate successors by using social and ethnographical data for their language analysis. The Mithridates is widely recog­nized for its vast collection of data, typo­logical descriptions, and classifications of languages, especially of the African and American Indian languages.

Jorg Meindl

See also Humboldt, Alexander von; Humboldt, Wilhelm von; Vater, Johann Severin

References and Further Reading

Adelung, Johann Christoph. “Proben der Dichtung ungebildeter Volker: Erstes Dutzend.” Erholungen (1799): 194—208.

------. Mithridates oder allgemeine Sprachenkunde mit dem Vater Unser als Sprachprobe in bey nahe funfhundert Sprachen und Mundarten. 4 vols. Berlin: Vossische Buchhandlung, 1806—1817.

Bahner, Werner, ed. Sprache und Kulturentwicklung im Blickfeld der deutschen Spataufklarung: Der Beitrag Johann Christoph Adelungs. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1984.