Thesis ID: CBB695686522

"Agglutinating" a Family: Friedrich Max Müller and the Development of the Turanian Language Family Theory in Nineteenth-Century European Linguistics and Other Human Sciences (2018)

unapi

Some linguists in the nineteenth century argued for the existence of a “Turanian” family of languages in Eastern Europe and Northern Asia, claiming the common descent of a vast range of languages like Hungarian, Finnish, Turkish, Mongol, Manchu, and their relatives and dialects. Of such linguists, Friedrich Max Müller (1823–1900) was an important developer and popularizer of a version of the Turanian theory across Europe, given his influence as a German-born Oxford professor in Victorian England from the 1850s onwards. Although this theory lost ground in academic linguistics from the mid twentieth century, a pan-nationalist movement pushing for the political unity of all Turanians emerged in Hungary and the Ottoman Empire from the Fin-de-siècle era. This thesis focuses on the history of this linguistic theory in the nineteenth century, examining Müller’s methodology and assumptions behind his Turanian concept. It argues that, in the comparative-historical trend in linguistics in an age of European imperialism, Müller followed evolutionary narratives of languages based on word morphologies in which his contemporaries rationalized the superiority of “inflectional” Indo-European languages over “agglutinating” Turanian languages. Building on the “Altaic” theory of the earlier Finnish linguist and explorer Matthias Castrén, Müller factored in the more primitive nomadic lifestyle of many peoples speaking agglutinating languages to genealogically group them into the Turanian family. Müller’s universalist Christian values gave him a touch of sympathy for all human languages and religions, but he reinforced the hierarchical view of cultures in his other comparative sciences of mythology and religion as well. This picture was challenged in the cultural pessimism of the Fin de siècle with the Pan-Turanists turning East to their nomadic heritage for inspiration.

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Authors & Contributors
Turda, Marius
Roux, Guillaume
Fransen, Sietske
Tugya, Beáta
Korösi, Andrea
Kovács, Zsófia Eszter
Concepts
Language and languages
Linguistics
Linguistics; philology
Nationalism
Science and politics
Psychology
Time Periods
19th century
20th century, early
18th century
Early modern
Medieval
Ancient
Places
Hungary
Ottoman Empire
Austria
Yugoslavia
Estonia
England
Institutions
Habsburg, House of
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