B Of Plato and swineherds "When it comes to Iinguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedorri:rrr swineherd, and Conf,r?ius with the head-hunting savage of Assarrr " The statement by Supi, 1t9zr, p' 2r9) has ingrained itself into tlrr- collective .orr.io.,srrerls of tlie linguistic profession as almost a solt'ttttt declaration of faith' It is taken to be axiomatic that there art'tttt primitive languages. .^i;; *uiiJ"ii.nce of Sapir's quore, associating-as jr d.oes,I'lillil with swine and Confucius wiih cannibalism' was undoubtedly <ittt' lrt ti, .onr.*pt of the nineteenth-century moralist for whom "lri;{lr crrltrrr." ,told in sharp contrast to the uncouth customs of the sav:rHr ";;;d .rinteenth-ientury scholars, that enthnocentric, mor;tltrl view was strengtheneJ Uy tttt evolutionary writings of Darwin' I lre first to write a "Darwinist" pamphlet on linguistic evolution wrrs llte .o*pututiu. philologist August Schleicher' In a pamphlet t'litttrtlttg that Darwiniarr-type'euolutiJn was actually discovered !l 9f1k'l"qtrtt nrrr, s.nt.icher fbr the first time pre.sented to the scientiflt Prrlrlh the thesis of evolution from isolating through agglutinative to irrllcr ' tional Ianguages (r869, pP' 59-54)' The idea caught on an(l lx'( 'lrrt' ."" "r th"e riain r.ui"J., Jr .rltt.r..nth-century linguistic :ttr,l ,tlt thropological thought' But it *?t "?t-: fully original idcrr',,Ar I'tt backatleastasHegel'sPhitosophyofHistory,the..advan<:tltl.'Itr.|rt European tung.rug."r-*ere th;ghi to have achieved a tl:tttl\ rrl ;;;;t;i;" tniugi innectional iategories that was d<rtti<'rl r, l;rtt g"'"g"t of other types (Hegel, 1953,.p' tq)'. An<l willrl'1111 riiti Humboldt nua ufrJJaf ,p".ilut.d"Ji the relative <lt:gtt'r's ,l trrrrl lectual development '(geistige Entwicklung) evi<1:rrr:t'<1. lry ,is.l'rllttg. "ggil"uri"., urd infle"ctionll languages (rg7 r). Sr:lrlt'i.lrt'r's "rtr-ll wasmerelytoarrangeinant.v<llrttirltrltrylirrt'wlllltst.t.Ittr.rlle Are there reallY no Primitive languages? IVAN KALMAR r4l'l Are there really no primitiae languagu? r49 valid manifestations of ty was a manifestation of the human Ge,ist, language-forming ca- or spirit, so central a in the German idealist view of progress. It is true that Schleicher cited neithei Humboldt nor Hegel, bur her claimed to lay down parallels between comparative-hi'storical ilology and Darwin's view of natural history. yet there is no lication in his pamphlet that he grasped one of Darwin's cenrral Modern evolutionists point out that according to Darwin ion was not goal-directed, not progressive, and nit a product the striving of Geist, but rather a pioduct of natural selection g randomly producedvariants (Gould, rg77, esp.Chap. r). As it gave supporr to a materialist rather than idealist view of ge. Schleicher gives no sign that he undersrood the role of ttdom variation in a Darwinian theory. At any rate, critics of linguistic evolution attacked not its Darwinian umboldt to be independenr if not equally e.human language-forming capacity. This tlcrpinnings, but ratherits idealistic implications about the progress Geist as found in Humboldt's work. It was the view of evohltion rrruurulr wrrtl(. rL was tlrc vlew oI evolunon Intellectual progress that eventually damned the whole thesis of ution in language to universal, though unexamined, condem_ earliest criticism of the Schleicher-Humboldt scheme did not, , rule out linguistic evolution as such. Some nineteenth-century rejected Schleicher's objectification of language as an ttism capable of autonomous development. According io Gaston language could not develop on its own, but only as"a result of grlrysiological and psychological laws of human nature', (rg6g, u) because it is nothing aparr from the people who use it. paris,s lion, however, hardly precludes linguistic evolution; it would ply require the evolution of language to be explained in terms of evolrrtion of "human nature." ttr.re influential objection, which appeared fairly early in the e(:lrth century, was that the Schleicher-Humboldt scheme was Hlt, .l l.:rtrs Arsleff (rgzg) detailssome of the relevant argumenrs Murlvig, whitney, and Br6al. Following rhe "classical" vieinr of the Itoyirl grammarians, these scholars rejected the notion of a I tt'lirliorr between language form and categories of thought. rrurlists lll, thcy believed such categoriesto bJuniversal, thoigh F lrrtrgrr:rgt,s rrright not express all of them in overt form. Th-ev llrll , ll,w('v(.1, ilt'l{llc against linguistic evolution. They objected I'erlrrrrtirrg srrrg('s irr llrrrguages with important stages in thought. rr' rr()sr irrllrrcrrlilrl clitir;rrt' ol' linguistic evolutionism came not