Our Notes & References

Another of Klaproth’s groundbreaking works, “one of the important early surveys of Oriental languages, notably the Caucasian languages, and the only source of information on several extinct Caucasian languages” (Encycl. Britannica)

With Turkish, Central Asian, Chinese & South-East Asian, as well as Siberian, Polar, Far Eastern & North Pacific languages – and the author’s entirely novel theory of linguistic diversity.

Julius Klaproth (1783-1835) was an impressive polymath. A linguist, historian, cartographer and sometime bookseller, Klaproth taught himself Chinese from books as a teenager and impressed Count Jan Potocki so much that he was appointed as the interpreter for Golovkin’s 1805 diplomatic mission to China. Though the mission ended in failure when the Count refused to perform the kowtow, Klaproth was nevertheless appointed an associate member of the Academy of Sciences upon his return and sent to study the people and languages of the Caucasus, then newly annexed by the Russian Empire. This second expedition also ended in catastrophe, with most of the members wiped out by fever in the high mountains, and Klaproth himself barely making it back to Petersburg.

Nevertheless, Klaproth gathered much information to build this fascinating and wide-ranging book. Although ostensibly a classification of the world’s languages into 22 groups, this is not simply a book on linguistics. Klaproth touches various subjects to elaborate a theory, challenging in particular the Biblical view of human origin and “seeking more scientific models for the emergence of cultural diversity than the story of Genesis” (Benes, 188). He was for example interested in comparing the chronologies of world myth to confirm their veracity: for example, he concludes, with interesting calculations, that the Hindu flood myth, the Biblical flood, and the foundation of the Chinese state all coincide in 3076 BC. The extensive footnotes also conceal, a la Robert Graves, a variety of speculative cosmogony.

To support his theory of a first language coming for the Caucasus and Central Asia, Klaproth compiled glossaries from a range of languages as diverse as Arabic, Mongolian, Armenian and Georgian (and its sister languages Laz, Svan and Mingrelian), as well as the extraordinarily rare such as Kuril Ainu (now extinct) and Samoyed (i.e. Nenets, spoken today by scarcely 25,000 people around the Urals).

It is interesting to note that Klaproth also adds comments on the peoples whose language he analyses: the Ostiaks are “wandering and [have a] miserable existence” (p.167), and the Ainu are quite wild, as their “women breastfeed the young of this animal [the bear] to tame them” (p.301)… Notably, he also gives a detailed history, mythology and vocabulary of the Ossetians, an Iranian group he was particularly interested in as their language and appearance (“curiously blue eyes and blond or red hair”) suggested that the Germans and Iranians shared an Urheimat somewhere in Central Asia.

Klaproth was not only an early Orientalist, but clearly also an early sinophile, praising the sophistication of the early Chinese state. In this he goes against the prejudices of his contemporaries, who thought that as a non-inflectional language (unlike Sanskrit and the European languages), Chinese was “primitive” or “underdeveloped”.

This lovely copy, in contemporary boards, belongs to the second edition, after the first, also published in Paris, in 1823. This is the text volume, as the work was published with a folio Sprachatlas of just one map and 69 pages of tables. Because of their contrasting formats, the volumes are extremely scarce together on the market:

Both editions are very rare on the market: the only copy of our edition we could trace at auction was in 1953 apparently, probably missing one volume. Of the first edition we could find only one complete copy of both volumes, 30 years ago, as well as two copies of the atlas (without the text), almost 20 years ago, and only one of the text (without atlas), in 1967.

Bibliography

Not in Cat. Russica; Benes, Tuska. 2004. ‘Comparative Linguistics as Ethnology: In Search of Indo-Germans in Central Asia, 1770-1830’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 24 (2): 117–32; Walravens, Hartmut. 2009. ‘Julius Klaproth’. Japonica Humboldtiana, Band 10 (2006), no. 10 (March): 178–91; Werner, Karel. 1987. ‘The Indo-Europeans and the Indo-Aryans: The Philological, Archaeological and Historical Context’. Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 68 (1/4): 491–523.