Acceso usuarios
Victoria Scotto
This paper explores the methodological connections between two linguistic and philological research methods separately put forward by August Schleicher and Karl Lachmann. In both cases, we will analyze the coincidences that enabled the use of the stemmatic method by both academics and their efforts to reconstruct an original (either textual or linguistic) form, named with the prefix Ur-. This analysis also includes the influence of the cultural context in the German territory during the 19th century, the time and place where these disciplinary methodologies arose. By “context” here we mean the influence of the Romantic philosophy that sustained the search for origins in a lost and vindicated past, as well as the academic structure that brought the prestige and scientific claim assigned to the study of the Humanities, which in that territory was called Aufklärung. Towards the end, we will present the evidence that support the central hypothesis of this paper: there are indeed direct connections between the methods of Schleicher and Lachmann, connections that link both their academic productions and the disciplines that they helped to establish institutionally.
