William Dwight Whitney was an American linguist, philologist, and lexicographer.
Background
William Dwight Whitney was born on February 9, 1827 at Northampton, Massachussets, the fourth child of Josiah Dwight Whitney (1786 - 1869), banker, and Sarah (Williston) Whitney, of old New England stock, strong in body, mind, and character, and in a community where education, religion, thrift, and serious performance were the foundations of society. His grandfather was Abel Whitney (Harvard, 1773), and his paternal grandmother was Clarissa, daughter of Col. Josiah Dwight, of the family that gave three presidents to Yale. His mother was daughter of the Rev. Payson Williston (Yale, 1783) of Easthampton, and sister of Samuel Williston, founder of Williston Seminary. His eldest brother, Josiah Dwight Whitney, of Harvard, was an eminent geologist; another brother, James Lyman, was head of the Boston Public Library; a third, Henry Mitchell, was professor of English at Beloit College; his sister Maria was professor of modern languages in Smith College.
Career
From boyhood his chief interest had been outdoor life, nature, and natural science, and this interest never left him. In his youth he shot, mounted, and presented to the Peabody Museum at Yale a collection of the birds of New England, including, it is believed, the last wild turkey. In 1849 he spent the summer with his brother Josiah in the United States geological survey of the Lake Superior region, and the report on the botany was published under his name as a chapter of the general report (1851). In 1873, in the middle of his linguistic career, he joined the Hayden expedition in Colorado as assistant in the geographical work of the survey. He was always keen and competent in botany and ornithology. By all the omens Whitney should have devoted his life to natural science. But a chance occurrence turned him toward linguistics. When he graduated from college, knowledge of Sanskrit in the West, with realization of its significant relationship to the languages of Europe, was scarcely half a century old. Chairs of Sanskrit had been established at Bonn and Oxford little more than a decade before. Early in 1845 William's brother Josiah returned from Europe, bringing with him 341 volumes for his library. Among these was a Sanskrit grammar by Franz Bopp. On October 1, 1845, William began the study of medicine in a physician's office. The next day measles developed. During his convalescence he picked up Bopp's grammar. After his recovery he became a clerk in his father's bank for more than three years, but when he joined the geological survey in 1849 he took the grammar with him. In the fall of 1849 he went to Yale for a year under Edward Elbridge Salisbury, "the pioneer and patron of Sanskrit studies in America, " as Whitney later described him in a dedication. By then, self-taught, he could read simple Sanskrit. At that time there were no distinctive graduate schools in America, but there was a beginning in the department of philosophy and the arts at Yale, where Salisbury, pupil of Bopp, G. W. F. Freytag, and Christian Lassen, and the only professional Orientalist in the country, had since 1841 been professor of Arabic and Sanskrit. The only class Salisbury ever had in Sanskrit was composed of William Dwight Whitney and James Hadley. But what a class! Salisbury himself generously said that it soon became "evident that the teacher and the taught must change places. " In 1850 Whitney went to Germany, where he studied three semesters under Bopp, Albrecht Weber, and Karl Lepsius in Berlin, and two under Rudolph Roth in Tübingen. Meanwhile Salisbury had been making plans at Yale. He created a fund, and on May 10, 1854, the Corporation elected Whitney to a new and separate "Professorship of the Sanskrit and its relations to kindred languages, and Sanskrit literature. " Whitney returned to America in August 1853, and a year later went to Yale, where he remained active until his death, despite a call to Harvard in 1869, when Salisbury provided additional endowment for the chair that has since been called the Salisbury professorship of Sanskrit and comparative philology and is now (1936) held by a pupil (Edgerton) of a pupil (Bloomfield) of a pupil (Whitney) of Salisbury. His forty years of labor there, teaching and research, were devoted to four main interests, often overlapping, but still indicative of remarkable versatility, as well as industry: Sanskrit, linguistic science, modern languages, lexicography. His bibliography in the Whitney Memorial volume numbers 360 titles. While a student in Germany he had planned with Roth an edition of the Atharva-Veda, then unpublished, and in Berlin he copied all the manuscripts available, collating them in 1853 with those in Paris, Oxford, and London. One of his hobbies was astronomy, and he spent many leisure hours working on a chart of the heavens as the ancient Orient imagined them. Whitney's most important work was his Sanskrit Grammar, which was issued at Leipzig in 1879, translated into German by Zimmer, and revised by Whitney a decade later. He subordinated to the technique of modern linguistic science the classifications, arrangements, rules, and terms of the ancient and medieval Hindu grammarians, whose traditions had previously prevailed in the West, and he took his material primarily from recorded Sanskrit literature, covering historically both the classical language and the older Vedic. He was too skeptical as to the intrinsic value of Indian linguistic scholarship, but his general emphasis was sound, and his work marks a great transition in the history of Sanskrit study. His method was essentially descriptive and statistical. Regret has been expressed that it was not comparative. But he was limited in time and space, and in the sequel his procedure proved fortunate, for otherwise the advances in Indo-European grammar would long since have outdated his work, whereas in fact it is still indispensable to student and scholar. And it laid the foundations for Wackernagel and other comparative grammarians in the years to come. The Grammar was followed by a formal supplement, The Roots, Verb-forms, and Primary Derivatives of the Sanskrit Language (Leipzig, 1885). In linguistics Whitney's work antedated many recent developments, and he held -sometimes unnecessarily, perhaps - theories that have since been overthrown, but he was one of the wisest leaders of his day, entitled to a prominent and permanent place in the history of the study of language, and his books still serve as a valuable introduction to the science. While his writings in this field were general, descriptive, and semi-popular, they discussed, with notable sanity of thought and clarity of expression, fundamental problems of scholarship concerning human speech. Whitney had considerable influence upon the trend of modern linguistic science, especially in his recognition of its distinction from philology, in his opposition to the abstract, figurative, and almost mystic vagueness that still prevailed in certain quarters, and in his conception of linguistics as a historical, and not a physical or natural, science. In 1864 he delivered a series of lectures before the Smithsonian Institution, and later before the Lowell Institute, on the principles of linguistic science. These were published in 1867 under the title Language and the Study of Language, and translated into German by Jolly and into Dutch by Vinckers. This was followed, in 1875, by The Life and Growth of Language, which was translated into German, French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, and Russian. Similar discussions are contained also in his two volumes of Oriental and Linguistic Studies (collections of previous contributions to various periodicals), which appeared in 1873 and 1874; in his little book, Max Müller and the Science of Language: a Criticism (1892); and in many articles. In his earlier years at Yale Whitney's salary was insufficient for the support of his growing family, and he added to his income by teaching German and French, at first privately and later in college classes. When the Sheffield Scientific School was established he organized its modern language department and became its head. Out of this subsidiary activity grew a list of publications that might well represent the lifework of a prominent professor in modern languages: a series of annotated German texts (1876) ; a German reader, with notes and vocabulary (1870); a larger (1869) and a smaller (1885) German grammar; a German dictionary (1877); a French grammar (1886). To these should be added his Essentials of English Grammar (1877). These grammars, all for practical use in school or college, show the same clarity, conciseness, and insight that mark his Sanskrit; they anticipated contemporary methods and were widely used and deservedly influential. A number of the works already mentioned belong to the category of lexicography and works of reference. The last decade of his life was largely given to The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language, of which he was editor-in-chief. His is the only name on the title-page, which says that the work was prepared under his superintendence, and he wrote and signed the preface. He shared responsibility for plan, method, and execution, supervised spelling, pronunciation, etc. , and read all the proofs. Whitney wrote on many subjects, but essentially he was a grammarian. His chief contribution was to the study and teaching of Sanskrit, and there have been few American Sanskritists who were not trained under him or one of his pupils. Neither his writing nor his teaching was fired by any high degree of imagination, enthusiasm, or other emotion. What he wanted was facts, carefully arranged and accurately presented. But he was not cold: his personal sympathy, patience, and kindness were proverbial, as were his natural simplicity and sincerity. It is almost incredible that any man should have done so much in four decades of productive scholarship - really three, for his last eight years were spent in a state of invalidism. Recognition came to him in abundance from America and abroad. He received honorary degrees from a number of American and foreign universities; he was an honorary member of the Oriental societies of Great Britain and Ireland, Japan, Germany, Bengal, Peking, and Italy, and of the literary societies of Leyden, Upsala, and Helsingfors. He was a foreign or corresponding member of the Institute of France, the royal academies of Ireland, Denmark, Berlin, Turin, the Imperial Academy of St. Petersburg, and the Royal Academy dei Lincei of Rome, fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, and Foreign Knight of the Royal Prussian Order pour le mérite (succeeding Thomas Carlyle). An outstanding interest in Whitney's life was the American Oriental Society, which he joined in 1850. He was librarian from 1855 until 1873, corresponding secretary (and editor of publications) from 1857, when he succeeded Salisbury, until 1884, when he was elected president, in which office he served six years. In 1885 he wrote, of himself, "no small part of his work has been done in the service of the Society; from 1857 to the present time, just a half of the contents of its Journal is from his pen". He was one of the founders and the first president (1869) of the American Philological Association. As chairman of a committee appointed by the Association to study the question of English spelling he prepared the report which was presented in 1876. He was opposed to the principle of "historical" or "etymological" spelling, favored reform, especially the use of the simpler of alternative forms, and held office in the Spelling Reform Association, but he was less active and less radical in the movement than F. A. March and others.
Personality
Whitney was devoted to his family and his home, and in country walks with his children or in conversation with his friends he found his recreation. He was a lover of music and had a good baritone voice. He was of average height and weight, had deep blue eyes, slightly curling reddish hair, and, most of his life, a full beard. In 1886 he learned that he was suffering from a grave affection of the heart (angina pectoris), and that his active life was ended. But so far as his strict regimen permitted he continued his work, serene and objective as ever, although he knew that any day might be his last.
