| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 93.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

William Dwight Whitney and the Science of Language. By Stephen G. Alter. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xvi, 339 pp. $49.95, ISBN 0-8018-8020-3.)
Language has become a centerpiece of critical theory and a setting for understanding webs of significance. Stephen G. Alter has produced two fine studies of the nineteenth-century origins of linguistic thinking: Darwinism and the Linguistic Image: Language, Race, and Natural Theology in the Nineteenth Century (1999), and now this biography of William Dwight Whitney, an American founder of modern language study, or philology. Alter's study emphasizes Whitney's working life and theoretical contributions rather than his early years or personal life.	1
Whitney (1827–1894) drew on commonsense realism for his view of linguistic development. He emphasized language conventions rather than any timeless essence. He proposed that languages therefore emerge and change naturally, with usage governing the character of any language, and with words gradually becoming conventionally accepted parts of the language.	. . .

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