Jules Gilliéron
Jules Gilliéron was a Swiss-French linguist and dialectologist. Born and initially educated in Switzerland, he studied linguistics at the in Paris, where he spent the remainder of his life. His mentors included Michel Bréal and Gaston Paris, who supported his academic career; Bréal helped him secure a lectureship at the in 1883. He became a French citizen in 1886, a professor in 1894, and assistant director of the by 1913, the same year he was awarded the Légion d'honneur.
Gilliéron's early publications in the field of linguistic geography included an 1880 study of the dialect of the Swiss town of Vionnaz and the Petit Atlas phonétique de Valais roman. In the latter, he developed the methods he would later apply to larger projects, such as the use of a pre-prepared questionnaire. He co-founded an academic journal, the Revue des patois gallo-romans, with Jean-Pierre Rousselot in 1887. He used a novel phonetic transcription system, developed with Rousselot, for the Atlas Linguistique de la France, a complete linguistic atlas of the Gallo-Romance area. The ALF, which he produced in collaboration with a fieldworker, Edmond Edmont, was the first major linguistic atlas of a Romance language, and its methodology influenced subsequent works of linguistic geography. Karl Jaberg and Jakob Jud, two of Gilliéron's students, later applied his methods to Italy and southern Switzerland.
Gilliéron considered the proper object of etymology to be the whole history of words, rather than only their origins. He opposed the Neogrammarian view that language evolves through exceptionless laws of sound change, arguing that linguistic changes are not always uniform and are influenced by human psychology. He believed that speakers could only differentiate concepts for which they had discrete linguistic forms, and therefore viewed phenomena such as folk etymology as potentially "pathological" forces which could reduce the complexity and thus the usefulness of a language, and which require speakers to use "therapies" to counteract them.
Gilliéron has been called "the master of linguistic geography", and credited as the founder of scientific dialectology in France. His student body was highly international, and many of those who attended his lectures went on to be prominent in linguistics and related fields in countries throughout Europe.
Biography
Jules Louis Gilliéron was born on 21 December 1854 in La Neuveville, near Bern in Switzerland, the youngest of the four sons of Jean-Victor Gilliéron and his wife Méry. Jean-Victor had left a post as a primary-school teacher in the villages of Lutry and Aubonne in 1853, becoming a French-language teacher in the Gymnasium in La Neuveville. He taught in the Gymnasium for girls in Basel from 1866, and was also a respected amateur geologist and palaeontologist. Jules's elder brother Émile, born in 1850, was an artist and archaeological draughtsman; another elder brother died in infancy. As children, the Gilliéron boys, including Jules, took part in Jean-Victor's geological expeditions.Jules attended school in Neuchâtel, where his teachers included the dialectologist. In 1874–1875, he accompanied his eldest brother, Alfred, on a tour of the Eastern Mediterranean region, which spanned several months. He took his school leaving exams in the autumn of 1875: these were graded "satisfactory", in response to which Gilliéron wrote to the school's governing body, with his father's support, to refuse his diploma, on the grounds that it had been given to him "out of kindness" and judged inferior to those awarded before. In the winter of the same year, he enrolled at the University of Basel, where he attended lectures by the historian Jacob Burckhardt, the linguist, and the classical philologist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.Cornu advised Gilliéron to study under the linguists Paul Meyer, based in the French city of Chartres, and Gaston Paris, a lecturer at in Paris who had developed Meyer's theories that dialects were not monolithic and that linguistic geography should therefore concentrate on individual linguistic features rather than dialect groups. In 1876, at the age of 22, Gilliéron moved permanently to Paris, where he attended from November lectures at the by Gaston Paris; by Michel Bréal, a prominent philologist of Ancient Greek; by the linguist Arsène Darmesteter; and by the classical philologist Louis Havet. He also attended lectures by Meyer in Chartres. During his first academic year in Paris, he delivered a lecture at a conference organised by Havet on the pronunciation of Vulgar Latin. After the 1876–1877 academic year, he studied primarily under Gaston Paris. In 1878, he began teaching German at the Lycée Chaptal, a secondary school. There, he taught advanced classes for students aspiring to study at the prestigious École polytechnique or at the Saint-Cyr military academy, using a version of the direct method he developed himself. During his time at the Lycée Chaptal, he also worked as a substitute professor at the University of Paris. His salary rose from 800 francs in 1878 to 4,950 in 1891. In 1897, he resigned his teaching post to focus his work on the Atlas Linguistique de la France.
In January 1883, Gilliéron was appointed to the, succeeding Darmesteter as a lecturer in linguistics under Gaston Paris. At the suggestion of Bréal, who had supported his elevation to the post, he lectured on dialectology. His lectures initially covered Old French and the study of the living dialects of France. He became a French citizen in 1886, though continued to describe himself as Swiss, and to take holidays at a small property in Switzerland. He was made an Officier d'Academie, a member of the honorific Ordre des Palmes académiques, in 1891. From the 1892–1893 academic year, a new section of the for the study of the dialectology of Roman Gaul was created, separate from that dedicated to Romance linguistics: Gilliéron was placed in charge of it, with the title of deputy director. In 1894, he took the post of "Professor of Dialectology of Roman Gaul", at the, created for him by Gaston Paris. By 1913 he was assistant director of the, though his former student Iorgu Iordan later wrote that his salary at this point left him with barely enough to live on. In the same year, he was awarded the Légion d'honneur. By 1917, he was promoted to the rank of director of studies, the same title as Gaston Paris had held in the 1890s.
In later life, Gilliéron married a Mme. Geissbühler. During this period, he was affected by ill-health: Roques wrote of it as "an incurable disease which was fortunately kept hidden from him until the end". He was instructed by the secretary of the to take convalescent leave in the spring of 1926. He returned to Switzerland, where he died on 26 April in. He remained in post at the until his death.
Students
Gilliéron's university courses were well known and attended by many future linguists. In total, 68 of his students have been identified as French, in comparison with 59 Swiss, 29 Germans, and smaller numbers from various other European countries, the United States, and Canada. A minority were women: these included Nellie Nicolet, who published a 1929 study of the dialect of the Italian Valle Antrona; the Belgian philologist and translator Julia Bastin; the Russian Xenia Pamfilova; the Danish Rosally Brøndal, who along with her husband Viggo attended Gilliéron's lectures and became a founding member of the Linguistic Circle of Copenhagen; and the Welsh educationalist Gwladys Perrie Williams.Gilliéron's earliest students, in 1882–1883, included the Swiss, later a professor at Geneva and expert on the Romance place-names of Switzerland, and the Romanian Ioan Bianu, later a prominent bibliographer and director of the library of the Romanian Academy. The following year, he taught Eugen Braunholtz, later a lecturer at Cambridge. Between 1897 and 1900, he taught Albert Dauzat, later director of studies at the. The lexicographer followed Gilliéron's lectures each year between 1901 and 1905, as did, later Bloch's collaborator and a university administrator, between 1903 and 1907. Another long-serving French student was Charles Bruneau, who attended Gilliéron's lectures from 1908 until 1913. The Istrian-born Italian linguist Matteo Bartoli studied under Gilliéron prior to the publication of his series on the dialects of the Dalmatian language in 1906.
Among Gilliéron's Swiss students to become prominent in linguistics were Arthur Piaget,,, Karl Jaberg,, Jakob Jud, Walther von Wartburg, and. He taught at least ten Romanian students in total, including the linguist and diplomat Iorgu Iordan, who followed his lectures in the 1924–1925 academic year, and Alexandru Rosetti, later a professor of the University of Bucharest, who studied under Gilliéron between 1921 and 1926.
Linguistic work
Gilliéron took up the study of the Franco-Provençal dialect of Vionnaz in the Roman Valais region of Switzerland in 1877, using it for his diploma thesis at the ; he presented the thesis successfully on 20 April 1879. He published his results in 1880 as Patois de la commune de Vionnaz . The following year, he expanded the project into a phonetic atlas of the whole Roman Valais region. This atlas, the Petit Atlas phonétique de Valais roman, was an early example of the use of a pre-prepared questionnaire and direct fieldwork to conduct linguistic research, and the first phonetic atlas to be published on a Romance-speaking area.In 1884, Gilliéron was approached by the Minister of Public Instruction to study the dialects of the langues d'oïl in southern Normandy. In 1887, he co-founded the Revue des patois gallo-romans. His co-founder, Jean-Pierre Rousselot, had attended his lectures from 1885 until 1887. The journal was sponsored by Meyer and Gaston Paris, and was published until 1893. The phonetic transcription system used by this journal became known as the.
The ''Atlas Linguistique de la France''
With the encouragement of Gaston Paris, who secured funds towards the research and printing, Gilliéron embarked upon the Atlas Linguistique de la France after his monograph on Roman Valais. The ALF was intended as a complete linguistic atlas of the Gallo-Romance area, which included France, French-speaking Switzerland, Wallonia, western Piedmont and the Channel Islands. It was the first major linguistic atlas of a Romance language, and the first national linguistic atlas to be completed. Gilliéron tasked Edmond Edmont, a layman with highly sensitive hearing, to travel by bicycle throughout rural areas between 1896 and 1900, using a questionnaire which focused on several different phonological, lexical and semantic marks of distinction. Edmont asked questions in standard French, asking respondents to translate words or phrases into their local dialects.The methodology of the ALF was predicated upon Gilliéron's twofold belief that the Gallo-Romance area could be analysed according to mechanistic dialectological laws, and that this could be done by interviewing speakers fluent in both a local dialect and Standard French, who would be able to identify and produce the dialect form of a given Standard French word. Gilliéron periodically updated the questionnaire, which initially tested 1,421 items but grew over three series to 1,920, each represented in its own map. He required Edmont to record only the first answer given by each interviewee so as to preserve, as far as possible, the respondents' basilectal response. Edmont conducted interviews in 638 different locations, using a single interviewee for each site, writing down the responses he received in the Rousselot–Gilliéron alphabet, and sending them to Gilliéron at the end of each day. These methodological innovations ensured the quality and commensurability of the data collected in the ALF.'''' Gilliéron's method of using a trained, professional data collector, rather than volunteers from the dialect communities, became the norm in dialectology.
The ALF was published in thirteen volumes between 1902 and 1910. Although it received limited scholarly attention in France, it was popular among scholars in Germany, Switzerland, Austria and Scandinavia, many of whom were Gilliéron's former students. Gilliéron received the prize of the Diez Foundation in 1908 for the work. Hans Goebl, in 2016, credited the ALF with founding the modern study of areal linguistics. Following Gaston Paris's theories, Gilliéron focused his analysis of the ALF data on individual linguistic features, rather than attempting to impose a typology or dialectal labels upon them. Karl Jaberg and Jakob Jud, who both studied under Gilliéron, later collaborated on the Sprach- und Sachatlas Italiens und der Südschweiz, published in eight volumes between 1928 and 1940, which applied his methods but refined them by including urban areas and asking respondents to name concepts without first offering a standard form of the word in question.
Views on linguistics and language change
Gilliéron's approach to etymology, in contrast to that of previous generations of scholars, emphasised the whole history of words rather than focusing entirely on their origins. In 1919, he compared an etymology focusing only on words' origins with a biography of Honoré de Balzac that read in its entirety: "Balzac, sitting on his nanny's knees, was dressed in a blue-and-red striped gown. He wrote La Comédie humaine." Gilliéron's 1918 book, Généalogie des mots qui désignent l'abeille, compared contemporary variants of a single word to draw conclusions about linguistic change over time; it was the first attempt to do so systematically.Gilliéron opposed the Neogrammarian school of linguistics, which taught that languages develop according to regular, exceptionless laws of sound change. He is often associated with the phrase "every word has its own history", and sometimes erroneously cited as its source. His work was in the early tradition of lexical diffusion, which sees sound changes as spreading word-by-word according to their frequency of use, against the prevailing Neogrammarian view which cast sound changes as mechanical events applied uniformly in particular phonotactic conditions. Unlike the Neogrammarians, he argued that human psychology plays a prominent role in linguistic change, and that various factors can result in sound changes spreading in a non-uniform fashion. The etymologist Christos Nifadopoulos names him, alongside Hugo Schuchardt, as one of the most important opponents of the Neogrammarian movement.
Gilliéron viewed language as a social tool, and believed that speakers could only differentiate concepts for which they had discrete linguistic forms. He therefore viewed the reduction of lexemes in a language – caused by sound change, the convergence of linguistic forms via folk etymology, and the simplification of multi-word signifiers into single words – as a "pathological" situation which required correction. He considered that speakers use "therapies", continuing his medical metaphor, including the repurposing of existing dialect words to break a state of one word holding multiple meanings, the creation of completely new vocabulary for the same purpose, the borrowing of words from neighbouring dialects or the literary language; in the literary language itself, he further suggested that speakers may assimilate the spoken form of words to their written forms, which are often more distinct in French, or return to Latinate roots. At the time and since, other linguists judged that Gilliéron overstated the impact of homonymy, and that it harms communication only in limited circumstances.
Assessment
In 1954, Gino Bottiglioni called Gilliéron "the master of linguistic geography";, in 2004, called him one of the most important Romance linguists of the early twentieth century. W. H. Veith, in 2006, called him the founder of scientific dialectology in France. Jürgen Lang writes that Gilliéron's prose can often be awkwardly expressed or difficult to interpret, as Gilliéron acknowledged, and that he often sought co-writers to mitigate this; in Lang's view, Gilliéron's sole-authored prose is often polemical and difficult to read. He echoes a contemporary criticism, raised by in 1923, that Gilliéron wrote negatively of Neogrammarian linguists while generally adopting their position that sound change is regular. However, Lang praises his work with Jean Mongin for problematising the distinction between borrowed and inherited vocabulary, and that between the historical and geographic origins of a word.In 2002, the publication of a 1998 conference on his work included the comment that Gilliéron had been comparatively overlooked in histories of linguistics, and that few studies to that date had concentrated in depth upon his work. The same study noted and challenged the view that Gilliéron merely collected linguistic facts without theoretical underpinning, suggesting that his work engaged with fundamental problems of language diversification, the role of speakers in the history of languages, and the proper methods of linguistic geography.
In an obituary, Iordan described Gilliéron as a modest man, who would have bristled to be referred to as a "scholar", who "worshipped no-one, admired no-one, and flattered no-one", and "in giant body there was hidden a soul with the naïveté of a child... which made him extremely likeable." Another former student, Oscar Bloch, recalled Gilliéron's "two-hour, impassioned lectures", after which he would take his favourite students to, a brasserie, to drink beer.