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Uriel Weinreich: Builder on Empirical Foundations Journal of Jewish Languages 5 (2017) 253–266 brill.com/jjl Uriel Weinreich: Builder on Empirical Foundations William Labov Department of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A. [email protected] Abstract In this article, William Labov offers a personal take on the scholarly accomplishments and advising style of Uriel Weinreich, his mentor and later his colleague as well. He also draws on letters he and Weinreich exchanged in the mid-1960s, and he documents as- pects of the collaboration that resulted in Weinreich’s most lasting contribution to the study of language change, the 1968 Weinreich, Labov, and Herzog paper (U. Weinreich, W. Labov, and M.I. Herzog. “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change,” in Directions for Historical Linguistics, eds. W.P. Lehmann and Y. Malkiel. Austin: University of Texas Press, 95–195). Keywords Uriel Weinreich − linguistic variation − language change − history of sociolinguistics This article is an account of an extraordinary scholar and human being who created the general approach to the study of linguistic change and variation that is dominant in the world today. I first met Uriel Weinreich in the fall of 1962 when I entered the field of linguistics at Columbia University, where he was chair of the department. In this article, I would like to sketch a portrait of Weinreich the mentor, the man, and the linguist, and then present an account of the creation of the influen- tial article, “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change” (1968), which he wrote with Marvin Herzog and myself shortly before his death at the age of 40. I wrote my master’s essay under Weinreich’s supervision—a study of sound change on the island of Martha’s Vineyard. I then did my dissertation on the © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2017 | doi 10.1163/22134638-05020002Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 11:59:35AM via free access 254 Labov social stratification of English in New York City. In 1965, I joined the faculty at Columbia and worked with Uriel until his death in March of 1967. My own interest in linguistic change and variation covered only a small part of the range of Weinreich’s creative activity. He began the study of his native Yiddish language in a Vilna high school with the encouragement of his father Max Weinreich. Uriel wrote a text for those who would learn that language, College Yiddish (1949), and an English-Yiddish, Yiddish-English dictionary (1968). His 1951 dissertation was a study of languages in contact in Switzerland. Languages in Contact, the theoretical core of this study, remains the basic text on the principles of interlanguage and cross-linguistic influence. The full dis- sertation, with all of his notes, tables, and photographs, was published in 2011. He was a creative force in dialect geography and sociolinguistics, designing and directing the Language and Culture Atlas of Ashkenazic Jewry (LCAAJ), which reconstructed from the evidence of expatriates after the Holocaust the phonology and grammar of Yiddish dialects. He was a major player in the de- velopment of semantic theory in the generative framework, and made impor- tant advances in the study of idioms. He was the editor of Word for a decade, and made that journal a leading force in the development of a socially con- scious linguistics. He was deeply engaged in the major issues of general linguis- tics and participated actively in the shift from a structuralist to a generativist framework. Yet given this wide range of research and administrative activities, Weinreich was profoundly committed to teaching. If a class was scheduled for Wednesday, he was completely unavailable all day Tuesday as he prepared for it. It so hap- pened that my mother was a native speaker of Weinreich’s own dialect of Vilna Yiddish, though not literate in that language. She was delighted when I returned with examples from Uriel’s courses on Yiddish grammar and phonol- ogy, though she never really believed me when I told her that ikh hob geborn ‘I was born’ was not standard Yiddish.1 She would have been even more delight- ed if my dissertation had been on Yiddish, but fate moved in other directions. In the year of my dissertation I met with Uriel once a week to discuss the work on the social stratification of English in New York City. He rarely 1 [Editor’s note (ILB): In standard Yiddish, this sentence would be rendered: ikh bin geboyrn gevorn ‘I was born.’ Differences include the use of the past tense auxiliary verb zayn ‘to be’ (bin ‘am’) rather than hobn ‘to have,’ the use of the variant of the participle geboyrn rather than geborn ‘born,’ and the addition of an overt passive auxiliary vern ‘to become.’ All three non-standard features are characteristic of colloquial Lithuanian Yiddish.] Journal of Jewish LanguagesDownloaded from 5 Brill.com10/01/2021(2017) 253–266 11:59:35AM via free access Uriel Weinreich: Builder On Empirical Foundations 255 intervened to suggest new directions. But at the end of each meeting I would ask myself, “Where did I talk the most?” That was the point where I had to make some serious changes in what I was doing. I was in fact the petit-fils of André Martinet, who had been chair of Columbia’s department from 1947 to 1955. Uriel’s commitment to structural analysis was consistent with his alignment to Martinet. Nevertheless, he was quite resistant to any pressure to become his disciple. He distanced himself from Martinet’s rejection of generative grammar and was more than a little critical of the absence of social orientation among the Martinetians in France and New York City. But he reinforced the alignment to Martinet’s thinking in our student body by inviting William Moulton of Princeton to teach a course in dialect geography at Columbia. Moulton not only demonstrated the rich pos- sibilities of structural explanation of change in his analyses of Swiss German dialects, but also acquainted us with the work of a wide range of 19th century linguists whose work had fallen by the way. I would like to insert here something about Weinreich’s personal style, if it were possible to capture that combination of calmness, gentleness, and intellectual honesty. His lectures were extraordinary efforts at organization and research. He threw himself into the analysis of others’ ideas with great generosity and enthusiasm, and he often gave more time to working out oth- ers’ theories than they had devoted to originating them. The achievements of his students and colleagues were a source of great delight to him. He had, in Roman Jakobson’s term, a “noble tenderness” for the ideas of others. There was a quality in Weinreich which reached the affections of others even before they were aware of it. There were times when we could observe in him a conflict between affection for his friends and his own intellectual honesty; we were all astonished that he was able to find solutions which compromised nothing on either principle. One measure of Weinreich’s influence was the general esteem in which his opinions were held in the field of linguistics. There was a special recognition of Weinreich’s name that guaranteed a hearing in any association of linguists; to have been Weinreich’s student and worked with him added considerably to the pleasures of life; and for more than a few, his death brought the awareness of an irreplaceable loss. When I traveled to give talks in other parts of the country, still relatively unknown myself, a special look of respect always accompanied the mention of his name. Yakov Malkiel, in a 1967 obituary, commented on this quality of Weinreich as it was manifest in his review of Hockett’s Course in Modern Linguistics (Weinreich 1959/1960): Journal of Jewish Languages 5 (2017) 253–266 Downloaded from Brill.com10/01/2021 11:59:35AM via free access 256 Labov … The search for independence, so characteristic of the gropings of our times, must be severely qualified with reference to Weinreich: under no circumstances did he stoop to the pose of an ‘Originalgenie’ contemptu- ous of the production of his seniors or of his peers … Inclined to compro- mise by temperament, superbly abreast of all relevant developments on a global scale, he could nevertheless assert with impressive strength his personal initiative and his private scale of values (Malkiel 1967:606). The Creation of Empirical Foundations [EF] Uriel Weinreich’s impact on the field of linguistics is implemented most strong- ly in the article that is the main subject of this article: “Empirical Foundations for a Theory of Language Change.” It is the work of three authors: Weinreich, myself, and Marvin (Mikhl) Herzog. It was first conceived during the academic year 1965–66, when Weinreich was at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto; Herzog was directing Weinreich’s LCAAJ proj- ect at Columbia, and I was teaching at Columbia and engaged in research in Harlem. Fortunately, my files have retained carbon copies of detailed, single- spaced letters between Weinreich and myself which provide an unusually complete record of the genesis and development of EF and a key to Weinreich’s thinking. When he first arrived at the Center, Weinreich hoped to devote most of his time to matters of general semantic theory. But in October, he wrote: Had I been master of my own fate, I would have had three days a week left for semantics, but as chance would have it, YIVO has just raised the money necessary to publish my English and Yiddish dictionary. At last I’ve gotten around to Frege in the rough, and also getting around to the Oxford philosophers.
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