The Prix Volney

The Prix Volney Essay Series analyzes and reproduces, often for the first time, essays submitted for this most prestigious of linguistic prizes, awarded since 1822 by the Institut de France to recognize work in general and comparative linguistics.
In this, Volume I , the series editor, Joan Leopold, introduces the founder of the prize, Constantin-François Chasseboeuf, Count Volney, and incorporates the history of the Prix Volney into the history of academies and scholarly institutions, linguistics and the social sciences in the nineteenth century. Jean Leclant, Permanent Secretary of the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, which now awards the Prix Volney, and Professor of Egyptology at the Collège de France, summarizes the historical and contemporary role of the Académie, including its organization of prize competitions.
Alan Kemp of the University of Edinburgh treats the first, and initially central, subject of the competition: the transcription of Oriental and other languages using modified forms of the Roman alphabet. His essay `Transcription, Transliteration and the Idea of a Universal Alphabet' is followed by two previously unpublished prize-winning Volney essays (1822, 1823) on this subject by Josef Scherer and a reprint of the prize-winning Essai sur l'analyse physique des langues ou de la formation et de l'usage d'un alphabet méthodique (1837) by Paul Ackermann. The study of French linguistics, which was officially excluded from the competition, but which formed the basis of many entries and numerous winners, is then treated by Jacques Bourquin, for French studies in general, and by Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gérand, for French dialects in particular.
The volume concludes with Gaston Bordet's and Jacques Bourquin's introductions and Jacques Bourquin's edition of the Prix Volney manuscript by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, `Recherches sur les catégories grammaticales, et sur quelques origines de la langue française' (1839). This is a manuscript of the only known linguistic work by the famous French social thinker.
In this, Volume II , the focus is on the authors who competed for the prize of 1835, the only year in which the theme of the contest was restricted to Amerindian (particularly Delaware) linguistics. The two competitors, Peter Stephen Du Ponceau and Constantine Samuel Rafinesque, both lived in the United States, but were of French and Swiss extraction and able to write their essays in French.
R.H. Robins, of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, describes the life of Du Ponceau and his views on general linguistics and phonological theory as seen in his first Volney essay, for the competition of 1826, `Essai de solution du problème philologique proposé en 1823 par la Commission ...', which is published here for the first time.
Pierre Swiggers, of the Catholic University of Louvain, Belgium, introduces Du Ponceau's Amerindian researches and their relationship to contemporary scholarship. Then follows a reprint with annotations of Du Ponceau's famous `Mémoire sur le système grammatical des langues de quelques nations indiennes de l'Amérique du Nord', published in 1838 and based upon his prizewinning 1835 Volney manuscript which is no longer extant.
This volume shows the Prix Volney Commissioners reaching out to the Western hemisphere and selecting some of the best linguistic scholarship it could offer.
This, Volume III , deals with two major nineteenth-century linguists of German origin: Friedrich Max Müller and Heymann Steinthal. Their previously unpublished Volney essays represent the far-flung interests of comparative and historical linguists in this period both in temporal and in geographical or ethnographical terms.
Max Müller's essay on `Comparative Philology and the Early Civilization of Mankind' (1849), edited by Joan Leopold, shows the earliest phases of his interest in comparative Indo-European language, culture, mythology and `race', studies in which he became a seminal figures.
Steinthal's two essays, one on languages of West Africa (1851), edited by Gerhard Böhm, and one on Chinese (1854), edited by Jerold Edmondson, show the novel phonetic, psychological and classificatory aspects of his linguistic researches, which received more recognition from the Volney Commissioners than from most of his contemporaries.
Extensive biographies and bibliographies of these two authors (by Joan Leopold for Max Müller and by Hans-Ulrich Lessing for Steinthal) accompany the annotated texts of their essays.