KARL JABERG (1877-1959)

Karl Jaberg

Y[akov] M[alkiel]

Swiss scholars are not alone in mourning the recent death of their ranking Romance linguist, at the ripe age of eighty-two years. For Romance philologists the world over, Jaberg’s home at Berne— a city with which he had been academically connected for over fifty years—provided a much-needed center of gravity. An unusual combination of keen mind and sterling character had here produced a standard of decorum, earnestness, and wisdom which will be sorely missed in numerous quarters.

Jaberg has lived out a long and useful life, untempted by intellectual flashiness and flamboyance. Every page that he has written, every letter that he has signed bears the cachet of quiet strength, of steady, but intense thinking, of thoroughness and neatness. It is difficult to single out any climactic point in his career, unless one thinks of the three memorable lectures which he delivered at the College de France in December, 1933, and which later, in book form, became a classic of linguistic methodology (Aspects géographiques du langage, 1935). Thanks to his physical robustness and his mental alertness, Jaberg had the enviable privilege of traveling (to his beloved Italy) and of actively pursuing his researches until the fatal sickness struck. He used these gifts with rare intelligence : his last publications, whether creative or critical, were his best. As an octogenarian, he saw many things and especially many connections in a sharper focus than scholars three times his junior.

Ever since the launching of the monumental project of the Italian and Southern Swiss Atlas Jaberg’s name has been very closely associated with Jakob Jud’s. Actually, the two Swiss scholars were entirely different in temperaments, tastes, and ambitions. It was their ability to bridge this clearly discernible gap in embarking on a joint venture, with thorough mutual respect for the partner’s peculiar accomplishments and inclinations, that insured the well-deserved success of the AIS. The annals of our discipline are full of— frequently tragicomic—accounts of teacher-pupil relationships, hovering between infatuation and estrangement. Conversely, Jaberg (the older of the two by a margin of a few years) and Jud exemplify a unique team of friends who succeeded in maintaining and strengthening their bonds of loyalty and affection through different stages of their long and fruitful lives, despite, the outsider is led to understand, occasional disagreements on matters of detail. No severer test of a person’s tact and delicacy has ever been devised.

Of the two, Jud represented by far the more dynamic personality, who with reckless, unsparing energy—one is prompted to think of spontaneous combustion—knew how to kindle enthusiasm in students, laymen, and even far-off correspondents. He was ever ready, indeed overflowing with eagerness, to drive a wedge into a bedrock of recalcitrant linguistic material, to experiment with a fresh approach (particularly in matters of etymology), and, ever alert to the importance of scholarly companionship and Nachwuchs, he surreptitiously injected seeds of his own vast knowledge—on a more than generous or even advisable scale—into every article and review published in his journal, into every dissertation written under his guidance. He was probably the last Romance advocate and active champion of the classic Gelehrtenkorrespondenz in a grand manner, considering himself morally obliged (and visibly enjoying every bit of this self-imposed obligation) to react to any challenge with a profusion of daring ideas, worthy of any imaginative experimentalist, and with a rich supply of complementary data, testifying to his fact-gathering prowess. In comparison, Jaberg was distinctly more reserved, sober, and balanced, reacting to stimulation sparingly and after heedful stock-taking. Above all virtues of academic intercourse he valued judiciousness, which to him meant more than sheer expediency or prudence : its dual connotations in his private vocabu- lary were, first, scrupulous avoidance of one-sidedness and whim in his personal researches, at the painful cost of slower rhythm and smaller volume of production, and, second and more important, absolute fairness, matched by firmness, in appraising the gropings of others. In the close-knit community of Romance linguists, Jaberg remained the towering personification of lucidity, honesty, and freedom from vanity, at a time when not a few shrill voices of fanatics and, worse, of charlatans became increasingly audible. Nearly everybody agreed that his verdicts, pronounced in measured tones and tolerant of other views, were final, and they were, in fact, hardly ever appealed.

Jaberg’s recoil from any excessively biased commitment, his deliberate search for continued intellectual growth long past his physical prime manifested themselves in three ways. First, in his willingness to analyze unfamiliar slices of material, for instance, when he rather unexpectedly attacked problems of Rumanian dialectology (VRom., V, 49-86) or, in 1947, delved into Portuguese which had so far lain outside his purview (RPF, I, 1-44), as if to give moral support to the respective atlas ventures, or else abandoned his favorite medium of folk speech amenable to direct observation for the sake of philologically filtered material (‘ Mittelfranzösische Wortstudien ’, Festschrift J ud [1943]). Second, he attained his goal through the exploration of languages in all legitimate perspectives—with the possible exception of syntax—, ranging from sound systems¹ through phonetic expressivism (RPF, I [1947], 1-44, and VRom., VIII [1945-46], 1-33) and inflection (against the temporary neglect of which he pleaded vigorously, but in vain, in the mid-4hirties) to derivation (VRom., XI [1950], 64-100) and stylistics (RPh., X [1956-57], 322-332, where he cast a refreshing side-light on Baroque verbal art). Add to these domains, from the very outset, semantics, the relation of the lexicon to material civilization (with particular attention to fashions in apparel), and straight dialect geography, including the twin techniques of field work and of cartography and the most efficacious interpretation of maps. The third avenue of approach was his unobtrusive readiness to address new groups of readers, as when he spontaneously suggested that his sparkling article on the birthmark appear in English (RPh., X, 307- 342), as a modest tribute to the English-speaking world (he also took considerable pride in his honorary membership in the Linguistic Society of America). One secret of this inexhaustible vitality was Jaberg’s reservoir of hidden resources and inconspicuous lines of curiosity. His late attachment to Hispano-Oriental poetry may have come as a surprise to superficial observers. Who but an intimate personal friend could have suspected that Jaberg was a passionate reader of English novels ? But remember that his studied many- sidedness never led to an ostentatious display of unusual bits of knowledge or to any recondite antiquarianism, exoticism, or comparable eccentricity. There always remained in Jaberg’s doings a hard core of solid knowledge, a clearly delimited field of well-earned specialization, from which Jaberg, after scrupulously consulting the best available fellow-workers, occasionally delighted in striking out in various directions : a splendid example of perfect equipoise between human breadth and scholarly limitation.

To Jaberg equity was a matter of cardinal importance in human relations and a prerequisite for true scholarly progress. Accordingly, his major reviews and review articles, written, as he himself confessed not without a touch of bitterness, in a vein of ‘ unzeitgemäße Treuherzigkeit ‘, served neither as springboards for personal attack or adulation, nor as thinly veiled pretexts for the more venial sin of exhibiting one’s own learning to the best advantage. A firm believer in the unity of knowledge, as regards the mutual encroachment and interlocking of different disciplines, he was consistently broadminded with respect to the choice of the most attractive method, a preference permissibly varying from person to person ; however, he did not condone ambiguity, slipshodness, disingenuous- ness, malice, or lack of veracity. One may well ponder his candid dictum to this effect : ‘ Wir freuen uns dieser Vielfalt. Unsere Sympathie gilt jeder tatkräftigen Initiative. Aber Sympathie schließt Kritik nicht aus, Kritik nicht um der Kritik, sondern um der Gerechtigkeit und der Klarheit willen ‘ (VRom., XIV, 61). Elsewhere he trenchantly defined—and rejected—harmful criticism, a cancer-growth on the body of our discipline : ‘ So wird die Kritik zu einer Verzerrung der eigentlichen Tatbestände, auch wenn die vorgebrachten Einwendungen berechtigt sind ‘. As a result of this negative attitude toward partisanship, Jaberg, while avoiding the thick of the fray, mustered the courage to pass judgement on controversial issues—from a ringside seat which afforded both a reasonably close view and the indispensable perspective. Witness, at the height of an unforgotten dispute, his dispassionate appraisal of Vossler’s highly subjective—and to many, offensively ‘ stylish י— account of the history of French language and, more recently, his balanced critique (VRom., VII, 276-286) of a scholarly book not devoid of highly personal overtones, namely W. von Wartburg’s Einführung ; also, as his legacy to future dialect geographers, the masterly arbitration of A. Dauzat’s, J. Séguy’s, and L. Remacle’s complaints against Gilliéron's pioneer atlas, an arbitration in- comparably more dramatic and meaningful than A. Kuhn’s two pretentious but colorless reports on recent trends in this gradually shrinking field.

As a linguist, Jaberg was specific, accurate, and sober, but neither jejune nor unduly abstract. Genuine sophistication to his mind, one gathers, consisted in the succession of two gambits : the neat de- limitation of stark linguistic facts, and, once this sifting has been accomplished, their deft and sensitive integration with the total cultural pattern, even if the remaining ingredients of that pattern were not isolable with equally mathematical precision. Hence the rich tapestry of his researches, in which carefully selected elements of dialect speech, literary language, folk belief (including folk medicine), natural resources, material civilization, and the three basic components of culture : spontaneous creation, lingering tradition, and borrowing, are all skillfully interwoven into a poetically suggestive, but always tightly reasoned whole, a worthy modern counterpart of the great tradition handed down by Grimm and Diez. Descriptive ordering and historical projection fascinated him alike ; and, when he engaged in the latter operation, he was, unlike most of his contemporaries, at pains to remember that his primary responsibility was toward linguistic phenomenology rather than toward historical reconstruction. Details were selected for microscopic examination if they bade fair to yield clues to far-reaching principles, whether the starting point happened to be a lexical problem (Romance expressions for ‘ swing ’ or ‘ birthmark ‘) or a trait of grammatical structure (‘ grading ‘). This ability to categorize and hierarchize made Karl Jaberg one of the few great students of general linguistics whom Romance scholarship has so far produced.

Source : Yfakov] MĮalkiel], ‘ Necrology : Karl Jaberg,’ Romance Philology 12.258- 261 (1959). By permission of the author.