CHRISTIANUS CORNELIUS UHLENBECK (1866-1951)

In Memoriam Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck

(18th October 1866֊12th August 1951)¹

J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong

It is only with some trepidation that I have taken upon myself to endeavour at least to revive for you for a few moments the exceptional personality of our late fellow member Uhlenbeck—exceptional both as a man and as a scholar.

Outwardly his career betrays little or nothing that appeals to the imagination or appears enigmatic : a long life, devoted to scholarship, not without difficulties and setbacks naturally, but essentially unshaken, even hardly ruffled, it seems, by the bewildering political events of this age.

So it seems, but when we try to penetrate into the core of his personality by immersing ourselves in the products of his mind, the picture that looms up before us appears to bear remarkably little resemblance to that of a scholarly recluse living unmoved by reality.

Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck, born at Voorburg on October 18, 1866 from the marriage of Peter Frederik Uhlenbeck and Julie le Roux, came of a German family, originally named ‘ in der Eulenbeck ‘, after the ‘ Freigut ‘ Eulenbeck near Velbert, which had been in the family’s possession of old. After his retirement in 1861 Peter Frederik, a naval officer, who had held important offices in the Dutch East Indies, settled down at Voorburg where his father had been Burgomaster for several years. However, after a short while the family moved to Haarlem and it was there that Uhlenbeck received classical schooling. From this period only one fact has come to my knowledge, i.e. that in his sixteenth year for the first time he went through a period of over-exertion and depression such as he was to live through many a time afterwards.

In 1885 he was enrolled as a student at Leyden University and three years later he took his doctor’s degree under Kern on a thesis on ‘ De verwantschapsbetrekkingen tussen de Germaansche en Baltoslavische talen ‘ (Correspondences between the Germanic and Balto-Slavonic languages). His other teachers were Matthias de Vries, Robert Fruin, and P. J. Cosijn whose tuition was of no less importance to his scientific education than that of his incredibly learned supervisor. Above all his association with Cosijn who was much closer to him as a human being than Kern and whose critical method can be found again in his own work, has been of great value to Uhlenbeck.

Even more remarkable than the contents of his thesis which he himself later came to style ‘ a very mediocre thesis ‘, even ‘ rubbish ‘, are some of his ‘ propositions ‘, appended to the thesis, since it becomes apparent from them that already at that time he had occupied himself intensely with the Basque language. In one of those propositions he rejected the conjecture of the relationship of Basque to Finno-Ugrian, in another one he posited that the parent language of the Basque dialects already had an incorporating conjugation. Although those propositions may have been subject to controversy at the time their correctness is no longer doubted by any one at the present time, half a century later.

In the first few years after taking his doctorate Uhlenbeck had no fixed field of activity. A short-lived mastership was unsuccessful : ‘ That stupid school ‘, as he generally described the institution later, was not the sphere of action in which he could feel at home. In 1890 he was commissioned by the government to make a study trip to Russia in order to investigate archivalia of interest to Dutch history. This research was especially important to him personally because it enabled him to learn Russian. After that he was on the editorial committee of the ‘ Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal י (Dietionary of the Dutch language).

There was, however, something of far greater moment than these things in the event of July 23, 1891 which proved to be of decisive significance for the whole of his future life, his marriage to Miss Wilhelmina Maria Melchior. Those who have had the privilege of knowing the Uhlenbecks more intimately cannot fail to have wondered how in view of his mental make-up, he could have pursued his vocation, even borne the burdens of life, but for her caring support. His dying first, to him a blessing, will, we feel sure, be accepted by her with complete resignation, realising that it was better this way.

In other respects also the year 1891-1892 could not but give great satisfaction to Uhlenbeck. Shortly before his marriage our Academy, acting on the advice of Kern and Houtsma, had deemed his ‘ Baskische studiën ’ (Basque Studies) worthy of publication in its edita. In this treatise the method of research acquired in the strict school of Indo-Germanics was applied for the first time to the sound-system and the primary word-formation of Basque. According to the critics, nearly everything he expounded about this difficult material was entirely new. His reputation as a linguist of importance was established in the process, and it seems almost natural that the following year, upon the establishment of a Chair of Sanskrit in the municipal university of Amsterdam, Uhlenbeck should be elected. It was not quite so self-evident to him though, in spite of his willingly accepting the appointment, ‘ since as he declared later, ‘ I did not yet know the first thing about Sanskrit ‘. Moreover, it was by no means clear what was expected of him. Consequently, in his inaugural lecture about ‘ De plaats van het Sanskrit in de vergelijkende taalwetenschap י (The place of Sanskrit in comparative philology) he deemed it necessary, and quite rightly so, to define more precisely his task as he conceived it : he envisaged including in his syllabus, apart from Sanskrit and its literature, the principles of comparative philology as well as Russian as indispensable to this course. On hearing that after a few years he was found willing to take upon himself Gothic, which was taught in a highly peculiar fashion by Te Winkel, and Anglo-Saxon, one is quite prepared to believe him when later he states that never in his life did he have to work harder than these first few years in Amsterdam. In spite of this they became the best years of his academic career.

Compelled by the terms of his appointment to be first and foremost an Indo-Germanist, he did not feel this to be an impediment, in spite of his growing interest in other languages. The stimulating contacts with prominent Indo-Germanists abroad such as Streitberg and Hirt, the friendly intercourse with Amsterdam colleagues and no less the sympathy of a few gifted pupils resulted in a satisfaction that enabled him to bear more lightly, it seems, the less agreeable fatigues inherent in his office. Consequently, his toiling did not take long to produce impressive results, for already two years after his nomination his ‘ Handboek der Indische klankleer in vergelijking met die der Indo-germaansche stamtaal י (Handbook of Indian phonology in comparison with that of the Indo-Germanic parent language) was published, and when in 1899 he was appointed Cosijn’s successor as professor of Old Germanic languages at Leyden, he had published in addition concise etymological dictionaries of Gothic and Old Indian.

In spite of the fact that Symons, who was an outright Germanist, and not himself had been put first on the select list by the faculty, Uhlenbeck could not look forward to the Leyden professorship with self-confidence. By this time he was well versed in Indo-Germanics and Germanics. He knew to perfection Sanskrit, Russian, Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, and whatever there was to be known of Gothic. He had thus surmounted the greatest difficulties. A period of alluring prospects seemed to be in store for him. In his inaugural lecture on ‘ De onderlinge verhouding der oudgermaansche tongvallen en hunne plaats in den indo-germaanschen taalstam ’ (The interrelations of the Old Germanic dialects and their position within the Indo-Germanic family) he enthusiastically welcomed the rejuvenation of Germanics which was heralded already and which was an urgent need, in his opinion.

He spoke of ‘ a reaction against the scholastic aridity which was characteristic of a part of our century ‘, of ‘ the new ways .... made passable by ethnologists and archeologists ‘. He even went so far as to mention ‘ the glorious and unforgettable days of romanticism and the spirit of Jacob Grimm ’, which he saw revived ‘ in the work of posterity ‘. Though he referred in this lecture to recent investigations, this effusion, if I am right, was due to an intuitive rather than a reasoned opposition to the simplistic approach to linguistics of the neo-grammarian school, from which even he had not yet been able entirely to divest himself at the time.

In spite of his admiration for the old Germanic cultures in which his lecture seemed to be steeped, Uhlenbeck was to show little of it to the outside world—I mean outside the circle of his students. It is true that he continued reading Old Germanic and notably the Edda and Old Norse sagas, but only by way of relaxation. The field which occupied his scientific interest lay elsewhere. In his Amsterdam days, inspired by the work of Ascoli and Delitsch he had already pointed out that a deeper penetration into Indo-Germanic could only be effected by a comparison with other language groups. He remained faithful to this conviction all the time ; all of his publications in the Indo-Germanic field rising above treatment of details of limited scope, such as for instance his studies on the nominative-accusative relation in Indo-Germanic and his remarks on the character of the relationship of the Indo-Germanic languages, are essentially based on his comparative investigations outside Indo- Germanic.

During his first eight years at Leyden he devoted practically all the time his official duties left him to Basque and the Eskimo languages. With his ‘ Beiträge zu einer vergleichenden Lautlehre der Baskischen Dialekte ‘ of 1903 he put into practice what he had demanded as an adequate method in his ‘ Baskische studiën viz. that for a morphological investigation to be fruitful it should be preceded by an accurate comparative study of the sound phenomena of Basque. At short intervals his treatise on ‘ De woordafleidende suffixen van het Baskisch ² and his ‘ Karakteristiek der Baskische grammatica ³ followed, the latter after a visit to the Basque country where he found himself unable to produce certain sounds—’ vous n’avez pas les mâchoires ‘ he was told—, and at the same time arrived at the conclusion that he would not be able to learn Basque either, i.e. that he would never acquire practical command of it, which made the scientific study of this language perhaps even more attractive to him. He found that Greenland came easier to him, i.e. Greenland Eskimo, the grammatical system of which captivated him just as much as the problem of its possible relationship with other languages. In between his Basque researches he had written about the relationship between Greenland and Finno-Ugrian and at the same time had pointed out several points of contact between Eskimo and Indo-Germanic, without himself attaching over-much importance to them as yet, and shortly afterwards his first publication about its grammar appeared, soon followed by his ‘ Ontwerp van eene vergelijkende vormleer der Eskimo-talen ‘.⁴ This treatise, which he himself very modestly indeed announced as ‘ a preliminary attempt at putting facts in order ‘, but which in reality put the study of Eskimo on a scientific level, forms the transition to the period in which his interest shifted via Greenland to the linguistic world of the North American Indians. There he found a field of activity which, except for a few short intervals, held his attention for over a quarter of a century. The comparative study of these languages was in its very initial stage at the time. Preciously little could as yet be discovered of a strictly scientific method such as had been practised for many years in Indo-Germanics. An attempt at a preliminary arrangement in this field amounted to pioneer work of such a strenuous and comprehensive nature that no other linguist trained in Indo-Germanics felt attracted to it. But Uhlenbeck saw things differently. To him it was like a vocation to penetrate into this unexplored field too and to lay it open to a truly scientific operation.

He was so much absorbed in these ‘ distant Americanistic hobbies ‘ as he himself somewhat disparagingly called them, that all the rest seemed to have disappeared from his horizon. According to his own testimony he did not bother to look into any Slavonic books anymore, he even no longer considered himself to belong to the Indo-Germanists. Consequently he disposed of his etymological slips and confined himself to Old Germanic on which he had to lecture. But actually even those compulsory lectures were too much for him. Not because he was jealous of his time. His students proper always found him prepared to meet all their requests, even though at times somewhat extravagant. Which of them does not recall with gratitude the many special lectures and tutorials—not only on Old Germanic, but also for instance on Vedic, on characteristics of language groups and the like—and the long conversations in his study which never seemed to bore or to tire him. But the thing that did bore and tire him, even to a great extent, and not merely after his transition to Americanistics, was lecturing to students with whom he failed to establish personal contact, whose ignorance, to him incomprehensible, he would always be inclined to impute to laziness or an utter lack of interest. And even when it occurred to him occasionally that his teaching method was perhaps less suited to beginners, it would be of no avail to him, since he found himself utterly unable to acquire the minimum of scholastic practice that is indispensable also in academic teaching. Frequent disappointments at lectures and examinations which wore him out, over-sensitive and emotionally unstable as he was, contributed not a little to his beginning to regard all official business as a heavy burden. There may have been other factors, unknown to us, which made him feel ill at ease within himself, at times putting him into such a state of over-fatigue and depression as was unlikely to have been caused by mere strenuous work. As a result of one thing and another Uhlenbeck in the course of his years at Leyden began to long more and more for the moment when, free of all official worries, he would be able entirely to devote himself to his scientific work ; and the alluring idea of a premature superannuation, once it had taken root with him, was no longer to release him. He had not yet quite reached that point at the beginning of his Americanistic period. At that time he was working with such an enthusiasm as to render him less susceptible—at least for the time being—to worries about the future.

His first publication was an essay entitled ‘ Die einheimischen Sprachen Nord-Amerikas bis zum Rio Grande ‘ in the journal ‘ Anthropos ‘ (1908 and 1910) in which he gave a clear and careful survey of the 54 groups of languages in the United States that were then being distinguished, together with concise grammatical outlines or remarks regarding the 38 groups of which more was known than simply where they were or had formerly been spoken. It is typical of Americanistics in those days that apparently the importance of this masterly summary had not penetrated to his American colleagues who were then engaged on American Indian languages. As appears from a very short review in the ‘ American Anthropologist ‘ one failed to discover much more in it than an extract from Powell’s well-known elaborate survey which had served Uhlenbeck as a guide. Apparently they completely failed to notice the essential difference between Uhlenbeck’s and Powell’s writings. This investigation amounted to him personally to an exploratory excursion across the whole linguistic field, to us who are now in a position to survey his work it forms a natural introduction to the long series of grammatical works and treatises on the genealogy of languages that followed it.

Although at the time quite a number of facts were already known about the Algonquian family of languages, into which he plunged with intense interest, his working with data at times unreliable and often extremely scrappy which had been collected by others soon ceased to satisfy him. And thus the plan occurred to him to go out on independent research. If he were to succeed in studying on the spot one of these languages and then later in describing it on the strength of the material he himself had collected, he would have provided himself and others with a thorough foundation for further research. He did succeed. Both his study trips to the Blackfoot Indians in Montana, in 1910 and 1911, in spite of the difficulties attached to this investigation, did produce the results he expected. I will spare you the titles of the many publications in which these results have been put down, the more so since by far the greater part of Uhlenbeck’s writings about Blackfoot and generally about American languages have appeared in the works of our Academy. There is one piece of writing, however, that must not go unmentioned since it constitutes the crown and to a certain extent the rounding off of his Blackfoot research, namely his grammar ‘ A concise Blackfoot grammar, based on material from the Southern Peigans ‘, published in 1938, in which all that had gone before can be found. The fact that this synthesis was four years in appearing after the publication of the 1930 and 1934 dictionaries to which R. H. van Gulik was a valuable contributor, is partly due to Uhlenbeck’s no longer being engaged exclusively on American linguistic phenomena.

But more had happened. World War I which, though to the majority of Netherlanders a period of some tension and discomfort at the same time passed them by hardly leaving a trace in their inner lives, had stirred him profoundly. To realise his impotence against this collective mania put him in a bitter mood with which he could not easily cope, at the same time strengthening the fatalistic strain in his philosophy of life which throughout had driven him, be it to a less extent, to aloofness. The nature of his scientific interest had changed too at least in one respect. The last spark of romanticism had disappeared from his view of the Old Germanic world. It was not that he had become ‘ anti-German ’ in the ordinary sense of the word. But he had now experienced an important piece of Old Germanic civilization, which he had used to see tinged and softened by a romantic veneer, as a brutal and revolting actuality in the affairs of the modern western world, enacted so to speak under his very eyes. All western civilization came to appear in a different light to him. And now, even more so than before, his interest was directed to things that were typically non-western and to phenomena of linguistic history cast back in a past so far removed that it was bound to be unattainable to any but a purely rational approach. I may recall here in the first place his discovery of the passive character of the verbum transitivum, more specifically the verbum actionis and deriving from it the opposition between two case values : the ‘ casus energeticus ’ and the ‘ casus inertiae’ of which the oppositions active < passive and transitive < intransitive turned out to be merely special instances, appearing to govern in some non-Indo-Germanic gram- matical systems not only the conjugation of verbs but other grammatical categories as well, such as the possessive flection of nouns. To Uhlenbeck the complex of phenomena based on this opposition of cases remained a problem of fundamental importance in two respects. First of all because of the ethno-psychological background of this complex, from which among other things an agens conception could be deduced widely diverging from ours, but no less because here we have to do with analogous, even almost identical, intricate grammatical phenomena which cannot be explained from historical contacts—since historical contacts between Eskimo, Algonquian, and Basque which indeed widely differ from one another in other respects are out of the question—but must be based on ethno-psychological parallelism. This inevitable conclusion suggested to Uhlenbeck the view that the methodology of argumentation hitherto followed in the field of the genealogy of languages needed revising. The current opinion held that a historical relationship between languages had to be evident above all from similarity of grammatical structure. Against this he put forward the view in his Academy lecture on BasqueCaucasian relationship in 1923 that such internal analogies between grammatical systems do not argue in themselves for a genetic connection and that reliable indications are to be found above all—maybe even exclusively—in lexical correspondences, from which regular phonetic correlations can be deduced. For the time being he was bound to go no further that this first preamble to a new theory in this field, since at the time he still accepted the neo-grammarian view of relationship and borrowing being two concepts that were to be clearly distinguished ; or at least he did not see his way to showing its untenability with convincing arguments. Moreover, in those years he was often over-fatigued again and consequently compelled to take a rest. Fortunately, this breakdown, which involved a certain decline of his scientific productivity, was only a temporary one. His medical discharge in 1926 enabled him at the age of sixty to resign his office and to take leave of Leyden and its university. An escape from Leyden in other words ? To some extent, indeed. Without any ill-will for that matter, no matter how severely university routine had often oppressed him. But he did not care at all for the surroundings of Leyden, and the university, any university, was to him essentially a ‘ school ‘ after all and he could not help disliking ‘ schools ‘. In the meantime he did not object to a university town as such, as was apparent from the fact that the Uhlenbecks in the beginning settled down at Nijmegen where he soon got in touch with a few studious undergraduates who called on him regularly. When after a while this was brought to an end by a body which to them was an authoritative one, he cannot fail to have reflected that at Leyden at least he would have been spared this disappointment, for a disappointment it was. Although this incident in itself might not have caused him to leave Nijmegen, it must have rendered parting easier to him and no doubt to his wife too, when fairly shortly afterwards they moved to Amersfoort, which had the great advantage of a quicker and less troublesome connection with Amsterdam, i.e. the Royal Dutch Academy. For the ‘ Kika ‘, as he was wont to call our distinguished institution, was very close to Uhlenbeck’s heart. ‘ You can be just as boring as you like there ’, he would say, and he could ascertain with satisfaction that personally he had availed himself none too rarely of that privilege. Consequently after his departure from Leyden he was a fairly regular visitor to our meetings and spoke there on more than one occasion, for the last time in the united session of both divisions in March 1936, shortly before he moved to Lugano.

At the time Uhlenbeck was nearly 70. He began to feel old, but his mood left nothing to be desired. Ever since his resignation he had become more sedate and partly due to that, perhaps, he had reached certainty in his scientific thinking about much that he may well have surmised for tens of years, but never had formulated. In this respect I am thinking in particular of the full-grown theory concerning the nature of linguistic relationship which he advanced, suddenly one may well say, in the years 1935 and 1936, and which he elucidated further at various points in 1941. Summarized as briefly as possible the theory amounts to his : The neo-grammarian conceptions of ‘ primitive relationship ‘, ‘ genetic relationship ‘, and ‘ parent language’ do not answer in any way to reality. On penetrating further into the history of language one does not observe a decrease but rather an increase of the number of dialects. As a result the relative unity characteristic of large complexes of interconnected languages, such as e.g. Indo-European or Ural-Altaic, is not based on mutual homogeneity but is essentially the product of a centralizing process of acculturation in which, along with prolonged assimilation, secondary differentiations and manifold re-alignments played their parts as well. After all, that which is usually called ‘ primitive relationship ‘ or ‘ genetic relationship ‘ is nothing but the possession of a great many isoglosses based on ancient contact. In fact there is no essential difference between the internal relationships of the Indo-Germanic complex and those of e.g. Uralic-Indo-Germanic or Eskimo-Indo-Germanic, which are manifested in a far smaller number of isoglosses. Uhlenbeck was prepared to continue using the term ‘ primitive Indo-Germanic parent language but only to designate the ‘ complex of dialects of the Indo-Germanic conquerors at the time of their closest intercourse, no matter in what way that close intercourse had come about ‘. Moreover, he pointed out in addition that Indo-Germanic, defined in this way, was not to be identified straight away with the language of the Indo-Germanic conquerors, since ‘ the conquests of the various territories that became Indo-Germanized later either completely or in parts, either for good or temporarily, took place at widely diverging times ‘. Of course the same considerations, mutatis mutandis, hold good of any ‘ parent language ‘, ‘ primitive ’ this or ‘ primitive ‘ that, anywhere in the world. Pure language differentiation cannot but have been, according to theory, at least in the evolution of larger language complexes, a factor of which the significance is often hard to assess, but which is at any rate of secondary importance.

I shall have to confine myself to a few indications with regard to the positive results obtained by Uhlenbeck himself and others on which this theory is based. The main point of issue was a synthesis of two groups of data : those concerning the mixed character of Indo- Germanic, in which Uhlenbeck distinguished between two complexes of elements, and those with regard to the mutual relationships between Indo-Germanic, Uralic, and Eskimo. The general picture of an ancient piece of linguistic history in the Eurasian field thus reconstructed through Uhlenbeck’s synthesis found support in certain parallels in the pre-history of Basque and some North American languages.

Uhlenbeck continued working on the details of this theory as long as his state of health permitted. His last treatise, published in 1950, in ‘ Anthropos ‘ concluded an exchange of views with Thalbitzer, the Eskimo expert, on the interpretation of a number of Eskimo words in connection with the pre-historic Eskimo-Indo-Germanic contacts.

It will have become apparent to you even from the few points that I have been able to raise that Uhlenbeck’s scientific interest was mainly directed towards history and linguistic anthropology, in his own terminology : ethno-psychology. To him linguistics was essentially the history of language, but a history of languages that would have to lead via a comparative reconstruction of the actual processes of change to a deeper understanding of the essence of language. Of course this does not imply that he believed the historical method to be the only correct one or the only possible one. He was not even by any means averse to the still preponderantly speculative character of structural linguistics, and he soon acquired its least hypothetical product, the general theory of phonemics. For that matter, much in that theory cannot but have imparted to him a clearer realization and confirmation of his own intuitive insight, for, if anyone, it was Uhlenbeck who was among those Dutchmen who, according to our fellow member van Haeringen’s striking formulation ‘ were accustomed to listening to their language already before phonemics appeared on the scene ‘. And could one expect otherwise from someone whose teacher Cosijn had vented his opinion as far back as 1893 about ‘ those cold soulless phonetics in which I passed ... the best years of my life ‘ and who himself testified in 1918 : ‘in language, on penetrating to its deeper nature, all is psychological in the end ‘ ? It is clear that it could not have been his scientific conviction that prevented Uhlenbeck from becoming one of the builders of structural linguistics. Whoever may still entertain doubts should reread the concluding pages of the lecture he delivered in 1923 ‘ On a possible relationship between Basque and the palaeo-Asiatic languages ‘, in which he conceded : ‘. . . observing the living language of a living people may well be important, perhaps more romantic even than poring over a nebulous past ‘. Something in the core of his personality-structure must have impelled him irresistibly to engrossing himself in the past, the far, far distant past. Was it merely an escape from the disillusionments of the present, or may we surmise that his fatalistically tinged philosophy of life, leaving little scope to ‘ historical coincidences ‘, led him to expect something else from this ‘ poring over a nebulous past ‘ and also something more important to him than philological reconstructions ?

And what about this mentality itself, inclining as it was to fatalism ? Should it surprise us that he who himself had suffered so often through the conflicts between his rational sense of reality and the vehemence of his innate emotionality, between his critical judgment and his over-sensitiveness which rendered him so helpless— should we be surprised that he should have been inclined to read into this play of forces at whose mercy he felt himself to be, an inescapable destiny even outside the sphere of the individual personality ? And we cannot help thinking that here too something may have lingered of the influence of Cosijn, his cerebral as well as sensitive teacher, appended to whose thesis one may find a proposition reading : ‘ Man’s will is altogether unfree ‘ and who in spite of his aversion to neo-grammarian phonetics continued, to his dying day, to believe in ‘ unbending linguistic laws ‘.

But no matter which view of Uhlenbeck’s personality we may wish to adopt it could not be a satisfactory one if it would not find support in something that may seem at first sight to be unimportant : the very special interest he took in genealogical investigations. Was it above all the romanticism of the past again that appealed to him in this research ? This may have been the case in his younger years when he was inclined to see a unity of life of special importance in the patrilineal family, but later when, albeit reluctantly, he had abandoned this view based on romanticism rather than on biology, this painstaking and searching penetration into the family’s past acquired for him the deeper sense of a psychological exposure of the personality in the light of previous generations. For it was indeed true to say that Uhlenbeck found it difficult to feel he knew someone well as long as he could not see him against the background of a complete family situation that could be pursued into the past. Conversant as he was with the modern theory of heredity, he none the less fully realized the limited possibilities in this field, and yet this type of investigation continued to captivate him all the time. And the curious finds which he sometimes came across—I am not referring, of course, to his genealogical publications in a narrower sense—but which for understandable reasons he never published, gave him personally, I believe, as much satisfaction as the most important of his discoveries in the field of historical linguistics.

In this way I could continue for a long time, trying to make you see Uhlenbeck as I have presumed he ought to be seen. But time presses, and moreover : to us who were his pupils it is not the most important thing who exactly he was, but what he was to us. Well, what was it ? What was it that prompted two of my colleagues to declare recently : ‘ I really owe everything to him ‘. He was neither didactic nor pedagogical ; I doubt whether he ever gave so much as a thought to didacticism or pedagogy. None of us kept following him, we all sooner or later sought and found our own ways. But what he gave us—how we do not know—has continued to aid us in our efforts to equal him in the only thing in which we might be able to equal him : his devotion to science for science’s sake. It was this one of our fellow members had in mind, I think, when he told me the other day : ‘ he set it free in us ‘ ; the statement ‘ I really owe everything to him ‘ referred to this, and Uhlenbeck himself referred to it when concluding a communication in our circle with the words : ‘ search is worth a life-time ‘.

Source : J. P. B. de Josselin de Jong, ‘ In Memoriam Christianus Cornelius Uhlenbeck (18th October 1866-12th August 1951),’ Lingua 3.243-268 (1953). By permission of Lingua and the author.

¹ With kind permission of the author and the Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen translated from Jaarboek der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1951-1952.

² Derivational suffixes of Basque.

³ Characteristics of Basque grammar.

⁴ Project of a comparative morphology of Eskimo languages.