A Brill Calendar: April 6

Professor Kern and the Study of Language

Few traditions in Leyden University are as curiously distributed over its life-span of more than four centuries as the teaching and studying of languages.

For some eight generations, the languages taught as from February 8 1575, Leyden’s ‘Dies natalis’ comprised those written in Classical Antiquity, under addition of Arabic, Syriac, Aramese, Hebrew and other tongues relevant to the Bible. After the French Revolution and Napoleon’s version of it, a new era starts; involving a proliferation of new objects of study.

Discovery of the importance of Sanskrit in the 18th century had launched a new linguistic awareness, with Asia and Micronesia as largely unexplored working fields. It became a self-enhancing process, continuing slowly in years after 1815; the mathematical curve describing such growth is an exponential one.

Quantification may be in order. When Johan Hendrik Caspar Kern (Purworejo, Dutch Indies, April 6 1833 – Utrecht, July 4 1917) started to teach in Leyden Oriental Languages in 1865, five Professors and two Lecturers were teaching there 14 languages. Some sixty years later a minimum of 32 languages were the object of Leyden studies, distributed over thirteen Professors and four Lecturers. This list does not include native American-Indian languages, Ethiopian, Hindustani, Pali, Polish, Baltic languages, Oscish, Provencal and Umbric, although they were included in academic qualifications of the Faculty, with comparative linguistics standing on its own.

There is no doubt that this spectacular widening of scholarly horizons was largely due to Professor Kern, who became Emeritus in 1903. The historian Huizinga – trained as a linguist – opined, whilst celebrating Kern’s role in linguistics, that anything new touched by Kern’s hand founded a new tradition. It is seldom that notions of ‘modernity’ in The Netherlands is exemplified so strikingly in academic progress.