Archbishop Trench’s Theory of Language: the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus

Abstract

In the previous chapter extracts were quoted from historians of the study of language who argue that nineteenth-century language studies in western Europe made a decisive break with all such previous study in their concern with ‘historicity’. In their opinion the nineteenth-century study of language took its place alongside other new discourses that were accredited with the status of science. Against this view, however, two principal points were argued: first, that within western Europe British linguistic study evinced a distinct type of concern with history that marks it off from mainstream continental (comparative) philology; second, that this British concern with history marks a continuity with previous British linguistic study in that it continues to be concerned with social and rhetorical issues. In this chapter both lines of argument will be pursued through an examination of the texts of one of the most popular linguists of mid-nineteenth-century Britain, Archbishop Richard Chenevix Trench.

The first philologists and linguists were always and everywhere priests. History knows no nation whose sacred writings or oral traditions were not to some degree in a language foreign and incomprehensible to the profane. To decipher the mystery of sacred words was the task meant to be carried out by the priest-philologists. (Vološinov, Marxism and The Philosophy of Language, 1930, p.74)