De Brosses, Jakobson et l'ontogenèse phonologique

Abstract

The idea of a fixed order in the appearance of phonemes in child language is very ancient. We already find it in Plutarch. However, in the middle of the 18th century, Buffon still only knows three steps of this progression. Jakobson criticizes Buffon's method in the beginning of his famous essay on the topic. Buffon's classification is used by De Brosses in a lost essay of 1753 : Beauzée gives evidence of the contents of this essay in his article «Langue» of the Encyclopédie. But in the Traité of 1765, the president, resorting to some new empirical observations, proposes a more articulated classification. This classification anticipates in some points the one proposed by Jakobson, both in its descriptive results and in the intuition of the structural rule. In 1802 Thiébault proposes a simplified version of this classification. Today De Brosses's «primitive linguistics» deserves to be analyzed again in the light of cognitive linguistics.