Leonard Bloomfield and Albanese

Abstract

ABSTRACT Among the numerous engaging puzzles from the history of linguistics is Leonard Bloomfield’s use of the language name Albanese for the national language of Albania, as when he writes in Language that ‘Later, Armenian and Albanese, and a few ancient languages known to us only from scant written records, proved also to belong to the Indo-European family’. Given that the most common English term for this language was and is Albanian, this is an odd terminological choice on Bloomfield’s part, as has occasionally been acknowledged, e.g., by Charles Hockett in the foreword to the 1984 reprint of Language. This note offers argumentation suggesting just how this detail of Bloomfield’s usage is to be accounted for, building on an earlier study by Hinrichs, Erdmann, and Joseph. We propose that Bloomfield’s use of Albanese instead of Albanian is most directly due to his teacher and mentor Eduard Prokosch. This claim is based on Prokosch’s own usage of the term Albanese, Bloomfield’s deep admiration of Prokosch, and Bloomfield’s interactions with Prokosch at a very early stage of his academic career. Bloomfield’s use of the term was then reinforced by his exposure to Germanophone scholars and scholarship, as argued by Hinrichs et al.