Jac. van Ginneken

Jacobus Joannes Antonius (Jac.) van Ginneken S.J. (21 April 1877, Oudenbosch - 22 October 1945, Nijmegen) was a Dutch linguist, priest and Jesuit, professor at the Katholieke Universiteit Nijmegen since its start in 1923. He taught Dutch Language and Dutch Literature, comparative linguistics of the Indo-european languages, and Sanskrit.

Ideas
Starting with his Grondbeginselen van de psychologische taalwetenschap, based on which he wrote his dissertation Principes de linguistique psychologique, van Ginneken worked on developing a psychological foundation for linguistics and language. Three substantial parts of his convictions are presented in the following:

Firstly, van Ginneken opposed the prevalence of the neogrammarians’ methods in linguistics and was a proponent for a psychological approach to linguistics in a more synchronic way, thereby allowing, he thought, to gain an extended view of the diachronic development of language as well.

Secondly, language, it seemed to him, had its foundations in sub- or unconscious regions of sentiment and emotion. This notion, which he explained in his Principes, had its opposition in the field of language psychology from those who saw language as prevailingly cognitive, notably Edward Sapir.

Thirdly, in the latter half of his life, van Ginneken developed the idea, that besides psychological factors, sound changes were influenced by genetic and anthropological ones, a view which didn’t find much agreement in the linguistic community at the time and much less after the Second World War, when much of language biology began to be seen as an absurdity of pre-War sciences.

Works

 * Principes de linguistique psychologique, essai de synthèse, 1907.
 * Handboek der Nederlandsche taal, 1928
 * De Oorzaken der Taalveranderingen, 1930
 * La Reconstruction typologique des langues archaïques de l'humanité, Amsterdam, 1939.