James Burnet, Lord Monboddo

(imported from 1911 Britannica)

James Burnett, Lord Monboddo (1714-1799), Scottish judge and anthropologist, was a leading figure in the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century. He is now best remembered as a founder of comparative historical linguistics. Born in 1714 at Monboddo in Kincardineshire, he studied at Marischal College Aberdeen, and, after passing his law examinations in Edinburgh, he was admitted to the Faculty of Advocates in 1737, and was made a Lord of Session in 1767 with the honorary title 'Lord Monboddo'.

Burnett married Elizabeth Farquharson, wiho bore him two daughters and a son. Burnett's youngest daughter Elizabeth Burnett became an Edinburgh celebrity, known for her beauty and amiability, but she died of consumption at the age of 25. Robert Burns wrote his Elegy on the late Miss Burnet of Monboddo in tribute.

On human origins

Monboddo was particularly known for his writings on human origins. In his Ancient Metaphysics, he conceived man as gradually elevating himself from an animal condition, in which his mind is immersed in matter, to a state in which mind acts independently of body. In The Origin and Progress of Language (1773), he argued that man belonged to the same species as the orang-outang - then a generic term for all types of monkeys. He traced the gradual elevation of man to the social state, which he conceived as a natural process determined by "the necessities of human life." He looked on language, as being something that was not "natural" to man, in the sense of being necessary to his self-preservation, but a consequence of his social state.

His views on the origin of society and language and the faculties by which man is distinguished from other animals have many points of contact with Darwinism and neo-Kantianism. His idea of studying man as one of the animals, and of collecting facts about primitive tribes to cast light on the problems of civilization, bring him into contact with the one, and his intimate knowledge of Greek philosophy with the other.

Burnett was widely thought to be eccentric. He often asserted that he followed practices of the ancient Greeks to keep in good physical condition. Thus, when he came out of court one day in a downpour, he calmly placed his wig in his sedan chair and walked home. Habitually he rode on horseback between Edinburgh and London instead of journeying by carriage. Another time after a decision went against him regarding the value of a horse, he refused to sit with the other judges and sat below the bench with the court clerks. When Burnett was visiting the King's Court in London in 1787, part of the ceiling of the courtroom started to collapse. People rushed out of the building, but Burnett who, at the age of 71, was partially deaf and shortsighted, was the only one not to move. When he was later asked for a reason, he stated that he thought it "an annual ceremony, with which, as an alien, he had nothing to do".

His studied abstinence from fine writing - from "the rhetorical and poetical style fashionable among writers of the present day" - on such subjects as he handled confirmed the idea of his contemporaries that he was only an eccentric concocter of supremely absurd paradoxes. He died on the 26th of May 1799.

Boswell's Life of Johnson gives an account of Samuel Johnson's visit to Burnett at Monboddo, and is full of references to the natural contemporary view of a man who thought that the human race could be descended from monkeys.

Historical linguistics

In The Origin and Progress of Language Monboddo analysed the structure of primitive and modern languages that argues that mankind had evolved language skills in response to his changing environment and altering social structures. His work in language evolution departed radically from then existing theories. This analysis was totally remarkable, since Burnett was partially deaf. He was intrigued with the systematics he discovered in codifying a multitude of primitive languages. Burnett was the first to discover that primitive languages create unnecessarily lengthy words for rather simple concepts. He reasoned that in early languages there was an imperative for clarity, so that redundancy was built in and seemingly unnecessary syllables added. He concluded that this form of language evolved as a method of survival when clear communication might be the determinant of avoiding danger. He demonstrated that he was aware of the advantages to those peoples who could develop superior language skills. This quasi-evolutionary idea, whilst common today, was then unusual. Burnett himself was deeply religious and often digressed to credit God with the divine first mover concept as argued in a similar vein by Aristotle.

Monboddo studied in great detail the languages of peoples colonised by Europeans, including those of the Carib, Eskimo, Huron, Algonquin, and Tahitian peoples. He was the first to note the preponderance of polysyllabic words, where some of his predecessors had dismissed primitive language as a series of monosyllabic grunts. He also made the astute observation that in Huron (or Wyandot) the words for very similar objects are markedly different. This led him to understand that primitive peoples needed to communicate reliably about a more limited number of subjects than in modern civilizations, which led to the polysyllabic and redundant nature of many words. He was also apparently the first to establish that primitive languages are generally vowel rich; whereas languages such as German and English are vowel starved. Partially this disparity arises from the greater vocabulary of modern languages and the decreased need for the polysyllabic content.

Monboddo also traced the evolution of modern European languages and gave particularly great effort to understanding the ancient Greek language, in which he was proficient. He argued that Greek is the most perfect language ever established because of its complex structure and tonality, rendering it capable of expressing a wide gamut of nuances. Monboddo formulated what is now known as the single-origin hypothesis, the theory that all human origin was from a single region of the earth; he reached this conclusion by reasoning from linguistic evolution.