Overview

In Volume I, the series editor, Joan Leopold, introduces the founder of the prize, Constantin-Francois Chasseboeuf, Count Volney, and incorporates the history of the Prix Volney into the history of academies and scholarly institutions, linguistics and the social sciences in the nineteenth century. Jean Leclant, Permanent Secretary of the Academie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, which now awards the Prix Volney, and Professor of Egyptology at the College de France, summarizes the historical and contemporary role of the Academie, including its organization of prize competitions. Alan Kemp of the University of Edinburgh treats the first, and initially central, subject of the competition: the transcription of Oriental and other languages using modified forms of the Roman alphabet. His essay Transcription, Transliteration and the Idea of a Universal Alphabet is followed by two previously unpublished prize-winning Volney essays (1822, 1823) on this subject by Josef Scherer and a reprint of the prize-winning Essai sur l'analyse physique des langues ou de la formation et de l'usage d'un alphabet methodique (1837) by Paul Ackermann. The study of French linguistics, which was officially excluded from the competition, but which formed the basis of many entries and numerous winners, is then treated by Jacques Bourquin, for French studies in general, and by Jacques-Philippe Saint-Gerand, for French dialects in particular. The volume concludes with Gaston Bordet's and Jacques Bourquin's introductions and Jacques Bourquin's edition of the Prix Volney manuscript by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Recherches sur les categories grammaticales, et sur quelques origines de la langue francaise (1839). This is a manuscript of the only known linguistic work by the famous French social thinker.

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