Julius Platzmann

Karl Julius Platzmann (born 31 January 1832 in Leipzig; died 6 September 1902 in Leipzig) was a German botanist, artist and bibliophile who published exact facsimile editions of rare early missionary grammars of indigenous languages of the Americas. Born to a well-to-do family in the Kingdom of Saxony, Platzmann first studied as an artist, and travelled to Brazil, where he created botanical illustrations. He spent the remainder of his life back in Germany, leading a very private life collecting linguistic books, writing, and creating facsimile editions. Publication of these works made documentation of several American languages available to a much broader audience.

Early life and education

Platzmann was born in Leipzig on January 31, 1832. He inherited privilege from both sides of his family.
His mother Marianna Platzmann (née Beyer) inherited family wealth. His father Theodor Alexander Platzmann (b. 1795) was a jurist and
member of the Saxon State Parliament
(''Landtag''), and a landowner of significance — Platzmann would grow up spending summers on the family estate of Hohnstädt in Grimma, not far from the intellectual hub of Leipzig, where his family also owned a home. Like his father, he attended the prestigious Fürstenschule Grimma boarding school, whose students would often go on to study at the University of Leipzig.

His interests were drawn to drawing and botany, however, and after just three years at the Fürstenschule, he transferred to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts., where his teachers would include the well-known painters Gustav Jäger and Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld.

Botanical Illustration in Brazil

Seeking inspiration in the tropics, in 1858 Platzmann set out for Paranagua, in the Brazilian state of Paraná, in order to study and draw the local flora and fauna. He bought a parcel of land and lived there until 1864, rarely leaving the small island (Ilha dos Pinheiros) where he lived. Some of his works would later be published in the Belgian botanical journal ''La Belgique horticole''. However, he seems to have kept all of his work without making it available to the wider world during his life and remaining in the possession of his family.

Tenuous comparative links between Old and New World languages

As noted by Kammler, upon returning to Germany, the explorer and ethnographer Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius sent Platzmann a copy of his compilation of glossaries of many indigenous languages of Brazil. This seems to have awakened in Platzmann an interest in the topic of languages.

Platzmann developed a strong interest in long-distance word relationships. In 1871 he published his ''Amerikanisch-asiatische Etymologien via Behring-Strasse 'from the east to the west'', which contained "cognates" which he claimed linked words from the New and Old world languages etymologically. These observations paid no heed to the comparative method. The book was widely derided, a fact which Platzmann acknowledged, even so, his interest in such linkages seem to have remained a strong motivation for his work in collecting and republishing grammars of indigenous languages of the new world for the rest of his life.

A random sample of these very questionable linkages is shown below:

Platzmann allowed himself to conclude that any similarity between any word from any New World language with any word from any Old World language with a vaguely similar meaning was significant, when in fact the similarities were almost certainly due to chance.

In a letter to his fellow ethnologist Alice Cunningham Fletcher, Daniel Garrison Brinton describes this kind of work by Platzmann as "cranky" and clearly implies his opinion that it is bad work:

I have just been reading Julius Platzmann's autobiographical pamphlet in which he explains why he republished so many Americana. The reason was, he wanted to prove that the Amer. langs. (all of them) are substantially the same as the Aryan, Semitic, African & Chinese tongues! He gives many examples of verbal identity. Such cranky productions are either sad or humorous, as you choose to take them. If I hear of any ''good'' article on the subject, I shall acquaint you with it.

Collecting early missionary grammars and dictionaries

Whatever his motivations, over the course of this research, he turned his considerable monetary resources toward building a private library of rare early grammars. He described his journey in collecting and republishing linguistic works as his "great, twenty-year, dilettante language study." (Van Hal 2020:72, translation) His life became almost exclusively focused on studying books in his collection, and described himself as a near hermit:

I was able to read with diligence, because I never go out in company or to a club, never go to the theatre, never go to a concert, never go to a restaurant .. never travel – with minimal exceptions –, am at home all year round, go to bed at 10 o’clock, even if I don't get up early, but I am with my cause all day long and I very much hate it when someone visits me and takes me out of my circle of thoughts. (Van Hal 2020, translation)

It is rather ironic that his place in the history of linguistics came about in Europe, given that his passion for American (and other) languages arose only once he had left Brazil. He spent enormous sums of money on these volumes. Vasconcellos (1881:7) cites a then-recent catalog listing of one work — Alonso de Molina’s dictionary of Nahuatl — as being valued at “£72 sterling”, which amounts to thousands of pounds in modern dollars, perhaps a year's salary for a laborer in those days. Platzmann himself practically bragged about the cost of his volumes: "I spared no expense. I have repeatedly paid 1000, 2000, even 5000 francs for a book."

Platzmann published a catalog of his collection as of 1876, when it contained exclusively volumes related to American languages. The importance of this library was recognized by influential contemporaries; among them August Friedrich Pott, who called them "an enviable treasure of the highest value and a unique private possession of its kind". It was these books that would become the basis of his later facsimile editions.

By the time of his death, his library had grown to include 1400 volumes. A catalog of the auction of that library was published posthumously by Oswald Weigel in 1903.

In some cases Platzmann commissioned private copies of manuscripts for himself or for others. One amanuensis for these transcriptions was Emanuel Forchhammer, who copied a rare manuscript grammar of the Chiquitano language of Bolivia, which was later used as a source in a published grammar of the language. Forchhammer also transcribed the so-called ''Gülich manuscript'', a collectanea of content about Tupi, for Karl Friederich Henning, the personal secretary and tutor for Pedro II of Brazil, with whom Platzmann was personally acquainted.

Facsimile editions

Later in his life, Platzmann published facsimiles of his collected books, beginning in 1874 with a facsimile of the Tupi grammar of 1595 by the Jesuit José de Anchieta. Facsimile editions of historical South American language books followed and eventually included the Carib, Arawak, Tupi, Guarani, Araucano, Quechua, Aymara, Mapudungun, and Mexican Nahuatl (Aztec) languages.

The incredible fidelity of the facsimiles is demonstrated below by two sample pages from Ludovico Bertonio's vocabulary of the Aymara language. On the left is the original, a scan of the same page in the facsimile is on the right.

Van Hal (2020) makes the case that it was the well-known German linguist August Pott who encouraged Platzmann to continue creating facsimiles, knowing that Platzmann was both obsessive enough to carry out the tedious work, and wealthy enough to afford to purchase exceedingly rare and valuable originals.

Platzmann himself dedicated a work to the topic of why he created facsimiles (among many meandering asides). Like his earlier work on spurious etymologies, nonetheless, this work also meanders into unreliable musing on putative Old/New world etymological relationships.

As for the facsimiles themselves, it is clear that he held that the early grammars should not be modified at all:

I prefer the old American grammars as they are. No one should try to correct them, for it is impossible. One couldn't improve a Raphael or a Rembrandt. They are masterpieces from a bygone era that should remain as they are. (Platzmann 1893:98)

All of Platzmann's facsimiles were published by B. G. Teubner. The table below is a complete list of his facsimile editions, based on Van Hal (2020).

Table of Facsimiles

As the table suggests, he held a particular interest in the Tupi-Guaraní language family of Brazil.

Original and Derivative works

Original

Platzmann wrote three wholely original books:

* 1871 - ''Amerikanisch-Asiatische Etymologien Via Behringstrasse 'From the East to the West'' - The aforementioned work which contained purported linkages between Old World and New World languages. It was negatively reviewed in linguistic circles.
* 1872 - ''Aus Der Bai Von Paranaguá'' - A memoir in the form of a collection of letters from Platzmann to his parents in Germany during his stay in Brazil.
* 1893 - ''Weßhalb ich Neudrucke der alten amerikanischen Grammatiker veranlaßt habe'' - Platzmann's explanation of why he undertook the task of creating facsimiles of missionary grammars.

He also wrote a short piece with an unclear publication history, but which contains an interesting description of the nature and culture in the coastal areas around Paranaguá:

* Platzmann, Julius. ''Allgemeiner Eindruck des brasilianischen Küstenlandes unter dem 25. Grad südlicher Breite.'' Grimma: Druck von C. Köster, o date, likely ca. 1860s 8 pp.

Derivative

He also wrote four derivative works, some based the sources of his facsimiles (Anchieta, Figueira, Anonymous), and one on a bible translation.

* 1874 - '' Grammatik der brasilianischen Sprache, mit Zugrundelegung des Anchieta''. - A German-language outline of the contents of Anchieta’s grammar of Old Tupi.
* 1882 - ''Glossar der Feuerländischen Sprache''. - A vocabulary of the Yahgan language of Tierra del Fuego. It is derived from Thomas Bridges' translation of the Gospel of St. Luke, published in London in 1881.
* 1899 - ''Der Sprachstoff Der Brasilianischen Grammatik Des Luis Figueira von Julius Platzmann und Luis Figueira''. - Like his 1874 summary of Anchieta, this is an overview in German on Figueira's grammar of the same language.
* 1901 - ''Das anonyme wörterbuch tupi-deutsch und deutsch-tupi. Mit einer karte des amazonenstromes'' (The Anonymous Dictionary Tupi-German and German-Tupi. With a Map of the Amazon River). A German-language "remodeling" of Platzmann's 1896 facsimile of a 1795 printing edited by José Mariano de Conceição Vellozo.

Legacy

Charles Jacques Édouard Morren named the species ''Vriesea platzmannii'' in Platzmann's honor.

Platzmann was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1886.

Unsold stocks of Platzmann’s facsimiles (they had sold poorly) were purchased ''en masse'' from Teubner and subsequently sold by Otto Harrassowitz.

Platzmann’s personal library was auctioned off by Otto Weigel in 1903.

Weigel enumerates three awards (Weigel 1903:II-III) received by Platzmann, among "many more":

* Imperial Brazilian Order of the Rose - Chivalric award of the Emp;ire of Brazil, Platzmann was awarded the rank of "knight" (''cavaleiro'')
* Albert Order - Kingdom of Saxony

Ehrenzeichen für Kunst und Wissenschaft
- Austro-Hungarian Empire

Of his legacy, Grumpelt comments:

Julius Platzmann lived a quiet and withdrawn life, devoting himself solely to the serious study of linguistics, making the rare treasures of linguistics available to the public through reprints, and collecting documents of human speech in all its diversity.

References

External links

* Works on Archive.org

* Some of Platzmann’s manuscript materials, not all of which are fully cataloged, at the National Anthropological Archives, Smithsonian Institution

{{DEFAULTSORT:Platzmann, Julius
19th-century German botanists
1832 births
1902 deaths
German expatriates in Brazil
Linguists from Germany
Members of the American Philosophical Society
Scientists from Leipzig