Disentangle Marcel Cohen

Work with regularity, from eight in the morning to midnight, all interspersed only by a few small breaks, like a lunch between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m., a snack at 4 p.m., and a dinner necessarily served between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m., this is undoubtedly one of the keys to the successful learned learned life of the linguist Marcel Cohen (1884-1974) that Josiane Boutet analyzes in her recent biography published in her recent biography published in her recent biography Lambert-Lucas.

We have too little linguist biographies at our disposal so as not to rejoice in such a proposal which is due in eight chapters and whose main stake is to disentangle what, in the trajectory of Cohen, makes it possible to identify it both as a pioneer of modern linguistics, namely a scholarly scholarly language, and a fully committed citizen, All his life made for access to knowledge a first condition of emancipation against obscurantisms.

“” Disentangle (P. 14), the verb is perfectly found, because it is a question of grasping how life and work intertwine continuously, either because Cohen’s work is conditioned by his life (his origins, his environment, his movements), or because his life is often put at the service of linguistic work. His Stakhanovist timetable is, no doubt, a perfect example. But it was necessary at least to respond to the central injunction of his work which consists in collecting and accumulating the greatest number of linguistic facts possible in their social and ethnographic context. Cohen’s absolute respect for the facts goes hand in hand with great theoretical caution and especially the refusal to switch to hasty, necessarily faulty generalizations. An original approach, made of small steps, which tells us about a time before the linguistic structuralism triumphant from the 1950s and 1960s, that of a priori modeling and attempts at systemic explanations.

A contact linguist

Let’s start with what makes Cohen’s linguistics appeal, namely an approach that considers that language cannot be analyzed outside its social inscription. Since his first projects on The language of the polytechnic school (1908), The Arabic speaking of the Jews of Algiers (1912), or his investigation work in Abyssinia (1911), Cohen emphasized contact and mixing situations which are for him essential factors of linguistic change. The capacity, for a speaker, of “ switch And to alternate between several speaking is a central language phenomenon, because it implies both borrowings as the disappearance of words, but above all, as Cohen indicates, it is a window open to the speakers’ report to their own speaking.

It is therefore a question for him of being attentive to both words and language, intonations and clicks, but also to the native life of speakers, as we said then. The words count, of course, but also things. First the technical instruments, but also economic and religious things like the Ethiopian amulets that Cohen analyzes in detail, because they contain, on folded parchments, magic texts written in Ge’ez, the language of the liturgy.

This linguistics of the field, made of observations, collections of texts, and discussions with privileged informants, allows it to revitalize the proven methods of French dialectology, while making each moment of his life a place of curiosity which allows him to experience language practices in situ. On the front, during the First World War, he observed the slang of the hairy. Based in the Balkans at the Eastern armies, he describes the ethnic and linguistic structure of the Macedonian city of Florina. He is also interested in technical data, the use of names, and more particularly to passenger words which are incorporated with similar or neighboring senses to various languages ​​not parent between them.

Back in Paris, first as a teacher with oriental languages, then from 1925 at the Institute of Ethnology in the company of Marcel Mauss and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Cohen thought about the method of investigation. In 1928 he published his Instructions linguistic survey (Travelers instructions) and take advantage of it to solve one of the essential problems of historical and comparative linguistics of the moment, namely languages. How “ Perceive then note sounds that we do not know, which do not exist in the language of the investigator (P. 74) ?

The engaged always exemplary

In addition to his many learned works, in particular concerning the recognition of the family of Chamito-Sémitic languages ​​(Egyptian, Libyco-Berber, Cuchitic and Semitic) which share obvious relatives, Josiane Boutet returns to the continuous commitments of Cohen. Young member of the group of socialist students, then member of Pcf Acquired from the idea of ​​Marxism as rigorous and rational science, Cohen was also a member of the General Confederation of Unit Labor, fighting against academic precariousness which he knew until his 37 years. During the 1930s, he actively participated in numerous anti -fascist associations, engaged in the workers’ university of Paris and participated in the circle of new Russia, which led him to publish a first summary article on the question of Linguistic Marxism in the famous 1935 collection, in the light of Marxism.

While insisting on the choices that led him to her various commitments, Josiane Boutet especially seeks to show how each of them came to feed Cohen’s linguistics, forcing him to think about the social and political place that a linguist must hold in society. In chapter 6, precisely entitled “ The social role of the linguist “, We learn for example that by leaving the Second World War, Cohen abandoned comparative linguistics which had given it international recognition, to focus on French linguistics, thus continuing its commitments for the popularization of knowledge by participating in the popular university of Paris. Josiane Boutet still recalls how Cohen also committed himself, sometimes with verve, on questions related to the teaching of French and more generally on the didactics of languages, publishing the pamphlet Elementary French ? No (1955), as well as several articles in humanity Taking advantage of his chronicle “ Look at the French language ». We find there the linguist of the contact and the mixture who defends a deeply open conception of the language, ultimately always in evolution, because it draws “ its novelties in its social, historical and geographic diversity (P. 150). Cohen is not tender with excessive grammatization, standardization and standardization of the French language, and knows how to take advantage of each opportunity to attack the censors and academicians who are lamenting – often for bad reasons – of a degradation of the French language.

Cohen can be criticized for Cohen, which Boutet also notes, but certainly not to have perceived and defended throughout his career the fact that language is an eminently political object, object of power, power, and therefore emancipation. A vision that made sense during the 1960s when Cohen directs the linguistic section of the Center for Studies and Marxist Research, guiding the work of this research group on spelling reform, teaching French, or the link between written and spoken French.

The great work: For a sociology of language (1956)

In this book implemented before the Second World War and published after several setbacks with Albin Michel in 1956, we find the double founding heritage in Cohen both of the linguistics of Antoine Meillet which allows to wonder how the words change its meaning, but also of the sociological revolution of Durkheim and its definition of social fact. Neither foreword to a new discipline, nor act of foundation or defense of sociology in linguistics, For a sociology of language is first of all a reaction of the scientist in the face of the proponents of structuralism for whom the sociological approach has become secondary, useless, even impracticable when it comes to explaining the dynamics of language with a unified model. Such theoretical reductionism completely lacks what makes Cohen the salt of language, namely that there is never a single way of speaking and that the general principle of all communication is linguistic variety.

Trying to explore, as Boutet recalls, “ as exhaustively as possible the multiple links of language relations to societies »(P. 163) Cohen envisages in his book several questions then little exploited by linguists, including those acquired in sociology. The first is that of written and spoken language professionals, namely engravers, typographers, secretaries and stenographers, but also lawyers, politicians, militants and probably also teachers. Cohen is indeed seeking to observe language in the field of work, opening a research path now fully developed by disciplines as different as language sciences, information and communication sciences or management sciences … The second innovative element of this book on which Boutet returns is the will, of Cohen, to question language from its effectiveness, in particular when it acts in ceremonial, ritual, ritual, ritual or divinatory practices. In these specific cases, speech is no longer just a means of transmission. It is a way to obtain results, but for that, the speaker must dispose and above all know how to mobilize various techniques such as eloquence, rhetoric, pleading, or propaganda … so many oratorical techniques essential to social life.

This biography draws the portrait of a great communist scientist, engaged all his life in an exemplary way, but whose academic posterity questions. Is Cohen’s work recognized at its fair value ? Josiane Boutet seems to think of the opposite, indicating that more than her communist commitment, it is the epistemological position of Cohen, a sort of au-mural whose academy hates, capable of mobilizing multiple, empirical knowledge, to enlighten serious and deep facts, which was most unfavorable to her. Locating on a disciplinary border to think often makes you, and sometimes for a long time, inaudible.