Julius Platzmann

Platzmann was born in Leipzig on January 31, 1832. His family was wealthy and influential in Leipzig society. His mother Marianna Platzmann (née Beyer) inherited family wealth.^[1] His father Theodor Alexander Platzmann (b. 1795) was a jurist and member of the Saxon State Parliament (Landtag). Like many wealthy German families of the time, the family kept both urban and country homes — Platzmann grew up spending summers on the family estate of Hohnstädt in Grimma,^[2] not far from the intellectual hub of Leipzig, where his family also owned a home on Reichstrasse.^[3] Like his father, he studied at one of the three prestigious Fürstenschule ("princely schools") in Saxony, the father having attended Pforta and Julius Grimma.

Many Fürstenschule alumni would go on to study at the University of Leipzig. Platzmann, however, had a longstanding interest in art, and after three years at the Fürstenschule, he transferred to the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in 1850.^[4] His teachers would include Gustav Jäger, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld,^[5], Ernst Friedrich August Rietschel and Adrian Ludwig Richter.^[6]

Several of Platzmann's works were exhibited at the Dresden academy.^[7] In his diary, Schnorr records high praise of Platzmann's talents as an artist, and even having been inspired to modify one of his own works in light of one of Platzmann's compositions. However, he also felt that Platzmann's potential as a fine artist had limits.^[6][8]

In his 1893 memoir Platzmann mentions that he "wanted to see tropical vegetation", and that Von Carolsfeld wrote him a letter of recommendation suitable for use abroad.^[5]: 8 Thus, in 1858 Platzmann set out for Paranagua, in the Brazilian state of Paraná, in order to study and draw the local flora, although it is not clear that he had ever had any formal education in botany. He bought a parcel of land and lived there until 1864, rarely leaving the small island (Ilha dos Pinheiros) where he lived.

Although he would not continue working in botanical illustration after his return to Germany, the work he created during his journey to Brazil was scientifically consequential: His double illustration of Phallocallis plumbea (now known as Trimezia martinicensis) and Cypella coerulea appeared as a plate in the influential Flora Brasiliensis.^[9] An analytical drawing of Billbergia amoena was printed in the Belgian botanical journal La Belgique Horticole.^[10][11] His illustration of Lophophytum mirabile was published in a popular magazine, Illustrirte Zeitung, which also included a written contribution from Platzmann describing the plant and how he encountered it. The article was later referenced in the monumental plant catalog Prodromus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis.^[12]: 129 His watercolors illustrations were exhibited to considerable acclaim, as far afield as London.^[13]: 17

However, he seems to have kept all of his work, without making it available to a wider public during his lifetime; it remained in the possession of his family.

After his return to Germany Platzmann was sent a copy of the explorer and ethnographer Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius's compilation of glossaries of many indigenous languages of Brazil.^[15][4] Platzmann himself recounted this event as the beginning of his shift from botany to linguistics:

After my return from Brazil, which took place in the year 1864, Mr. von Martius — who was quite delighted by my watercolors and with whom I was in correspondence — sent me, to my good fortune or misfortune, his Linguarum brasiliensium. And thus began my great, twenty-year, amateurish study of languages.^[5]: 10

In particular, he 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',^[16] which contained comparisons between New and Old world languages which he believed showed genetic relationships between essentially any language pair. These observations paid no heed to the comparative method. There were no shortage of negative reviews — Canstatt referred to it as "a clear failure … based on dilettantish fallacies.^[17]

Once the notion of speculative etymology caught hold of Platzmann, it never let him go: he never ceased to assert that he had a unique ability to "find" etymological unities across the languages of the world. While he admitted that his early Etymologien was "hasty and premature", he also describes having continually worked since 1875 to publish "a second, improved, and greatly enlarged edition of the American-Asiatic Etymologies."^[5]: 69

A random sample of his proposed cognates is shown below:

Platzmann allowed himself to conclude that any similarity between any word from any New World language and 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.

Peetermans ascribes^[18]: 2 this work to Platzmann's belief in "the monogenetic origin of all humans and their languages" and that this belief "enabled him to gain some insight into the original human language of prehistoric times, die Sprache des Menschen 'the language of the human (being)', which is the mother tongue from which die Sprachen der Völker 'the languages of the peoples' all derive."^{[5]: 96, 101}

While Platzmann predicted that his work would be rediscovered and appreciated in the future, his contemporary linguists disregarded the value of what they evaluated as irresponsible etymological fancies. In a letter to Alice Cunningham Fletcher, Daniel Garrison Brinton described this kind of work by Platzmann as “cranky”:

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.^[19]

Elsewhere Brinton lumps Platzmann's etymological works in with those of other poorly supported claims in works by Émile Petitot, Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen, and others.^[20]

Once he had rededicated his career to the topic of linguistic research, he quickly 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".^{[5][21]: 72}. His life became almost exclusively focused on acquiring and studying books in his collection, and he described himself as hermit.^[a]:

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) ^[21]

He spent enormous sums of money on these volumes. Vasconcellos cites a then-recent catalog listing^[22]: 7 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.^[22] 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."^[5]

Platzmann published a catalog of his collection as of 1876, when it contained exclusively volumes related to American languages.^[23] 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".^[24] Brinton also praised the work, calling it "a model of this kind of bibliographical work". ^[25] It was these books that would become the basis of his later facsimile editions.

By the time of his death in 1902, his library had grown to include 1400 volumes. A catalog of the auction of that library was published by Oswald Weigel.^[26][27]

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.^[28][29] 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.^[30]

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, Cumanagoto, Kariri, Arawak, Abipón, Tehuelche, Moxa, Nahuatl (Aztec), and Lingua Geral languages.

The exceptional fidelity of the facsimiles is demonstrated below by two sample pages from Ludovico Bertonio's vocabulary of the Aymara language.^[31] On the left is the original, and a scan of the same page in the facsimile is on the right.^[32]

Page 22, Bertonio original	Platzmann's facsimile

Van Hal 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.^[21]

Platzmann himself dedicated a work to the topic of why he created facsimiles (among many meandering asides).^[5] Like his earlier work on spurious etymologies, 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.^[5]: 98

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

Charles Jacques Édouard Morren named the species Vriesea platzmannii in Platzmann's honor.^[11]

Platzmann was elected as a member to the American Philosophical Society in 1886,^[60][61], and awarded a medal from the Société américaine de France in 1875.^[62]

Unsold stocks of Platzmann’s facsimiles (they had sold poorly) were purchased en masse from Teubner and subsequently sold by Otto Harrassowitz.^[21]

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

Weigel enumerates three awards^{[26]: II–III} received by Platzmann, among "many more":

• Imperial Brazilian Order of the Rose - Chivalric award of the Empire 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.^[63]

Despite his harsh critique of Platzmann's comparative efforts cited above, Weigel (1903) also quotes Daniel Brinton's very high praise for Platzmann's work on facsimiles:

By his beautiful and faithful republications of old authors he has, perhaps, done more than any other living man to aid these studies.