80 Orientalism and Empiretranscribing languages
Missionaries viewed native languages as the best means for the trans-
mission of the Christian message. For scholars interested in narod-
nost’, the indigenous tongue was also the historically authentic one.
Johann Gottfried Herder’s interest in primitive and folk culture and
his insistence on the importance of language as the vehicle for the ex-
pression of the character of a people found a ready audience in
Russia. Herder advocated studies in comparative anthropology and
comparative linguistics, and he inspired what would become the rich
tradition of German philology in the nineteenth century.^149 “[Civiliza-
tion] grows best, and I would say only,” he wrote to Joseph ii in 1793,
“in the peculiarity of the nation, in its inherited and constantly trans-
mitted vernacular. One wins the heart of a people only by using its
language. Is it not inspiring to plant seeds of well-being for the re-
motest future among so many people in their own way of thought, in
the manner which is most peculiar and most cherished by them?”^150
In the latter eighteenth century, Russian writers were preoccupied
with the development of their own language and emphasized its ca-
pacity to measure up to the literary potential of the languages of the
West.^151 Almost a century later, Russian scholars associated with the
Caucasus Department were united in their belief about the impor-
tance of the study of mountain languages. While Arabic was the lan-
guage of the Qur’an and the mulla, most mountaineers were
illiterate, and their languages were yet to be transcribed.
Like Zisserman and in the spirit of Herder, Petr K. Uslar empha-
sized the significance and value of the study of the many languages
of the North Caucasus. Uslar briefly served in Dagestan in the late
183 0s as a young man, and he returned in 1850 with the task of pre-
paring a study of Erevan province. He stayed in the Caucasus for
twenty-five years, committed to his linguistic and ethnographic re-
search. His wife and eldest daughter died of scarlet fever in 1843
while Uslar was working at the General Staff in St Petersburg, and his
younger brother had died many years earlier, at the age of twenty-
two, in a battle with the mountaineers.^152 “The view about the ex-
treme impoverishment of these languages is completely mistaken,”
he argued. “These languages are incredibly rich in their grammatical
forms and allow one the possibility of expressing the most refined
and nuanced ideas.”^153 As Herder had suggested a century earlier, all
languages were capable of abstraction and “bear the stamp of reason,
the tool of which it has been formed.”^154 Uslar contested the views of
conservatives who were skeptical of the capacity of non-European
languages to express significant concepts and ideas.