Karl Julius Platzmann (31 January 1832 – 6 September 1902) was a German botanical illustrator, writer and bibliophile. Platzmann first studied as an artist, and later travelled to Brazil, where he created hundreds of botanical illustrations. After returning to Germany, he spent a very private life collecting rare colonial dictionaries, grammars and religious texts about indigenous languages of the Americas. He then edited and published exact facsimile editions of those works. His publications have become an important resource in the study of the native languages of the Americas.
Early life and education
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. 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 near Grimma, not far from the intellectual hub of Leipzig, where his family also owned a home on Reichstrasse. Like his father and brothers, he studied at one of the three prestigious Fürstenschule ("princely schools") in Saxony. Theodor had attended Pforta in Schulpforte, and the sons attended Grimma near the family estate in Hohnstädt.
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. His teachers would include Gustav Jäger, Julius Schnorr von Carolsfeld, Ernst Friedrich August Rietschel and Adrian Ludwig Richter.
Several of Platzmann's works were exhibited at the Dresden academy. 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.
Botanical illustrator in Brazil — 1858-1864
In his 1893 memoir Platzmann mentions that he "wanted to see tropical vegetation", and that Schnorr wrote him a letter of recommendation suitable for use abroad. Thus, in 1858 Platzmann set out for Paranaguá, in the Brazilian state of Paraná, in order to study and draw the local flora. He bought a parcel of land and lived there until 1864, rarely leaving the small island (Ilha dos Pinheiros) where he lived.
Although Platzmann would cease to produce botanical illustrations after his return to Germany, the work he had created during his journey to Brazil was scientifically consequential and brought him some renown. His double illustration of Phallocallis plumbea (now known as Trimezia martinicensis) and Cypella coerulea appeared as a plate in the influential Flora Brasiliensis. An analytical drawing of Billbergia amoena was printed in the Belgian botanical journal La Belgique Horticole. He published a series of Pflanzenstudien (Plant studies) in 1865-1866 in the popular magazine, Illustrirte Zeitung. The first installment described Lophophytum mirabile, in which Platzmann describes how he encountered the plant during a tapir hunt. (That article was later referenced in the monumental plant catalog Prodromus systematis naturalis regni vegetabilis.) Other installments of the series include descriptions and illustrations of Araucaria brasiliensis, Cecropia peltata, Carica papaya, and Musa sapientum. One review of his Pflanzenstudien called him a "brilliant artist" and "hoped that these plates—the fruit of years of study undertaken amidst hardships and struggles of every kind—will gain the recognition they deserve through worthy reproduction or inclusion in a renowned scientific collection."
While these as well as his watercolor illustrations were exhibited to considerable acclaim, as far afield as London, Platzmann seems never published his Brazilian work as a whole. Some work remained in the possession of his family. In one letter to correspondent and mentor Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius, Platzmann mused about the possibility of using his Brazilian works as a submission for a doctoral degree at a German university (the modern system of doctoral advisors was only incipient in Platzmann's time).
Aus Der Bai Von Paranaguá Platzmann published a travelogue of his trip in the form of a collection of letters to his parents in Germany. The work received considerable attention: it was serialized in the Dresdner Journal and described at length in Teubner's catalog of 1872.
From botany to comparative linguistics
After his return to Germany, Platzmann was sent a copy of the explorer, botanist, and ethnographer Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius's compilation of glossaries of many indigenous languages of Brazil. 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.
In particular, he became captivated by the idea that word relationships could be detected across New World and Old World languages. In 1871 he published his Amerikanisch-asiatische Etymologien via Behring-Strasse 'from the east to the west''', which contained comparisons between New and Old world languages which he was convinced showed genetic relationships between languages around the world.
His comparisons paid no heed to the comparative method, which was being developed by his contemporaries in Leipzig and beyond. There were no shortage of negative reviews — Canstatt referred to it as "a clear failure … based on dilettantish fallacies. Daniel Brinton called the etymologies "verbal coincidences" that did not "merit serious consideration". In another letter, Hugo Schuchardt criticizes "his old friend" Platzmann of having fallen prey to "the siren call of phonetic similarity", describing his "etymologizing" as "wild fantasy".
But 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", years later he also describes having continually worked since its publication to publish "a second, improved, and greatly enlarged edition of the American-Asiatic Etymologies."
A random sample of his proposed cognates from the work is shown below:
New World word New World language Old World word Old World language Ri Quechua rī Sanskrit Riču Quechua lōk Sanskrit Rik, right Botocudo right, right English Rima, speak Quechua rumor, speak Latin Rimay, speech Quechua 'rēma, speech Greek language Ris, red Taino russus, red Latin
As can be seen by the combinations of language families in this table, 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 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."
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.
Collecting early missionary grammars and dictionaries
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". His life became almost exclusively focused on acquiring and studying books in his collection, and he described himself as 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)
He spent enormous sums of money on these volumes. Vasconcellos 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". Brinton also praised the work, calling it "a model of this kind of bibliographical work". 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.
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, Cumanagoto, Kariri, Arawak, Abipón, Tehuelche, Moxa, and Lingua Geral languages. one facsimile, of Molino's famous Nahuatl (Aztec) dictionary, was from North America.
The exceptional 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, and a scan of the same page in Platzmann's facsimile is on the right.
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.
As for the facsimiles themselves, it is clear that he held that the early grammars should not be modified at all: