Chapter 3 offers a double biography of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) and Alexander von Humboldt (1767–1859) until the latter’s departure for the Americas, and does so for two reasons: Not only did the two brothers grow up together in an intimate fraternal relationship (with their father lost and their mother estranged), and did so despite differences in personality and interest, but Alexander also became a major resource through his own linguistic-ethnographic observations with Indigenous peoples of the Americas and as a liaison for resources from American contacts on his elder brother’s behalf. In short, Alexander served as the eyes and ears of William, who never crossed the Atlantic. On his return to Europe, Alexander then brought along major linguistic works for Wilhelm’s library. Over the years, the two Humboldts would grow even closer to each other, as evident in their organismic perspectives of language and nature.

While engaged in helping rebuild a post-Napoleonic Prussia and Europe after his Roman years, Humboldt pursued several linguistic projects: a linguistic cartography of Europe applicable to other continents; initial analyses of Nahuatl; grammatical sketches of seven other Mexican languages; a programmatic comparative-contrastive statement of linguistics in “Essai sur les langues du nouveau Continent;” an in-depth analysis of Quechua of the Andes plus grammatical sketches for Araucano (Mapuche), Guaraní, and Muisca of South America; comparative studies of Aztecan, Mayan, or Tupian language families and linguistic areas; introduction to Massachusett, Mahican, and Onondaga grammars of eastern North America; noun incorporation versus polysynthesis; growing understanding of verbal morphology, including the zero morpheme; “inner forms” of American languages; attention to language contact and also to extralinguistic, sociocultural scenes and wider contexts as part of comprehensive descriptions and explanations of differences and changes in languages without literary traditions in substitution of historical records.

When Alexander was exploring the rainforest of northern South America at the turn of the nineteenth-century, Wilhelm pursued intensive sociolinguistic-ethnographic fieldwork on Basque, a non-Indo-European isolate, in the Pyrenees of Spain. Basque would attest as an ergative-absolutive language comparatively rare in Europe, but quite common in the Americas. Research on a language without a philological tradition required linguistic and anthropological field research, including the learning of its grammar, its uses and contexts, plus accompanying sociocultural customs. Humboldt recognized Basque as “a living image of their way of thinking and feeling,” for which he drew on proverbs, poetry, music, and dances. Conversely, distinctive Basque society was intelligible solely through the Basque language as part of an integrated theory of language in culture and society. Although Humboldt never identified Basque as Native American, his journey to the Pyrenees then became his substitute for a voyage to the Americas in the mind of German Humboldtians.

Humboldt also influenced a second generation of American linguists: Francis Lieber, who still had been a personal protégé of Humboldt’s and who studied Black English of South Carolina, English creoles of the Caribbean, and Chinook Jargon together with language acquisition; Albert S. Gatschet as a former student of the Humboldtian J. C. Eduard Buschmann in Berlin and as the only professional linguist at J. W. Powell’s Bureau of American Ethnology, studying diverse American languages; and Daniel G. Brinton, who examined Humboldt intensively, translated an essay of his on the verb in American languages into English, but misinterpreted Humboldt in social-evolutionist terms. Despite individual achievements, the second generation of American Humboldtians ultimately remained too disjointed to have much of a long-term impact, and Brinton appeared a renegade with his continued insistence on social Darwinism. When Brinton passed away, Humboldtian ideas evidently had little of a chance for survival in the United States.

Humboldt personally inspired American linguists of the early nineteenth century such as Peter S. Duponceau and John Pickering (both by correspondence) plus A. Albert Gallatin (probably in person by Alexander’s introduction and perhaps by correspondence) as the first generation of American Humboldtians. Whereas Duponceau had already been impressed by Humboldt’s sociolinguistic field study of Basque, he and Pickering responded to Humboldt’s inquiries for information on North American languages; but Duponceau and Pickering also drew on the Prussian as a descriptive-analytical linguist with a broad hemispheric, even global comparative foundation, a solid interest in linguistic-cultural alterity and diverse language use, language change, and linguistic typology. Thus, they came to share a broad range of linguistic topics. In contrast, Gallatin likely found primary inspiration in Humboldt's early model of linguistic cartography for his own early maps of American languages and for his cultural ecology with language at the center.

With its “emic” underpinnings and multi-faceted comparative principles, Humboldt’s Americanist platform proved suitable for the initial description and analysis of the languages of the Pacific such as Old Javanese and other Malayo-Polynesian languages in their own terms (“inner forms”) in contrast to the unidimensional Sanskrit-derived models by Indo-Europeanists. Humboldt instead concentrated on linguistic-sociohistorical diversity as key notions in the description and analysis of Southeast Asian and Pacific languages, alternative models of language change, including language contact, and complementary historical methodological resources. He did not suggest any common ancestry between the languages of the Americas and the Pacific beyond that of modern humanity; but he merely argued for linguistic processes that applied in the Americas also to hold true in the Pacific or in still other areas, and thus defined a modern anthropologically-based historical linguistics in truly comparative terms with special attention to the analysis of grammar.

Understanding Alexander von Humboldt’s role in his brother’s Americanist linguistics requires an appreciation of his American explorations. In today’s eastern Venezuela, Alexander engaged in linguistic-ethnographic fieldwork with the Chaima or Kumaná (Cariban); later, he met Quechua-speaking people in the Andes and Nahuas in Mexico among other Indigenous Americans, providing valuable sociolinguistic insights for Wilhelm. Alexander’s map of explorations closely reflects Wilhelm’s early inventory of American grammars, suggesting Alexander as a primary source of Wilhelm’s early American documents. Although sometimes chastised as a colonizer, Alexander proved unusually empathetic to Indigenous peoples, recognized sociohistorical continuities from pre-Columbian to post-contact societies, and addressed issues of colonial society from a hemispheric perspective, including exploitation and slavery. While visiting the United States on his return to Europe, Humboldt voiced his abolitionist position, but gained few insights about Native Americans’ fate as part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 or the developments leading to their removal.

While regularly recognized as a statesman, an educational reformer, the founder of the University of Berlin, and a scholar in political science, philosophy, and literature, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835) has not always received as much acknowledgment for his contributions in anthropology or linguistics. When he is paid homage as a student of languages, it is for his role as a philosopher of language rather than as a philologist or linguist. When on other occasions Western academia has remembered Humboldt as a distinct linguist, he has appeared as a scholar of almost all languages except those of Africa or the Americas – and yet it is the very languages of the Western Hemisphere to which Humboldt paid his longest and most intensive attention, as evident by a set of recent publications in German. Chapter 1 offers an introductory discussion for an anglophone audience interested in Humboldt’s contributions to Americanist linguistics.

Humboldt not only offered a theoretically much more diverse program of Americanist linguistics than conventionally recognized, ranging from fundamental analytical issues, historical problems, and sociohistorical descriptions to comparative studies, typological questions, innovative notions, and programmatic statements across much of Middle and South America and eventually eastern North America; significantly, the present book also covers a longer historical period, from the early nineteenth century through the years after World War I, during which he exerted direct and indirect influences on four generations of linguists and anthropologists. Although the present discussion does not address the developments of the twentieth century, it answers a question that half a century ago Dell Hymes raised in wonderment about the continuous reinvention of Humboldtian notions: American Humboldtians then offered a long, sociohistorically diverse and rich platform for a broadly defined comparative linguistics to reinvent itself in various forms.