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10 - The Celebration of Linguistic Diversity: Humboldt’s Anthropological Linguistics
- from Part II - Renaissance to Late Nineteenth Century
- Edited by Linda R. Waugh, University of Arizona, Monique Monville-Burston, Cyprus University of Technology, John E. Joseph, University of Edinburgh
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- Book:
- The Cambridge History of Linguistics
- Published online:
- 20 July 2023
- Print publication:
- 10 August 2023, pp 308-325
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Summary
Humboldt was the founder of ‘the comparative study of languages,’ an anthropological alternative to historical-comparative linguistics of his day. His interest was language diversity (he studied a wide range of languages) and the anthropological roots of the creativity of the human mind (Kant’s influence). Language, for him, besides being a means of communicating mental entities, is the production of new entities, a reciprocal (speaker-hearer) creative activity. The generation of thought by language is universal but results in culturally different ‘world views.’ Humboldt compared languages from two perspectives: structure and ‘character.’ Though he grouped together languages that share syntactic/morphological ‘procedures’ (inflection, isolation, agglutination-incorporation), he refused to divide languages into classes and cannot therefore be considered the founder of typology. He also explored the ‘character’ (specificity) of languages which is realized in, and can be observed in, speech and literature. Few linguists were interested in Humboldt’s universalist/philosophical/literary enterprise: Steindhal, Pott, Gabelentz. But Humboldt’s work became the source of divergent approaches in linguistics: typology and universals, exotic languages study, linguistic relativism, literary/poetic language, philosophy of language. Chomsky’s ‘rediscovery’ of Humboldt led to international discussions, though the investigation of language and mind went in opposite directions (innate universal grammar vs. cultural diversity).
5 - Herder and Language
- Edited by Hans Adler, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Wulf Koepke, Texas A & M University
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- Book:
- A Companion to the Works of Johann Gottfried Herder
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 28 February 2023
- Print publication:
- 30 April 2009, pp 117-140
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Summary
I. Philosophy of Language
AFTER BACON'S DISCOVERY OF THE non-scientific semantics of natural language as idola fori, “idols of the marketplace” and the most serious obstacle to true knowledge, and after Locke's attempt to integrate language into a theory of human understanding in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), and after his proposals for coming to terms with the epistemological problem of language (which is “a mist before our eyes”), language was on the agenda of the philosophy of the eighteenth century — at least of its empiricist current. Rationalist philosophy generally speaking has no problem with language, and, hence, nothing interesting to say about it. The most important answers to Locke's Essay, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac's Essai sur l’origine des connaissances humaines (Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, 1746), Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement humain (New Essays on Human Understanding, 1765), and, in a certain way, also Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova (The New Science, 1744), necessarily deal with language. They all know that human “understanding,” “connaissances,” “entendement,” “scienza” have infallibly something to do with language. The question is to what extent and whether this is good or bad.
There is no other philosopher of the eighteenth century — but shall we call him a philosopher anyway? — who is haunted by language in the same passionate way as is Herder. And there is no other philosopher of the eighteenth century for whom language is to the same extent and with the same intensity the heart of a philosophy of knowledge — and hence of philosophy tout court — and therefore the main object of philosophy. In that sense, Herder is the creator of the “philosophy of language” as an autonomous philosophical reflection on language, not only as a “linguistic philosophy,” that is, a philosophy (of knowledge, of action, of beauty, etc.) that deals with language because language comes along as an obstacle to truth or to true philosophical or scientific discourse.
Recent studies have fervently tried to show (why this strange passion?) that many of Herder's ideas about language are shared by other thinkers, and that he is only one link in the chain of European reflection on language. Of course this is the case, as is generally the case with any philosopher one can think of. But this is beside the point. Nobody claims that Herder is the inventor of every single element of his language philosophy.