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from Part II - Renaissance to Late Nineteenth Century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2023
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).
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