Page 505 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

By temperament he was throughout his life reluc- tant to commit himself to writing, or to complete works he had begun, but he realized that his search for the nature of language, and its importance in the life of man, could only be based on a knowledge of a wide variety of languages. To his knowledge of Greek and Latin and other languages of Europe he added Sanskrit in 1821, which had a powerful influence on his view of language. In the same year he helped to secure the appointment of Franz Bopp, one of the great pioneers of comparative linguistics, to a pro- fessorship in Oriental and General Linguistics in Berlin. From grammars of the native languages of America, acquired by his brother, Wilhelm had extended his knowledge to the American continent; and Remusat's work on Chinese led him to publish in this area also. Searching for a link between languages from different parts of the world he studied the Poly- nesian languages and the languages of Malaya. The search culminated in his great work, published posthumously, On the Kawi Language on the Island of Java (Humboldt 1836-39), with its lengthy intro- duction entitled 'On the Diversity of Human Lan- guage-Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind.' What perhaps caused Humboldt to select the Kawi language for such close examination was not only the geographical position of Java, but the mixed nature of the Kawi language, combining a Sanskrit vocabulary with a Malayan structure. Although he believed that vocabulary and grammatical structure are inseparable and inter- dependent parts of language (except for the linguistic analyst), he thought the differences between languages to be most evident in their grammatical structure.
Greek and Sanskrit were for him the most perfect languages—at one extreme of a typological scale, exemplifying the supreme type of inflecting language. At the other extreme he placed Chinese, as an isolating language, lacking inflections or affixes. In between came the so-called 'agglutinating' languages, which he regarded as having an inferior variety of inflection, involving 'mechanical adding, not a truly organic accretion.' Similar classifications can be found earlier in Friedrich von Schlegel and his brother August Wilhelm von Schlegel. Humboldt, however, identified in the 'Mexican language' (Nahuatl) a new category of sentence form, called 'incorporating.' In this the main elements in the structure of the sentence are 'incorporated' into a single word. The superiority of languages such as Greek and Sanskrit for Humboldt lay in what he perceived as the organic nature of their grammatical structure, where inner modifications and inflections are welded into the root, which contains the crucial concept; but at the same time the unity of the word is maintained. Languages of very different types, such as Chinese and Mexican, clearly could also express the thoughts of their speakers, but are constrained by their structure to do this less perfectly.
The relationship of language with thought is crucial. Humboldt believed that all languages contain certain universal features, arising from the laws of thinking, shared by all men. But without language, he main- tained, thinking is not possible, because only through expression in language is a concept given objectivity. Language, however, is not a fixed object or product (Humboldt uses the Greek word ergon) but involves constant creation, or activity (Greek energeid). This creativity of language is limited in particular lan- guages by the structure or form they have developed. The creativity is constantly at work, but it can only act on what material is available to the speaker at a particular time. So particular languages acquire their individual character, which may be more or less imper- fect, as a result of their being animated by 'a more or less fruitful principle of mental development.' Thus Humboldt ranks languages on a scale, at the top of which are those of the Sanskritic type (i.e., Indo- European). The form of Chinese is accepted as ex- hibiting perhaps more than any other language 'the power of pure thought,' but falls short in versatility and harmony. Humboldt proceeds to associate the particular national character of each language with a particular outlook of its speakers on the world—a thesis that was later to be developed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin LeeWhorf.
Among nineteenth-century writers, August Friedrich Pott acknowledges his debt to Humboldt, and Heymann Steinthal (see Di Cesare 1996) and Wilhelm Wundt were certainly influenced by him in developing the notion of 'national psychology' (Vo'l- kerpsychologie). However, Humboldt's influence on linguistics has been more apparent in the twentieth century than in the nineteenth, e.g., in so-called 'neo- Humboldtian' trends (see Basilius 1952), and in con- troversial claims as to the similarities between Hum- boldt's well-known, but variously interpreted, idea of the 'inner form of language' (innere Sprachforrri) and the rules of generative grammar (see Coseriu 1970). For the influence on Humboldt of earlier linguistic philosophers see Manchester (1985).
See also: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
Bibliography
Basilius H A 1952 Neo-Humboldtian ethnolinguistics. Word 8: 95-105 (repr. in Fishman J A (ed.) 1968 Readings in the Sociology of Language. Mouton, The Hague)
Coseriu E 1970 Semantik, innere Sprachform und Tie- fenstruktur. FoL 4: 53-63
Di Cesare D 1996 'Innere Sprachform': Humboldts Grenzbegriff, Steinthals Begriffgrenze. HL 23(3): 321-46
Humboldt W von 1836-39 Uber die Kawi Sprache auf der Insel Java, nebst einer Einleitung uber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts. K6ni- gliche Akademie der Wissenschaften, Berlin. (The intro- duction is translated by P Heath as On Language: the Diversity of Human Language Structure and its Influence
Humboldt, Wilhelm von
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