Wilhelm von Humboldt

Wilhelm (Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand) von Humboldt, a German man of letters and extraordinary close friend of the poets Goethe and Schiller, whose life's work encompasses the areas of philosophy, literature, linguistics, anthropology, education, and political thought as well statesmanship was born in Potsdam on June 23, 1767, and died at Tegel near Berlin on April 8, 1835. 

Although there has always been strong interest in Humboldt expressed by political and cultural historians and educationists in Germany, it is only in recent decades that his contributions to the formation of modern linguistics, semiotics, hermeneutics, and language philosophy have given rise to renewed attention to his pioneering achievements in these areas, even though much of his work in linguistics has remained unknown or unexplored until recently. 

Yet numerous linguists beginning with Pott and Steinthal in Germany and the American Brinton in the nineteenth century to Boas, Sapir, Bühler, Weisgerber, and Chomsky in the twentieth century, derived or claimed to have derived important insights from Humboldt. But their interest in Humboldt was partial at best and limited to those aspects of his work that could be utilized to reinforce or legitimize their own projects and methodologies. 

It is quite misleading to associate the term “Humboldtian linguistics” or “Humboldtian language philosophy” with any one specific direction, for example, with the Whorfian thesis of “linguistic relativity” or with Chomsky's opposite notion of a universalist “generative grammar” because these tend to ignore other equally or more important dimensions of Humboldt's work. 

After his death in 1835, his linguistic work was effectively disregarded by mainstream linguists in Germany, whose primary interest was focused on the Indo-European language group. Thus, a prominent figure like Franz Bopp would maintain that the languages of the South Pacific represented but decayed forms of Sanskrit despite the fact that Humboldt had already thoroughly disproved this opinion in his Kavi Work and demonstrated that these languages constituted what is called today the Austronesian language group (Mueller-Vollmer 1991). 

Even the linguist Heyman Steinthal published in 1884 a two-volume edition of Humboldt's writings entitled Die Sprachphilosophischen Werke Wilhelm's von Humboldt (Humboldt's works in language philosophy) (see “Works,” bibliography) in his introduction and commentaries criticizes Humboldt from a reductionist psychologistic position and neither here nor anywhere in his other writings made a serious attempt to discuss Humboldt's own arguments and to investigate his actual philosophical position. 

In France, on the other hand, we find throughout the 19th century a comparatively sustained interest in Humboldt that was confined chiefly to his work in the Asian languages and to his Basque studies. As a member of the Société Asiatique in Paris, he published a number of articles in the society's official journal, the Journal Asiatique (For a list of these articles, see Bösch 2006, p. 234) and the latter, in turn, carried reviews of some of his writings. 

It has to be noted that this French reception resulted largely from the personal contacts and scholarly exchanges that he maintained with a number of prominent French linguists such as Jean-François Champollion, Jean-Pierre Abél Rémusat, Eugène Jacquet, and Eugène Burnouf Yet Humboldt's French reception, while including some of his important linguistic studies, all but omitted their philosophical concerns and underlying principles. 

Typical is the review of Humboldt's groundbreaking treatise from 1827, “On the Dual,” that appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Germanique, I: 378–381 (1829), where the reviewer blended out entirely the philosophical intent and key argument of the piece (Ibid. 105/6) and thus distorted beyond recognition Humboldt's integration of linguistic research and language philosophy which lies