On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species

by Wilhelm von Humboldt, Peter Heath (Translator), Michael Losonsky (Editor)

This classic study of human language was first published in 1836, as a general introduction to Humboldt's treatise on the Kawi language of Java. It is the final statement of his lifelong study of language, exploring its universal structures and its relation to mind and culture. It remains one of the most interesting and important attempts to draw philosophical conclusions from comparative linguistics. This volume presents a modern translation by Peter Heath together with a new introduction by Michael Losonsky that places Humboldt's work in its historical and philosophical context.

Genres: Philosophy, Linguistics, Language, Science, Anthropology, Politics, Nonfiction

344 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1836

About the author

Wilhelm (Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand) von Humboldt, German man of letters 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, to 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 to 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 who 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 criticises Humboldt from a reductionist psychologistic position and neither here or 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

Reviews

[Gary Bruff · Rating 4 out of 5]

In 1835, the year of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s death, the languages of the world were in a similar state to what they are today. Languages were dying out just as they are now, and the ancient and classical languages had already been rediscovered and for the most part extensively studied. With no more worlds to discover or texts to unearth, Humboldt himself might have regarded the universe of linguistics as drawing its final conclusions. The truth of the matter, of course, was that linguistics was in its infancy. While there is much to admire as prescient in Humboldt’s final work, On Language, there is just as much to regard as a dismal artifact of Humboldt’s nineteenth century, Prussian Weltanshauung.

Beginning with the good. Humboldt’s work in many ways anticipated the broad empirical scope and philosophical underpinnings of truly modern linguistics, and in that sense On Language was very far ahead of its time. As Chomsky himself acknowledged in his 1960’s book Cartesian Linguistics, Humboldt was possibly the first to recognize that language is inherently creative. As for Chomsky, Humboldt’s notion of creativity boils down to the fact that speakers/languages make ‘infinite employment of finite means.’ Also very Chomskyan is Humboldt’s idea that because all languages share a single unified ‘inner form’, languages are in a sense innate and uniform at some deep level. The diversity of human languages for Humboldt stems from variation in ‘verbal affinity’, which is the link between universal thought and the variable ways to express that thought. Because this economy of expression can make a certain idea more or less natural in a particular language, similar notions expressed in distinct languages may match or correspond to one another while not being absolutely identical to one another. Hence, contra Chomsky this time, the speaker’s freedom to express him- or herself results (in the aggregate of a speech community) in a drift of an entire language along its own peculiar historical trajectory. Humboldt’s idea of linguistic freedom bridges the gap between a postulated universal ‘inner form’ and the empirically evident human variability in grammar and vocabulary.

Considering that he wrote On Language 180 years ago, Humboldt could have done much worse in terms of his ethnological sensibilities. Anticipating later empirical work in anthropological linguistics and linguistic typology, On Language draws from an impressive spectrum of languages, including Sanskrit, Burmese, Tagalog, Nahuatl, Tongan, Delaware, Maori, Chinese, Arabic, and more. Humboldt was neither a universalist nor a relativist, and his omnivorous digestion of grammars seems in the final analysis to suggest that languages speak us. They do so through the interaction of a constant human nature, a language’s conservative adherence to its principle of organization, and the diverse and variable means of expression found locked away in all human languages.

Humboldt also takes a stab at understanding grammatical issues which have traditionally been the concerns of Americanists and other linguistics fieldworkers. Although his terminology is obviously different, and at times obscure, Humboldt explores grammatical phenomena such as inalienable possession, incorporation, form classes, obviation, polysynthesis, and grammaticalization. The last I found particularly ahead of its time. Humboldt traces through classical texts the progression of substantives becoming demonstratives becoming affixes. He also makes a case that languages undergo erosion or decay of grammatical suffixes through sound changes, only to be rejuvenated by the adoption of new and creative expressions as part of the grammar.

Now the bad. The problems with this book can be summed up by the subtitle of On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human Species. Humboldt is transfixed by the notion of human development and progress. Writing a generation prior to Darwin, Humboldt was part of the evolution-as-progress scene that partially engendered Darwin’s Origin of Species (as well as Marx’s Capital). The problem with Humboldt’s progress is that some languages are singled out as advanced while others are passed off as the ‘rude’ languages of ‘savages’. Sanskrit is held up as the paragon of grammatical virtue on account of its extensive morphology, the complexity of word structure which ties an expression together into an energetic and active thought. Chinese is seen as ‘least perfect’ because it lacks morphology and therefore leaves it up to the hearer to put the syntactic pieces together. Even worse to Humboldt are the ‘primitive’ languages of ‘rude’ and ‘uncultured’ peoples. Such languages confound lexical categories by treating adjectives or nouns as verbs. Presumably he is talking about the polysemy of person makers together with the frequent lexical merging of objects and verbs in Native American languages. So Humboldt, through spurious criteria and rather subjective whims, places those languages with extensive morphology (but not like the American Indians, who have too much morphology) at the head of the class. Conveniently, this ranks German ahead of French and English while at the same time associating German with highly civilized Greek and Latin. However, Humboldt realizes that speakers of Chinese, who should be stupid relative to speakers of languages with advanced morphology, are nevertheless rather smart in terms of their history of scientific and literary accomplishments. Humboldt saves his system by arguing that languages, regardless of their grammatical complexity, fare best when they consistently follow their principle. So Chinese is OK—even though they speak with an isolating grammar, they stick with it to the end as the principle of their language. Lastly, Humboldt believes that languages have a kind of beauty and elegance that is at times more significant than a language’s cognitive potential. While ‘inner form’ is universal, languages can playfully overcome the constraint of universal ideas through metaphorical expression. Even the ‘rude’ languages can modify their ‘verbal affinity’ by making use of the musical element in speech. Through conceptual metaphor and pronounced musicality, all languages continue to grow, and this adds to the ‘mental development of the human species.’

I would not recommend Humboldt to a neophyte in linguistics, for this book makes use of ideologies and methodologies that are incompatible with truly modern linguistics. I would hate for someone to think that this is what linguistics is all about. You should also know what hermeneutics is before trying to read On Language. If you are not accustomed to German philosophy or philology, you could easily fail to appreciate the poetic and rhetorical aspects of the work. For me, Humboldt’s comments on the beauty and creativity found in all languages make this book worth reading. All in all, this book captures a moment in the history of linguistics where, if you know what you are looking for, you can see the entire field in utero. Above all else, Humboldt is at his best when he interprets the dialectics of subject and object and of deduction and induction in order to give the reader a sense of the factors that lead to linguistic change, if not ‘growth.’

[Ⰰⱃⰿⰰⱀⰴ Ⱆⰾⰴⰵⱃⰻⰽⱁ Ⱅⰵⱄⰾⰰ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alfa
Zagreb, 2010.
Preveo: Ante Stamać
Prvotno izdano posthumno 1836.
Jezik je tako aktualiziran da je prepun pupoljaka, latica te sočne srčike. Barokan, profinjen i živ. Jedinsten je Humboldtov stil pisanja, osebujan kao što su Nietzsche ili Spengler osebujno pisali.
Meni je doslovce slina curila od kreativnosti teorijskog jezika. Kako je znanost nekada bila otvorena, slobodna i bogata, a danas je zatvorena poput zidina locusa horridusa zdravog razuma, https://www.berkeley.edu/.
Usporedite jezik umčine Humboldta i nekog posthumanista ili feministkinje sami.
Sadržajno se na općoj razini raščlanjuje jezik kao takav putem primjera azijskih jezika, uglavnom jezika grupe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Austron....
Širina i erudicija Humboldtova uma je zadivljujuća. Bez ikakvog eurocentrizma analizira azijske i sjevernoameričke jezike te otvoreno i nedvosmisleno jezike "primitivnih naroda" stavlja na istu razinu s europskim jezicima. Svaki jezik je odraz duše i uma pojedine kulture, svaka kultura razvije vlastiti jezik u skladu s vlastitom nutrinom. Neflektivni jezici po Humboldtu po ničemu nisu inferiorni flektivnim jezicima.
Suvremena posthumanističko-feministička totalitarna ideologija pokušava prepraviti povijest u kojoj bi bijeli ljudi bili uskogrudni i pohlepni rasisti, a von Humboldt je oličenje suprotnoga.
Zanimljivo je da indoeuropske jezike naziva sanskrtskim jezicima te se divi indijskoj kulturi i sanskrtu na svakom koraku.
Istinski (pozitivni) kozmopolitizam romantizma je vrhunac naše faustovske kulture, to je moj duboki i čelični sud, neogotika je nadjačala samu gotiku. Romantizam u mnogim svojim vidovima pokazuje sve dobre strane kolonizacije; nastanak lingvistike, indoeuropeistike, arheologije, filozofskog univerzalizma (koji nikada nije univerzalan već duboko bjelački no upravo je bjelački po svom prividu univerzalizma, naša faustovksa i ikarovska kultura je podarila svima kanalizaciju i Platona, danas i internet te dosezanje Marsa), nastanak stotina kreolskih kultura, nastanak stotina kreolskih jezika, ta da nije bilo kolonizacije niti jedna žena ne bi izgledala poput Nicki Minaj.
Razina koju je lingvistika dosegla već u Homboldtovo doba je takva da ostajete bez daha.
Jasno je po kome je Radoslav Katičić tako dobar.
Pročitajte!
Pročitajte!
¡Hasta luego!

[Jesse · Rating 1 out of 5]

Race science for linguists. Worth comparing to Fichte's "Addresses to the German Nation", which uses Herder's philosophy of language to argue that German is superior to French. Humboldt is instead using Schlegel's (incorrect) identification of Sanskrit as an ancestor of Latin/Greek/German, what we would now describe as their all being part of the PIE language family, to argue that all European languages are superior to Chinese! This method of finding racial/linguistic unity among Europeans via Sanskrit is closely related to Schlegel's invention of the "Aryan race" (arische volk).

The main philosophical move that Humboldt uses to judge one language better than another is to say that there is an internal "logic of thought" that is universally shared by all humans. What is not shared, however, is the vitality to make that internal logic clear in one's speech, in the actual grammar of one's language. The lack of such vitality is not an individual failing, but a national and racial failing, as Humboldt insists that language-learning is mostly about descent, not early childhood exposure, positing some sort of race-memory. (He points out that people can directly modify language by coining words, but doesn't realize how difficult that makes his racial position).

How does Humboldt claim that the grammar of Sanskritic languages is better, closer to the logic of thought, than Chinese? He identifies the Sanskritic languages as "inflectional", which he in term relates to their "correct" understanding of verbs as "synthetic positing". Chinese, on the other hand, is said to be an "isolating language", without any phonetic markers for the parts of speech of its words. This apparently means it doesn't understand what verbs are really about.

Similar to Fichte's claim that only Germans can perceive infinity and make unbounded progress, Humboldt argues that all "isolating" literary cultures will necessarily stagnate unless they are broken apart by foreign influence, while those that understand "synthetic positing" correctly have infinite cultural progress within them (it's not clear to me if he gives the Semitic languages this possibility of infinite progress too, or only the Sanskritic ones).

Overall, despite getting a lot of its philosophy of language and cultural nationalism from Herder, I found this much more objectionable. I think the influence of Kantianism on the German Romantics is rather to blame, insofar as it encouraged the identification of the internal language of thought (itself a dubious notion) with philosophical logic. Herder's identification of the internal language as a compendium of distinctions that one is prepared to make between objects, while still not equating inner and outer languages, brings them closer, forcing a recognition of the diversity of internal language parallel to that of external language. (To be clear, Humboldt does keep this Herderian notion of internal language as a compendium of "concepts", if not mere distinctions, but adds a universal aspect too.)

[Mélinée]

One must not consider a language as a product dead, and formed but once; it is an animate being, and ever creative. Human thought elaborates itself with the progress of intelligence; and of this thought language is a manifestation. An idiom cannot therefore remain stationary; it walks, it develops, it grows up, it fortifies itself, it becomes old, and it reaches decrepitude.

[Ondřej Šefčík · Rating 5 out of 5]

Klasicke dilo, ktere stoji za to číst i po 200 letech. Vadil mi, kupodivu, slovensky překlad, nsgeoufam si rici, jestki to bylo jeho spatnou urovni nebo mym odvyknutim slovenstine, nicmene slovensky ctu hodně... ale Humboldt stoji za to a lituju, ze cesky preklad neni.

[Todd Marek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Classic book that has been highly influential for several strands of contemporary linguistic research. The book gets fairly obnoxious when it begins tying languages (arbitrarily) to a speculative set of levels of mental development. If you can put that aside as a product of the colonialist mindset prevalent in much of the scientific thinking of the 1800s there is some interesting theorizing about the relationship of language to thought, although this is really an elaboration on Herder's earlier thinking on the subject.

[Nicholas Shelton · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm sure the reason I didn't like this book had more to do with me than with the actual book.
I don't think I got anything out of this book. I was expecting hardcore philosophy and instead I found linguistics.
I did not see how he tied in his surveys of languages to the development of national character. Perhaps, it's only because I did not understand the linguistic jargon but he seemed to summarize peculiarities in languages but never clearly explain their effect on speakers.