Abstract
Humboldt was a philosopher and linguist with a keen interest in the nature and formation of languages, and in the interconnections between language and thought. The key for him was to ground language evolution in both mind and body, form and matter. More specifically, the nature and formation of human languages derive from the need to express thoughts, pursuant to cognitive laws, but also from our particular human capacities for producing speech sounds. The exceedingly complicated story of how these twin forces interact is presented in the selections included here. One crucial highlight is that, for Humboldt, the influence does not run in only one direction, but is reciprocal. As a result, once a language is formed, it can shape the mental powers of its speakers. (Humboldt is thus often take to be a precursor to Sapir-Whorf style linguistic relativism.) Given that the forces of mind and sound-production would seem to be universal, at least initially, Humboldt faced the obvious issue of where diversity of linguistic form comes from. Again, the story is complicated and sophisticated, but the main idea is that most languages fall short of an ideal solution to “encoding cognition in sound” because of historical contingencies. What this means, however, is that further development of human thought might allow the evolution of a truly ideal tongue.
Text from: Losonsky, M. ed. 2000. Humboldt: On Language. 2nd Edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
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Notes
- 1.
Cf. §6, 7, and 22.
- 2.
Compare my essay on the task of the historian in the Paper of the Berlin Academy of Science, 1820–1, p. 322.
- 3.
Cf. § 22 below.
- 4.
Cf. §2–3, 6–7, and §22 below.
- 5.
Now this also explains why no regard is paid, in the form of the Sanskrit roots, to the laws of euphony. The tables of roots that have come down to us everywhere bear the mark of being a labour of the grammarians, and a whole number of roots may owe their existence solely to the grammarians’ habit of abstraction. Pott’s admirable researches (Etymological Investigation, 1833) have already assigned a great many to this region, and we may hope for many more from the continuance of his work.
- 6.
Some particularly notable examples of this kind are to be found in my essay on the genesis of grammatical forms, Paper of the Berlin Academy of Science, 1822, 1823; Historical-Philological Class, p. 413.
- 7.
The influence of the disyllabism of the Semitic root-words has not only been expressly noted by Ewald (in his Hebrew Grammar, p. 144, §93; p. 165, §95), but also masterfully set forth, in its prevailing spirit, throughout the whole of linguistic studies. That the Semitic languages take on a special character, in that they create their word-forms, and in part also their inflections, almost entirely by changes within the words, has been fully worked out by Bopp, and applied in a new and ingenious way to the division of languages into classes (Comparative Grammar, pp. 107–13).
- 8.
Bopp (Annuals of Scientific Criticism, 1834, vol. 2, p. 465) was the first to notice that the normal use of the potential mood consists in expressing general categorical claims, in separation and independence from any particular time determination. The correctness of this observation is confirmed by a mass of examples, especially in the moral sayings of the Hitôpadĕsa. But if we reflect more closely on the reason for this at first sight striking employment of this tense, we find it to be used in a quite peculiar sense in these cases as a subjunctive, except that the whole idiom must be explained elliptically. Instead of saying: “The sage never acts otherwise,” we say “The sage would so act,” the omitted words “under all circumstances and at any time” being here understood. So in virtue of this usage I should not like to call the potential a mood of necessity. Here, rather, it seems to me to be the quite pure and simple subjunctive, abstracted from all material auxiliary concepts of can, may, should etc. The peculiarity of this usage lies in the mentally appended ellipsis, and only in the so-called potential insofar as this is motivated, precisely, by the ellipsis, primarily before the indicative. For there is no denying that the use of the subjunctive, as if by cutting off all other possibilities, has a stronger effect here than the simply assertive indicative. I mention this expressly, because it is not unimportant to preserve and cherish the pure and normal meaning of grammatical forms, so long as we are not unavoidably forced to do the opposite.
- 9.
This confusion of one grammatical form with another has been treated more at length in my essay on the genesis of grammatical forms, Paper of the Berlin Academy of Science, 1822, 1823; Historical-Philological Class, pp. 404–7.
- 10.
The close connection between the folk character of the various Greek peoples and their poetry, music, dance and mime, and even their architecture, has been set in a clear and full light by A. Boeckh, in the essays accompanying his edition of Pindar, where a rich hoard of variegated and until now largely recondite learning is brought to the reader’s attention, in a methodically intelligible arrangement. For he is not content to depict the character of the tonalities in general terms, but goes into the particular metrical and musical points relating to the differences between them, a thing that had never previously been done in this thoroughly historical and exactly scientific manner. It would be uncommonly desirable that this philologist, who combines the most extensive knowledge of the language with a rare insight into Greek antiquity in all its parts and propensities, should very soon execute his plan to devote a separate work to the influence of the character and customs of the various Greek peoples upon their music, poetry, and art, in order to treat of this important topic over its full range and extent. Cf. his remarks upon such a project in his edition of Pindar, vol. 1, The Poetry of Pindar, p. 253n.14, and more especially p. 279.
- 11.
Cf. above, § 2, 6, and 7.
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Freund, M. (2017). Wilhelm von Humboldt. In: Cameron, M., Hill, B., Stainton, R. (eds) Sourcebook in the History of Philosophy of Language. Springer Graduate Texts in Philosophy, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-26908-5_38
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