topics: |  linguistics | history | europe

One interesting aspect is how this book presents a different view of
Humboldt than is traditional (as in the Encyclopedia Britannica view
appended at the bottom).

From chapter on 19th c.

Seuren introduces Humboldt rather negatively:

     The German amateur philosopher-linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835)
     is best known for the voluminous introduction to three hefty volumes [on
     the Kawi language of Java], "On Language: On the Diversity of Human Language
     Construction and its Influence on the Mental Development of the Human
     Species" (1836).

Wilhelm, brother of the famous scientist and explorer Alexander, was a
wealthy man who did not have to work for a living, and held a series of
senior posts in the Hohenzollern government.  Born to a prominent
Pomeranian family, his father was Royal Chamberlain and his mother, the widow
of a wealthy baron, often sustained his and his brother's lifestyles.  Lived
in Paris 1797-1801 (Napoleon's coup was in 1799), and was infl much by
Diderot and de Condillac.  He often served as an high official in the
government of Friedrich Wilhelm II; from 1802-1808 was accredited to the
Vatican as a Prussian diplomat, subsequently he was in charge of Education at
the Ministry of Interior in Berlin.  He formulated the principles of
classical secondary education, the "Gymnasium", in use even now in Germany.
He was the main force behind the foundation of the Humbold University; (not
Alexander, whose statue can be seen on the campus).

Linguistic prejudice: inflectional languages tend to be superior

(p.110)

The main focus of his "On language" is how language differences reflect
national traits.  Each nation developed the language most suited to its "spirit",
and 2/3ds of the book is devoted to pointing out the deficiencies in the
languages and hence the cultures of other groups.

    Other communities delivered inferior linguistic products, due to their
    inferior intelligence and culture.  Chinese, American Indian languages,
    Malay, for example, have their charm and possible other merits but they
    cannot compete with the classical languages of western civilization as
    regards clarity, culture, sophistication.  Thought and language are
    inseparatble.  Yet one often finds that a grammatical construction
    expresses thought in a disorderly way.  One must therefore distinguish
    between the "outer form" of a language (its "surface structure") and its
    "inner form", a difficult and vague term best taken to stand both for
    semantic structure or thought structure and for the innate language faculty.

Languages with a flectional morphology were both the expression and the
source of superior intellect and civilization.

WvH idolized Sanskrit - the most perfect language in history, closely
followed by Greek, Latin, and the Romance languages.  Languages that had
shed their inflectional roots were saved because of their "staunch and
sturdy races".  He was particularly derisive about Chinese as a tone
language.

Seuren concludes that "one can say without exaggeration that H had a
fundamentally chauvinist mind." Some e.g. Aarsleff in his intro to
Peter Heath's 1988 translation, even levels the charge of racism.

[in comparison to Seuren, an article in Britannica 2008 (see below) -
attempts to derive Saussurean linguistics ultimately from those of Humboldt,
who is comparatively glorified. ]

"Inner form" and Chomsky

Chomsky refers to Humboldt on two points.  One is the reference to "inner
form" as an analogue of "deep structure" in his Aspects of the Theory of
Syntax (1965):

    In place of the terms "deep structure" and "surface structure", one might
    use the corresponding Humboldtian notions "inner form" and "outer form"
    of a sentence... The terms "depth grammar" are familiar in modern
    philosophy and something roughly like the sense here intended
    (cf. Wittgenstein's distinction of 'Tiefengrammatik' and
    'Oberflaechengrammatik', 1953, p. 168) [Chomsky 1965, 198-9]

Now, while pro-Chomskians interpret "inner form" in Humboldt as a level of
syntax, this term in Humboldt is unclear and confused and certainly includes
much of semantics along with grammar. It appears to be a "semi-mystical"
notion comprising the "total mental machinery" behind language, which
includes "at least both" the grammar or syntactical rules and the semantics
or logical form.

Intellectual roots

There is much literature on the intellectual roots of Humboldt's ideas.  He
had never read Kant.  It is certain that some of his ideas were shaped by
Friedrich Schiller, whom he admired to exaltation, and others by the
philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, who in 1772 published a higly romantic
essay on the origin of language.  Also influenced by French ideologues like de
Condillac.

Heeschen 1977 correctly stresses that Humboldt's ideas of language creation
were primarily aesthetic.  language originates in the urge to express poetic
beauty (an idea that derives via Herder from the early 18th c. Neaopolitan
philosopher Giambattista Vico.

Humboldt was more of a dilettante - in comparison to his more professional
contemporaries in linguistics, he did not adopt an empirical stance - his
main interest was not in answring empirical questions about language development
and structure, but the establishment of the superiority of European languages and
culture.

Influence of Chomsky on Humboldt: Britannica

Article, Linguistics;
section on "Other 19th-century theories and development science : Inner and outer form"

One of the most original, if not one of the most immediately influential,
linguists of the 19th century was the learned Prussian statesman, Wilhelm von
Humboldt (died 1835). His interests, unlike those of most of his
contemporaries, were not exclusively historical. Following the German
philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), he stressed the
connection between national languages and national character: this was but a
commonplace of romanticism. More original was Humboldt's theory of "inner"
and "outer" form in language. The outer form of language was the raw material
(the sounds) from which different languages were fashioned; the inner form
was the pattern, or structure, of grammar and meaning that was imposed upon
this raw material and differentiated one language from another. This
"structural" conception of language was to become dominant, for a time at
least, in many of the major centres of linguistics by the middle of the 20th
century.

Another of Humboldt's ideas was that language was something dynamic,
rather than static, and was an activity itself rather than the product of
activity. A language was not a set of actual utterances produced by speakers
but the underlying principles or rules that made it possible for speakers to
produce such utterances and, moreover, an unlimited number of them. This idea
was taken up by a German philologist, Heymann Steinthal, and, what is more
important, by the physiologist and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and thus
influenced late 19th- and early 20th-century theories of the psychology of
language. Its influence, like that of the distinction of inner and outer
form, can also be seen in the thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss
linguist. But its full implications were probably not perceived and made
precise until the middle of the 20th century, when the U.S. linguist Noam
Chomsky re-emphasized it and made it one of the basic notions of generative
grammar.