[Lingtyp] Wilhelm von Humboldt, 250 years today

[Martin Haspelmath]

Congratulating living people is potentially risky, but this time I'll 
try by congratulating Wilhelm von Humboldt 
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt> on his 250th 
birthday today, as there seems to be no doubt that the unbroken 
tradition of systematic cross-linguistic ("typological") research, 
including theoretical speculation, dates back to his work of the 1820s.

He coined the terms "agglutination" and "incorporation", and through the 
likes of Bopp, Schleicher, Whitney, Gabelentz, Jespersen and Sapir, this 
tradition of thinking about world-wide diversity continued into the 20th 
century.

As an introduction to some of the best of his work, I recommend Frans 
Plank's paper "On Humboldt on the dual 
<http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/plank/for_download/publications/66_Plank_Humboldt_Dual_1989.pdf>" 
( In Roberta Corrigan, Fred Eckman, & Michael Noonan 
(eds.)//1989./Linguistic categorization/, 293-333. (Current Issues in 
Linguistic Theory, 61.) Amsterdam: Benjamins.)

As was made clear by Daniel Jacob at the recent FU Berlin workshop 
<http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/izeus/zentrum/veranstaltungen/konferenzen/index.html> 
on the occasion of Humboldt's birthday, Humboldt's interest in language 
diversity was also inextricably linked to a Eurocentric conviction that 
Indo-European languages are "more highly developed", and to a kind of 
anti-enlightenment view that different nations/ethnicities think 
differently and thus a universal rationality is not possible (see also 
this paper 
<https://www.academia.edu/13844365/Zwischen_Universalit%C3%A4t_Historizit%C3%A4t_und_Typologie_Projektionen_des_Verh%C3%A4ltnisses_von_Sprache_und_Denken_bei_W._von_Humboldt> 
by Daniel Jacob). This latter view thus separates us from Humboldt, but 
nevertheless, I find it interesting to reflect on broken and unbroken 
traditions of particular intellectual pursuits.

(Now based in Jena, I also find it intriguing that Humboldt, F. Schlegel 
and A. von Schlegel, the three most famous names for typology between 
1808 and 1836, all spent some formative years in Jena in the 1790s, the 
Schlegels as part of the famous literary movement of "Early 
Romanticism". Jena even has a museum for this movement: 
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantikerhaus).

Martin

-- 
Martin Haspelmath (haspelmath at shh.mpg.de)
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History
Kahlaische Strasse 10	
D-07745 Jena
&
Leipzig University
IPF 141199
Nikolaistrasse 6-10
D-04109 Leipzig





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