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Congratulating living people is potentially risky, but this time
I'll try by congratulating <a
href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_von_Humboldt">Wilhelm
von Humboldt</a> 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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
As an introduction to some of the best of his work, I recommend
Frans Plank's paper "<a
href="http://ling.uni-konstanz.de/pages/home/plank/for_download/publications/66_Plank_Humboldt_Dual_1989.pdf">On
Humboldt on the dual</a>" (
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In Roberta Corrigan, Fred Eckman, & Michael Noonan (eds.)<em> </em>1989.<em>
Linguistic categorization</em>, 293-333. (Current Issues in
Linguistic Theory, 61.) Amsterdam: Benjamins.)<br>
<br>
As was made clear by Daniel Jacob at the recent <a
href="http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/izeus/zentrum/veranstaltungen/konferenzen/index.html">FU
Berlin workshop</a> 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 <a
href="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">this
paper</a> 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.<br>
<br>
(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: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantikerhaus">https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romantikerhaus</a>).<br>
<br>
Martin<br>
<br>
<pre class="moz-signature" cols="72">--
Martin Haspelmath (<a class="moz-txt-link-abbreviated" href="mailto:haspelmath@shh.mpg.de">haspelmath@shh.mpg.de</a>)
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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