[Lingtyp] Wilhelm von Humboldt, 250 years today

[Joao Veloso]

Thanks, Martin, for this beautiful idea of congratulating someone's birthday so long after his death, and thanks for recalling our attention to the fundamentals of our knowledge.

J.

---

Jo?o Veloso
Professor Auxiliar com Agrega??o
Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto, Dep. Estudos Portugueses e Rom?nicos
Coordenador do Centro de Lingu?stica da Universidade do Porto
FLUP
Via Panor?mica, s/n
4150-564 PORTO
Portugal
Telef. 22 607 71 00
Telem. 91 60 60 948
https://ojoaoveloso.wordpress.com
https://phonup.wordpress.com/
E-mail: jveloso at letras.up.pt --- ojoaoveloso at gmail.com
http://www.degois.pt/visualizador/curriculum.jsp?key=8420509535360710
ORCID: 0000-0002-5070-8838


De: Martin Haspelmath<mailto:haspelmath at shh.mpg.de>
Enviada: ?quinta-feira?, ?22? de ?junho? de ?2017 ?07?:?44
Para: lingtyp<mailto:LINGTYP at LISTSERV.LINGUISTLIST.ORG>

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<mailto: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