Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development (Pennsyvania Paperbacks) - Softcover

Humboldt, Wilhelm Von

Softcover

ISBN 10: 081221028X ISBN 13: 9780812210286

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972

Synopsis

Linguistic Variability and Intellectual Development, Wilhelm von Humbolt's most famous work, was published by his brother Alexander posthumously, in 1836. It promptly established itself as a classic in the philosophy of language and has held that position ever since. With many examples from a vast multitude of languages, from Sanskrit to Delaware Indian, the author shows how character and structure of a language expresses the inner life and knowledge of its speakers and how their intellectual development is in turn shaped by their language.

About this title

About the Author

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), German man of letters and diplomat, was also an extraordinary philologist.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Objective of the Present Treatise

The distribution of human beings into races and tribes and the variation in their languages and dialects are certainly closely related, but both of these result primarily from the productivity of human intellectual power in all its forms. It is in the creation of human intellectual power that they find their recognition and their explanation to the extent that research is able to penetrate the relationship between them. This revelation of human intellectual power about the earth during the course of millennia, varying in type and degree, constitutes the ultimate goal of all intellectual activity; it is, moreover, the ultimate idea which the history of the world must clearly strive to produce.

This expansion of the intellectual life is the sole possession that the individual, to the extent that he participates, may regard as indestructible. And in a nation it represents that entity from which, in turn, great individualities unfailingly develop. Comparative linguistics, or the precise investigation of the diversity through which innumerable peoples resolve the problem of linguistic structure imposed upon them as human beings, fails to attract serious interest unless its relationship to the pattern of national intellectual power is made clear. But the insight into the actual nature of a nation and into the internal relationships of an individual language, as well as its relationship to linguistic requirements in general, depends entirely upon consideration of the total intellectual individuality. For this alone, dictated by nature and its milieu, furnishes the articulation for the character of the nation. Upon its heritage alone, consisting of an accumulation of deeds, institutions, and productive ideas, is based the nation's character and rests its dignity and the power to continue itself diachronically down to posterity. Language [human speech] on the other hand is the organ of the internal being, this self that progressively achieves internal cognition and enunciation. All of its tiniest rootlets are anchored firmly in the national intellectual potential. The more appropriately the latter reacts upon it, the more principled and richer its development. As language in its intricacies is but an effect of the national linguistic sense, those problems concerning the complex structuring of languages (from which also stem their most important variables) cannot be solved adequately if one does not subscribe to this viewpoint. Material cannot, of course, be sought there for that which is inherently restricted to historical treatment by comparative linguistics. Nevertheless, an insight into the original concatenation of facts and a comprehension of language as an internally cohesive organism may be obtained. These, in turn, aid in a correct appraisal of individual factors.

Observation of the connection between linguistic variation and the distribution of tribes on the one hand, and the production of human intellectual power on the other, as a relationship developing progressively in varying degree and in new configurations, is the theme with which this treatise will be concerned, insofar as these two phenomena are capable of clarifying each other.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 1972
• ISBN 10: 081221028X
• ISBN 13: 9780812210286
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320