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Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt
(June 22, 1767 – April 8, 1835), government functionary,
diplomat, philosopher, founder of Humboldt Universität in
Berlin, friend of Goethe and especially of Schiller, is
especially remembered as a German linguist who introduced a
knowledge of the Basque language to European intellectuals.
His
younger brother Alexander von Humboldt was an equally famous
naturalist and scientist.
****
Philosopher and
diplomat
Wilhelm von Humboldt was a philosopher of note and published On
the Limits of State Action in 1810, the boldest defence of the
liberties of the Enlightenment. It anticipated John Stuart
Mill's essay On Liberty by which von Humboldt's ideas became
known in the English-speaking world. He describes the
development of classical liberalism and the role of liberty in
individual development and in pursuit of excellence. He also
describes the necessary conditions without which the state must
not be allowed to limit the action of individuals. Friedrich
Hayek considers Humboldt the greatest German philosopher of
liberty.
As
Prussian minister of education, he oversaw the system of
Technische Hochschulen and gymnasien that made Prussia, and
subsequently the German Empire, the strongest European power and
the scientific and intellectual leader of the world.
As
a successful diplomat between 1802 and 1819, Humboldt was
plenipotentiary Prussian minister at Rome from 1802, ambassador
at Vienna from 1812 during the closing struggles of the
Napoleonic Wars, at the congress of Prague (1813) where he was
instrumental in drawing Austria to ally with Prussia and Russia
against France, a signer of the peace treaty at Paris and the
treaty between Prussia and defeated Saxony (1815), at Frankfurt
settling post-Napoleonic Germany, and at the congress at Aachen
in 1818. However, the increasingly reactionary policy of the
Prussian government made him give up political life in 1819; and
from that time forward he devoted himself solely to literature
and study.
Linguist
Wilhelm von Humboldt was an adept linguist who translated Pindar
and Aeschylus and studied the Basque language.
Von
Humboldt's work as a philologist in the Basque language has had
the most extended life of all his other work. The result of his
visit to the Basque country was Researches into the Early
Inhabitants of Spain by the help of the Basque language (1821).
In this work von Humboldt endeavored to show, by an examination
of geographical placenames, that a race or races speaking
dialects allied to modern Basque once extended throughout Spain,
southern France and the Balearic Islands; he identified these
people with the Iberians of classical writers, and he further
surmised that they had been allied with the Berbers of northern
Africa. Von Humboldt's pioneering work has been superseded in
its details by modern linguistics and archaeology, but is
sometimes still uncritically followed even today.
Von
Humboldt died while still preparing on his greatest work, on the
ancient Kawi language of Java, but its introduction was
published in 1836 as The Heterogeneity of Language and its
Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind. This essay
on the philosophy of speech:
"... first clearly laid down that the character and structure of
a language expresses the inner life and knowledge of its
speakers, and that languages must differ from one another in the
same way and to the same degree as those who use them. Sounds do
not become words until a meaning has been put into them, and
this meaning embodies the thought of a community. What Humboldt
terms the inner form of a language is just that mode of denoting
the relations between the parts of a sentence which reflects the
manner in which a particular body of men regards the world about
them. It is the task of the morphology of speech to distinguish
the various ways in which languages differ from each other as
regards their inner form, and to classify and arrange them
accordingly." 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica
He
is credited with being the first European linguist to identify
human language as a rule-governed system, rather than just a
collection of words and phrases paired with meanings. This idea
is one of the foundations of Noam Chomsky's theory of language.
Chomsky frequently quotes Humboldt's description of language as
a system which "makes infinite use of finite means", meaning
that an infinite number of sentences can be created using a
finite number of grammatical rules. In recent times, Humboldt
has also been credited as an originator of the linguistic
relativity hypothesis (more commonly known as the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis), approximately a century before either Edward Sapir
or Benjamin Whorf.
References
The
first subsection below is a list of works written by von Humbold
himself, the second section lists works written about him or in
reaction to his writing.
Works by von
Humboldt
Socrates and Plato on the Divine (orig. Sokrates und Platon über
die Gottheit). 1787-1790
On
the Limits of State Action (orig. Ideen zu einem Versuch, die
Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen). 1791.
Über den Geschlechtsunterschied. 1794
Über männliche und weibliche Form. 1795
Outline of a Comparative Anthropology (orig. Plan einer
vergleichenden Anthropologie). 1797.
The
Eighteenth Century (orig. Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert). 1797.
Ästhetische Versuche I. - Über Goethe's Hermann und Dorothea.
1799.
Latium und Hellas (1806)
Geschichte des Verfalls und Untergangs der griechischen
Freistaaten. 1807-1808.
Pindars "Olympische Oden". Translation from Greek, 1816.
Aischylos' "Agamemnon". Translation from Greek, 1816.
Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium in Beziehung auf die
verschiedenen Epochen der Sprachentwicklung. 1820.
Über die Aufgabe des Geschichtsschreibers. 1821.
Researches into the Early Inhabitants of Spain with the help of
the Basque language (orig. Prüfung der Untersuchungen über die
Urbewohner Hispaniens vermittelst der vaskischen Sprache). 1821.
Über die Entstehung der grammatischen Formen und ihren Einfluss
auf die Ideenentwicklung. 1822.
Upon Writing and its Relation to Speech (orig. Über die
Buchstabenschrift und ihren Zusammenhang mit dem Sprachbau).
1824.
Bhagavad-Gitá. 1826.
Über den Dualis. 1827.
On
the languages of the South Seas (orig. Über die Sprache der
Südseeinseln). 1828.
On
Schiller and the Path of Spiritual Development (orig. Über
Schiller und den Gang seiner Geistesentwicklung). 1830.
Rezension von Goethes Zweitem römischem Aufenthalt. 1830.
The
Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual
Development of Mankind (orig. Über die Verschiedenheit des
menschlichen Sprachbaus und seinen Einfluss auf die geistige
Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts). 1836.
Works by other
authors
Hegel, 1827. On The Episode of the Mahabharata Known by the Name
Bhagavad-Gita by Wilhelm Von Humboldt
****
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URL of Original Article:
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Date Article Copied:
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