Wilhelm von Humboldt
The source of general linguistics, eighty years before Saussure. Reading the posthumous On the Diversity of Human Language Construction (1836) — energeia, inner form, worldview.
Reading Humboldt's On the Diversity of Human Language Construction (1836) — Language Is Not a Product but an Activity
Eighty years before Saussure's Course, eighty-five before Sapir's Language, general linguistics began here. Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote it up to his death; it appeared posthumously. Energeia, inner form, worldview, "infinite use of finite means" — the frame of the book, from the German.
Energeia — Language Is Not a Thing but an Act
What sits in the dictionary is not language. For Humboldt, the reality of a language is "the ever-repeated labour of the mind" — the act of speaking itself. The most-quoted passage of On the Diversity, from the German.
Inner Form — a Language's "Shape" Is Neither Its Sounds nor Its Rules
In Sanskrit the elephant is "the twice-drinker," "the two-tusked," "the one with a hand." One object, three concepts. A language presents not objects but ways of grasping them — Humboldt's "form," from the German.
Worldview — a Language Draws a Circle Around a People
"Every language draws a circle around the people to whom it belongs." But Humboldt also wrote that the circle is not a prison — to learn a foreign language is to gain a new standpoint. The source of linguistic relativity, from the German.
Infinite Use of Finite Means — the Source of Generative Grammar
From a limited stock of sounds, words and rules, a speaker makes an unbounded number of sentences never uttered before. In 1966 Chomsky put Humboldt's phrase at the head of "the creative aspect of language use." What was carried on, and what was left.
The Organ That Forms Thought, and the Speech That Lives in Dialogue
A word is not an imprint of the object but of the image the object produces in the soul. And language is not made by one person alone — "I" already contains "thou." Humboldt on language and thought, language and the other.
A Typology of Languages, and the Problem of "Ranking" — from Humboldt to Sapir
Isolating, agglutinating, inflecting, incorporating. This map of languages by structure begins with Humboldt. But he placed inflecting languages at the top. How the twentieth century, and Sapir, took that ranking apart.