TEXTS IN GERMAN PHILOSOPHY General Editor: CHARLES TAYLOR yAdvisory Board: RUDIGER BUBNER, RAYMOND GEUSS, PETER HEATH, GARBIS KORTIAN, WILHELM VOSSENKUHL, MARX WARTOFSKY The purpose of this series is to make available, in English, central works of German philosophy from Kant to the present. Although there is rapidly growing interest in the English-speaking world in different aspects of the German philosophical tradition as an extremely fertile source of study and inspiration, many of its crucial texts are not available in English or exist only in inadequate or dated translations. The series is intended to remedy that situation, and the translations where appropriate will be accompanied by historical and philosophical introductions and notes. Single works, selections from a single author and anthologies will all be represented. FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Daybreak FRIEDRIGH NIETZSCHE Untimely Meditations J. G. FICHTE The Science of Knowledge LAWRENCE 8. STEPELEVICH (ED.) The Young Hegelians: an anthology FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE Human all too Human HEINRICH RICKERT The Limits of Concept Formation in Natural Scienceei asics RRO ae Ea se er WILHELM VON HUMBOLDT ON LANGUAGE THE DIVERSITY OF HUMAN LANGUAGE-STRUCTURE AND ITS INFLUENCE ON THE MENTAL DEVELOPMENT OF MANKIND * TRANSLATED BY PETER HEATH WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HANS AARSLEFF The right of the University of Camridg 1 print ond sel all mannet of books was granted by Henry VIA in 1334, The University has printed ‘and published continuously since 1584, CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS CAMBRIDGE NEW YORK NEW ROCHELLE MELBOURNE SYDNEYPublished by the Press Syndicate of the University of Cambridge The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge cnz 2RP 32 East 57th Street, New York, ny 10022, USA 10 Stamford Road, Oakleigh, Melbourne 3166, Australia © Cambridge University Press 1988 First published 1988 Printed in Great Britain by the University Press, Cambridge British Library cataloguing in publication data Humboldt, Wilhelm von On language. ~ (Texts in German philosophy). 1. Languages ~ Philosophy I. Title II. Series 4o1 106 Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data Humboldt, Wilhelm, Freiherr von, 1767-1835. On language: the diversity of human language-structure and its influence on the mental development of mankind. (Texts in German philosophy) Originally published as the introduction to the author’s Uber die Kavi-Sprache auf der Insel Java (1836-1840) and also issued separately (1836) with title: Uber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts. Bibliography. Includes index. 1, Language and languages. 2. Intellect. I. Heath, Peter Lauchlan, 1922-. II. Title. IIT. Series. 103.4813 1985 410 84-28561 ISBN 0 521 25747 6 (hard covers) ISBN 0 521 31513 1 (paperback)Contents Introduction by Hans Aarsleff vii Translator’ note Ixvi Glossary Ixviii Preface by Alexander von Humboldt 3 Note on transliteration of foreign alphabets 7 1 Distribution and cultural connections of the Malayan races. Plan of the present work 15 2 General consideration of the course of man’s development 20 3 The same, continued 23 4 Effects of exceptional mental power. Civilization, culture and education 29 5 Conjoint action of individuals and nations 37 6 The same, continued 41 7 Transition to closer consideration of language 46 8 Form of languages 48 g Nature and constitution of languages as such 54 10 Sound-system of languages. Nature of the articulated sound 65 Sound-changes 69; Allocation of sounds to concepts 71; Designation of general relations 74; The sense of articulation 77 Sound-system of languages 79 Technique of this 80 11 Inner linguistic form 81 12 Combination of sound with inner linguistic form 88 13 The procedure of language more fully explained go Verbal affinity and verbal form 93 14 Isolation, inflection and agglutination of words 100 15 Verbal unity more closely examined. Incorporative system of languages 109 Means of designating verbal unity. The pause 111; Letter-change 113 16 Accent 125 17 Incorporative system of languages. Framing of the sentence 128 18 Congruence of sound-forms in languages with gram- matical requirements 140 vvl 19 20 ar 22 23 24 25 CONTENTS Main division of languages, according to the purity of their formative principle Character of languages Poetry and prose 168 Power of languages, to evolve felicitously from one to another Act of spontaneous positing in languages 184; The Verb 186 ; The Conjunction 200; The Relative Pronoun 201; Inflected languages, considered in their progressive development 202 ; Languages evolved from Latin Retrospect on the course of the inquiry so far Languages that deviate from purely regular form 216 Nature and origin of less perfect language-structure The Semitic languages 223; The Delaware language The Chinese language The same, continued The Burmese language Whether the polysyllabic language-structure has evolved from the monosyllabic Index 143 148 182 207 214 220 226 230 233 237 262 289Introduction HANS AARSLEFF I The man and the writing In the long history of western reflection on language and its relation to ourselves and the world we live in, few works have the stature of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s great essay on the philosophy of language which is here offered in Peter Heath’s excellent translation from the original German. It was first published posthumously in 1836, within a year of the author’s death, under a title that proclaims the central theme that had inspired his study of language and languages since he first turned his attention to the subject around 1800: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind. It appeared as the general introduction to a very large work with the simple title On the Kawi Language on the Island of Java, a work of nearly two thousand pages in three volumes that were published in the transactions of the Berlin Academy during the years 1836-9. Obviously, the publication of so large a work in the transactions must be seen as a tribute and memorial to the academy’s most illustrious member over the preceding decades, for it meant setting aside the rule that only papers actually read in the sessions could appear in the transactions, a rule that in this case was met only by the fact that a few small parts had been delivered before the academy in earlier years. Humboldt was a public figure, both as statesman and diplomat and as scholar. It is the aim of this introduction to do three things: first, to tell who Humboldt was and what he did; secondly, to set forth the prominent features of his argument and philosophy; and thirdly, to explore the intellectual background and context of his thought. Since our text is known as the Kawi Introduction, I shall for convenience use the abbreviation KI. Humboldt was born in Berlin in 1767 as the son of a court-official and of a woman who was much younger than the father and a wealthy widow when he married her. His brother Alexander, the famous scientist and traveller, was born barely two years later, and the two boys were educated together at home by carefully chosen private tutors, from whom they, in addition to thorough instruction in the classical languages, received the kind of general education that would prepare them for the public careers they were expected to viivi INTRODUCTION follow. After the father’s death in 1779, their education was guided by the ambitious and rather cold-hearted mother, who sent them, still under supervision, to the minor but safely traditional university at Frankfurt an der Oder before they were allowed to proceed to the modern and liberal University of Géttingen, where they benefited from the livefy intellectual atmosphere and studied under famous scholars. Wilhelm completed his legal studies and for a short while held a government post in Berlin, but gave it up in 1791 when he married a wealthy woman, who already knew Schiller and Goethe. Humboldt never had to work for a living, and for the next dozen years he did what he prized most: he cultivated his mind and explored his individuality in all the ways that were open to him. He resided in different places: on his father-in-law’s estate near Erfurt, in Weimar and Jena to be close to Goethe and Schiller, in Dresden, and on the family estate near Berlin, Tegel, which he later rebuilt with great deliberation in the classical style and made his preferred residence. He also began to make himself a minor literary figure in the company of the great. He studied much, wrote a great deal, and published little — a pattern that persisted for the rest of his life. He preferred study, found writing hard and disagreeable, and left many more writings unfinished than he completed and put into print. In 1796 the mother’s death left both sons with very large inheri- tances. In spite of the vast expense and a growing family, Wilhelm decided to live in Italy for a while, but when war blocked the way, they all instead journeyed to Paris. Here they spent four years between November of 1797 and late summer of 1801, interrupted by a seven-month journey through southern France and Spain, where the wife, it seems to Humboldt’s surprise, gave birth to a child, and a shorter journey through the Basque regions by Humboldt alone during the spring of 1801. It was in these years, when the world was made new, that Paris was becoming the capital of the nineteenth century. From all parts of Europe poets, scholars, writers, and scientists streamed to Paris to be part of the action, which was both politically and intellectually exciting. Among them was Wordsworth. The Paris experience had a profound impact on Humboldt’s thought, and he made it emphatically clear in letters he wrote at the time. A year after his arrival he wrote to a friend in Germany that in spite of much he found disagreeable, ‘nevertheless I cannot deny... that my residence here opens a new epoch in my thinking’, In the same year he wrote to another friend, who was planning to leave Paris, that he did not approve of the decision, ‘whatever you say, Paris is always interesting, and you wish to return to Berlin, to a place that is less important by a wide margin’. In the fall of 1801, soon after