Lecture The emergence of comparative-historical linguistics in the XIX century

W. v. Humboldt stresses the differences between individual languages as expressions of the experiences of individual speakers of these languages and therefore in a sense is one of the earliest proponents of the theory of linguistic relativism, although he does assume that all languages by necessity have similar things they need to to be able to express. According to him, language is a source of great creativity, and even the best descriptions provided by grammarians will never manage to capture all the relevant ideas underlying it. He is also known as the inventor of a classification scheme for linguistic typology, distinguishing between isolating, inflecting, agglutinating and incorporating languages.

Some of the most famous Indo-Europeanist scholars of the 19th century were Jakob Grimm – whose sound law expresses that the relationship between different languages can be established by tracing regular “letter changes” in words of the core language –, Schleicher, whose Stammbaumtheorie (‘family tree theory’) established a model for grouping related languages together and tracing them to common ancestors, only later to be replaced by Schmidt’ Wellentheorie (‘wave theory’), which stated that changes in the evolution of languages did not delineate languages as sharply as in Schleicher’s family tree model, but that they occured in waves spreading out into and influencing different languages.

Some of the most famous Indo-Europeanist scholars of the 19th century were Jakob Grimm – whose sound law expresses that the relationship between different languages can be established by tracing regular “letter changes” in words of the core language –, Schleicher, whose Stammbaumtheorie (‘family tree theory’) established a model for grouping related languages together and tracing them to common ancestors, only later to be replaced by Schmidt’ Wellentheorie (‘wave theory’), which stated that changes in the evolution of languages did not delineate languages as sharply as in Schleicher’s family tree model, but that they occured in waves spreading out into and influencing different languages.