The Philosophical Foundations of Humboldt's Linguistic Doctrines

Download or read book The Philosophical Foundations of Humboldt's Linguistic Doctrines written by Martin L. Manchester and published by John Benjamins Publishing. This book was released on 1985-01-01 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wilhelm von Humboldt s writings on language are a mixture of philosophical theorizing about mind and language on the one hand, and on the other hand, specialized studies of the most detailed sort of both the classical languages and languages which only in Humboldt s day were becoming known to European scholars, such as Sanskrit, Chinese, and native north and south American languages. This book endeavors to show that Humboldt s work on language is a coherent system of thought; to recapture and expose the systematic structure of assumption, hypothesis, argument and conclusion; and to assign many of the specific themes in his writing to a place within this structure.