Abstract
More than a century and a half ago Wilhelm von Humboldt wrote a paragraph the first sentence of which reads: “The connexion between the form of sound and inherent laws of language constitutes its completion.” That Humboldt’s thoughts about inherent laws of language were ahead of his time is almost pathetically indicated by Steinthal (1884, pp. 362–367), Humboldt’s learned commentator from whose critical edition I have translated. He states immediately that he has little or nothing to contribute for elucidation of the paragraph. Ordinarily quite level-headed, he gets rather desperate and declares that while expressly resigning his “office as interpreter”, he would not dare just to reject a thought by Humboldt. Steinthal (1884, pp. 1–5) had also in his preface explained that through his many years of work on Humboldt’s linguistic texts, he often had the feeling that there was still more behind the words — something he could not fully grasp. Probably the difficulty had been summarized by Humboldt (1820) himself: “Nan is only human through language, but to invent language he had to be human.”
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Hansen, O. (1989). Is Speaking Man an Ethical Creature. In: Jackson, M.C., Keys, P., Cropper, S.A. (eds) Operational Research and the Social Sciences. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0789-1_37
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