Item #65394 Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues. Wilhelm von HUMBOLDT.
Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues

The Philosophy of Speech

Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues. und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts.

Berlin: Druckerei der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1836.

Uuml;ber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts. Berlin: Gedruckt in der Druckerei der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1836.

First edition of the first clear statement of the principle in ethnolinguistics that languages express the individuality and culture of their speakers, and that historical change in a language should be correlated with historical change within its culture. Quarto (10 3/8 x 8 1/16 inches; 263 x 218 mm). xi, [1, blank], 511, [1, blank] pp.

Publisher’s half brown cloth over marbled boards. Spine lettered in gilt. Spine and extremities neatly repaired, some light surface wear and sunning to spine. Boards with some chipping. Very light foxing to first and last gatherings. Housed in a quarter morocco clamshell. Overall, an excellent copy.

“In this, his philological testament, Humboldt attempts the classification of peoples according to language. More important than the classification itself was the corollary to it, which seemed to Humboldt to imply that the development of individual languages is affected by physiology, ethnography, history, geography, political and religious relationships, and that stages in the cultural development of peoples leave strongly marked traces in their languages. In the words of A.H. Sayce, a great philologist of our own day: “This essay first clearly laid down that the character and structure of a language expresses the inner life and knowledge of the speakers, and that languages must differ from one another in the same way and to the same degree as those who use them...What Humboldt terms the inner form of the language is just that mode of denoting the relations between the part of a sentence which reflects the manner in which a particular body of men regards the world about them’” (Printing and the Mind of Man).

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835), elder brother of scientist Alexander von Humboldt, was a writer, philologist, and prominent representative of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century humanistic school of thought. He introduced far-reaching school and university reforms into Prussia as part of the general reforms before and after the Wars of Liberation. Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts is a revision of his introduction to Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java (Berlin: 1836).

Printing and the Mind of Man 301.

HBS 65394.

$4,500.

Price: $4,500.00

Item #65394

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