American Indian and General Linguistics

Abstract

ALEXANDER von Humboldt, the first of the great human geographers, in his preface to his brother Wilhelm's great three-volume posthumous work on Oceanic languages and on general linguistics (published by the Royal Academy of Sciences over the years from 1836 to 1839), comments on two aspects of Wilhelm's life work. Wilhelm's drive for scientific accomplishment led him to produce one of the first great works of comparative philology in which he not only describes the internal structure and traces the external cultural contacts of Javanese (2:1-203) but also places it in its larger Oceanic setting (2:207-424; 3) from the Philippines to Hawaii to Easter Island to Madagascar. His broadly humane interest in the relation between human language and human thought, however, led him to provide this great work with a four-hundred page introduction (l:i-cccxxx) in which he investigates the structure of a wide range of human languages (including many of the New World, such as Quechua, Yaruro, Nahuatl, and Delaware) and the possible bearing of that structure on the intellectual development of their speakers. Alexander suggests (1: ix-x) that a study of his brother's great work will not bear out the common prejudice that a man's worth is measured by the substantive materials with which he works and not by the manner in which he handles them. Rather its perusal will lead the reader to the conviction that greatness in the treatment of a subject does not spring from intellectual foundations alone, but from greatness of character, from a mind free of temporal restraints, and from unplumbed depths of feeling. Alexander himself was not a philologist, but he collaborated closely with his brother in gathering materials (A. von Humboldt 1826:l:xliii-xliv) on American Indian languages, particularly on those of New Spain. This activity, together with his wide-ranging concern with distributional characteristics of human attributes (including language), permit us to credit him with an important role in the stimulation of research in American Indian languages and in furthering general linguistic study in the Americas. Alexander's interests were broad, ranging from the contemporary distribution of human groups as they were manifest at the time of his extensive journeys through New Spain to the ancient origins and subsequent migrations of such groups. The attack on the problem of origins and migrations continues to be a major concern to historically minded linguists of today. Their approach is multi-faceted.