Linguistics at the German University

Abstract

We began our discussion of the emergence of linguistics with the question of how to account for the fact that during most of the nineteenth century, linguistics was a German discipline. The argument that Romantic concepts and ideas were profoundly embedded in the idea system of the early comparative grammarians might explain why German scholars took particular interest in the links between Sanskrit and the European languages, but it hardly explains why comparative studies of language became a subject of lasting interest in the German universities. After all, long after Romanticism had ceased to exercise any direct influence on intellectual life in Germany, comparative and historical linguistics was still a growing field of research.