Ebook: The Linguistic Relativity Principle and Humboldtian Ethnolinguistics

The linguistic relativity thesis, according to Miller, had its origin about the beginning of the nineteenth century. Johann Georg Hamann is said to be “the first writer in Germany to deal with the influence of language on thought” (p. 14), and his work, together with that of Johann Gottfried Herder, contains foreshadowings (but no explicit formulation) of the linguistic relativity thesis. It was, instead, Wilhelm von Humboldt who first formulated the hypothesis in his well-known introduction to a study of the ancient language of Java. It is this introduction, “On the Variety of Human Language Structures and their Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind,” rather than the scattered and vague foreshadowings in Hamann and Herder, that truly marks the beginnings of studies in linguistic relativity.