Introduction

Abstract

Western philosophy1 has been addressing the question of how language relates to the world at least since the Ancient Greek debate between those who thought that the relationship is natural (cf. Plato's Cratylus) and those who thought it is subjective and conventional (Democritus of Abdera, and in a way also Aristotle2). In the Middle Ages, realists (e.g. Duns Scotus) claimed that words denote concepts that correspond to real entities, whereas nominalists (e.g. William of Ockham) maintained that concepts only correspond to names or words (nomina). These considerations assumed a more specific shape with the growing awareness of the sometimes unbridgeable differences between languages, an idea expressed in Martin Luther's Sendbrief vom Dollmetschen (1530) or John Locke's An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding (1690). Clear traces of the linguistic worldview3 idea can be found in Francis Bacon's De Dignitate et Augmentis Scientiarum (1623): the philosopher claimed that the unique structure and certain idiosyncratic properties of languages provide access to what the communities using these languages feel and think. The progressive interest in psychological and sociological aspects of language was continued by the 18th-c. German thinkers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder. Hamann and Herder saw a connection between language and the spirit (psyche) of the community or nation that speaks it. These observations were soon afterwards developed by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who is usually credited with originating the idea of the linguistic worldview. Humboldt says: It is no empty play upon words if we speak of language as arising in autonomy solely from itself and divinely free, but of languages as bound and dependent on the nations to which they belong. (Humboldt, 1999 [1836], p. 24) Thus, "there resides in every language a characteristic world-view [Weltansicht]"4 (ibid., p. 60). However, Humboldt attributes to speakers the ability to overcome the limitations imposed by each language, to extend the worldview in creative speech events. Humboldt's views were continued and elaborated by Leo Weisgerber and Neo-Humboldtians with their notion of sprachliches Weltbild. Their main idea was that every language, a particular community's mother tongue, is a repository of cognitive content. Reality, claimed Neo-Humboldtians, is segmented not according to the properties of things themselves but to the lexical structure and syntactic organization of the mother tongue.