Talk:Wilhelm von Humboldt

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A recent edit inserted "European" in the statement "Humboldt is credited with being the first European linguist to identify human language as a rule-governed system." Just the first European linguist? Who is the non-European who beat him to it? --Wetman 23:39, 19 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Pāṇini. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 4 July 2005 15:49 (UTC)

Oh. Then every grammarian in Antiquity and the Middle Ages identified human language as a rule-governed system, and the statement is rendered vacuous. Can someone determine what is Humboldt's advance over Pāṇini et al and edit in in? Let us make an assessment that has some content. --Wetman 4 July 2005 20:31 (UTC)

AFAIK European linguists up to Humboldt's time hadn't heard of Pāṇini, so no, they didn't identify human language as a rule-governed system. As I understand it, Humboldt came up with the idea on his own, and only later did European linguists figure out that Pāṇini had beaten him to it by a couple of millennia. --Angr/_{tɔk tə mi} 4 July 2005 22:09 (UTC)

[edit] Data mining

The German version of this article is rather more advanced... --- Charles Stewart 18:44, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Translations of the relevant parts of it, edited into this article, would make a great improvement. --Wetman 22:15, 14 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Chomsky?

"This idea is one of the foundations of Noam Chomsky's theory of language." I find it difficult to understand why Humboldt should be valued by the fact that Chomsky reffered to his ideas. This implies that Chomsky has a much more important role in linguistics than he really does. His paradigm has been surpassed; by Integralism, for example.

The point is that Humboldt's impact on linguistics should not be assessed via Chomsky. It should either be objective, or, if refferences must be made, they should be to all paradigms Humboldt influenced.

I don't agree that Chomsky's paradigm has been "surpassed", since there is still plenty of research going on within a Chomskian framework. (In fact, there is probably far more Chomskian research than there is Integralist research. That small quantity of work within Integrationism which is available on the internet seems to consist mainly of long diatribes against everything that isn't Integrationism, attempts to show that every other approach is some variant of Sassurianism, and vague programmatic rhetoric which makes no contribution to our understanding of anything within linguistics -- sorry, just had to vent). Anyway, I agreee that we shouldn't assess Humboldt's ideas in terms of Chomsky's theories, but I don't think the article is doing that. Chomsky is partly responsible for the fact that Humboldt is still well known, and a sentence or two mentioning that Chomsky was influenced by Humboldt doesn't seem out of place to me. Cadr 12:25, 24 June 2006 (UTC)