IX Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2017

Wilhelm von Humboldt had a huge influence on the development of culture and literature. His writings continue to influence scholars and thinkers of our time. Every educated man considers as his duty to examine carefully the works which he wrote at the time. His thoughts and conclusions are still relevant to contemporaries the XX and XXI centuries. In order to understand his ideas we must learn his biography and to find out where he was born, where he worked, whose friendship influenced him a lot.

Wilhelm von Humboldt is a German philologist and one of the founders of linguistics as an independent science. He is also the political figure, diplomat, philosopher and the major figure of German classical humanism. He adhered to the idea that the highest goal of human history is the realization the ideal of "humanity", which is the development of individuality of a single person and revealing all his abilities. Humboldt’s insides had a huge impact on the development of humanitarian thought not only on the scale of the country, but throughout Europe.

Humboldt was born in the German Potsdam, his father was the Saxon elector. Education of William and his younger brother Alexander, who later became a well-known scientist and naturalist, received the considerable attention. In 1787 they both were students of the Frankfurt University; brothers studied also at the University of Göttingen, focusing on history, law and politics. Scientific activities attracted Wilhelm Humboldt, he was also interested in real socio-political processes, but another big fad was the new trend in philosophy and literature.

After graduation in 1789 he went to Paris. Impressions and observations that were accumulated in the capital of France became the basis for the books "On the limits of state action". However, proclaiming individual freedom and limit state functions only the external security work for publication did not allow censorship. During this period of the biography Humboldt had the acquaintance with Schiller, and a little later he had a meeting with Goethe, which resulted in long-lasting friendships.

Humboldt quickly became known as a man with a sharp mind, well-educated and became a welcome guest at the most famous salons, where he was a prominent and influential figure. In 1791 he married Carolina von Deharadun, she was considered one of the most intelligent and educated women of his time and became his assistant. Their Berlin house gained a brilliant reputation throughout Europe and became the center of attraction the best minds. Wilhelm Humboldt traveled the continent, visiting Switzerland, Spain and France for a long time he stayed in the Italian capital.

In 1801 he became a resident of Prussia, at the papal court in the Vatican and held this honorary post until 1810. In 1809 Humboldt acts as the founding father of the Berlin University and in the same year became the head of the Moscow Department of religions and education in Berlin. The tenure staunch supporter of humanism and enlightenment was marked by a number of educational reforms; in particular he brought to the jurisdiction of the Church primary school.

From 1810 to 1819, the mind and energy of Humboldt dedicated the service in the field of diplomacy and important government positions.

Wilhelm von Humboldt was an adept linguist and studied the Basque language. He translated Pindar and Aeschylus into German.

Humboldt's work as a philologist in Basque has had more extensive impact than his other work. His visit to the Basque country resulted in Researches into the Early Inhabitants of Spain by the help of the Basque language (1821). In this work, Humboldt endeavored to show by examining geographical placenames, which at one time a race or races speaking dialects allied to modern Basque extended throughout Spain, southern France and the Balearic Islands; he identified these people with the Iberians of classical writers, and further surmised that they had been allied with the Berbers of northern Africa. Humboldt's pioneering work has been superseded in its details by modern linguistics and archaeology, but is sometimes still uncritically followed even today. He was elected a member of the American Antiquarian Society in 1820, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1822.

Humboldt died while preparing his greatest work, on the ancient Kawi language of Java, but its introduction was published in 1836 as The Heterogeneity of Language and its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind. His essay on the philosophy of speech first clearly laid down that the character and structure of a language expresses the inner life and knowledge of its speakers, and that languages must differ from one another in the same way and to the same degree as those who use them. Sounds do not become words until a meaning has been put into them, and this meaning embodies the thought of a community. What Humboldt terms the inner form of a language is just that mode of denoting the relations between the parts of a sentence which reflects the manner in which a particular body of men regards the world about them. It is the task of the morphology of speech to distinguish the various ways in which languages differ from each other as regards their inner form, and to classify and arrange them accordingly.

He is credited with being the first European linguist to identify human language as a rule-governed system, rather than just a collection of words and phrases paired with meanings. This idea is one of the foundations of Noam Chomsky's theory of language. Chomsky frequently quotes Humboldt's description of language as a system which "makes infinite use of finite means", meaning that an infinite number of sentences can be created using a finite number of grammatical rules. Humboldt scholar Tilman Borsche, however, notes profound differences between von Humboldt's view of language and Chomsky's.

More recently, Humboldt has also been credited as an originator of the linguistic relativity hypothesis (more commonly known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis), developed by linguists Edward Sapir or Benjamin Whorf a century later.

The reception of Humboldt's work remains problematic in English-speaking countries, despite the work of Langham Brown, Manchester and Underhill (Humboldt, Worldview & Language, 2009), on account of his concept of what he called Weltansicht, the linguistic worldview, with Weltanschauung being translated simply as 'worldview' a term associated with ideologies and cultural mindsets in both German and English. The centrality of distinction in understanding Huimbolt's work was set out by one of the leading contemporary German Humboldt scholars, Jürgen Trabant, in his works in both German and French. Polish linguists, at the Lublin School (see Jerzy Bartmiński) in their research of Humboldt, also stress this distinction between the worldviews of a personal or political kind and the worldview that is implicit in language as a conceptual system.

However, little rigorous research in English has gone into exploring the relationship between the linguistic worldview and the transformation and maintenance of this worldview by individual speakers. One notable exception is the work of Underhill, who explores comparative linguistic studies in both Creating Worldviews: Language, Ideology & Metaphor(2011) and in Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: Truth, Love, Hate & War. In Underhill's work, a distinction is made between five forms of worldview: world-perceiving, world-conceiving, cultural mindset, personal world and perspective, in order to convey the distinctions Humboldt was concerned with preserving in his ethnolinguistics. Probably the most well-known linguist working with a truly Humboldtian perspective writing in English today is Anna Wierzbicka, who has published a number of comparative works on semantic universals and conceptual distinctions in language.

The Rouen Ethnolinguistics Project, in France, published online a 7-hour series of lectures on Humboldt's thought on language, with the Berlin specialist Prof. Trabant.

The works of Wilhelm von Humboldt laid the foundation for the linguistics. He argued the thesis, which gave food for thought to many philosophers and scientists. Until now, linguists are discussing and debating about many of his conclusion. But one thing is certain – it is impossible to study the science and not know the name of Wilhelm Humboldt. In addition to scientific papers, which he left to his descendants Wilhelm von Humboldt on language, another significant Testament was the University, where he received higher education of thousands of young and talented people. The value for contemporaries the Concept of Wilhelm von Humboldt was a revolution in linguistics. According to most theorists, scientific thought moved forward, and some of the provisions and ideas of the founder of this science was already outdated and become irrelevant. Nevertheless, every scientist will be very helpful to learn and understand the course of reasoning von Humboldt in the process of creating works. He spent a lot of time, systematizing and classifying the different languages in language groups and the common characteristics or differences.

Humboldt talked about the constancy and at the same time the variability of language as it changes over time that affects these changes, which ones will remain forever, and which also gradually disappear

The bright trail was left by Humboldt in science, particularly in Philology. His ideas about what the language of any people is an expression of his personal worldview determines the attitude of the representatives of the people to peace is the ongoing process of spiritual creation, significantly influenced the development of linguistics. In 1832, Humboldt became an honorary member of the Petersburg Academy of Sciences. He died in 1835, April 8; death overtook him not far from the German capital in the Palace of Tegel.

In the world there are dozens of monuments and memorials in honor of Wilhelm von Humboldt, but one of the most outstanding was the crater on the visible side of the moon, which was given the name of a great scientist. In Berlin there is a monument in honor of Humboldt on one of the main streets of the city – Unter den Linden.

REFERENCES

1. Ю. Н. Попов, Гумбольдт (Humboldt) Вильгельм // Большая советская энциклопедия : [в 30 т.] / гл. ред. А. М. Прохоров. — 3-е изд. — М. : Советская энциклопедия, 1969—1978;

2. Гаим Р. Вильгельм фон Гумбольдт... пер. с нем. М., 1898;

3. Шпет Г. Г. Внутренняя форма слова (Этюды и вариации на темы Гумбольдта). М., 1927;

4. ФБ.ру [Электронный ресурс] – режим доступа http://fb.ru/article/242288/gumboldt-vilgelm-biografiya-i-trudyi, свободный;

5. Афоризмы великих людей [Электронный ресурс] – режим доступа http://www.wisdoms.ru/avt/b68.html, свободный.

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