Expanding the comparative view: Humboldt’s Über die Kawi-Sprache and its language materials

Floris Solleveld
KU Leuven
Summary

Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Über die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java can be seen as the first comparative grammar of non-Indo-European languages. While Humboldt’s practice of collecting and re-assembling linguistic information has been documented extensively in the Berlin Academy edition of his Schriften zur Sprachwissenschaft, this article puts his work in perspective by tracing it back to its sources and treating it as part of a wider parallel process of expanding the comparative view. In three sections, this article discusses (1) the research agendas of the three British colonial scholars upon whose works Humboldt drew for Malayan languages; (2) to which extent his Polynesian language material was ‘rawer’ than these compendia; and (3) how he reworked this material into a comparative Malayo-Polynesian grammar. Finally, a comparison is drawn with the work of his assistant and continuator Eduard Buschmann, and with Horatio Hale’s slightly later survey of the languages of the Pacific.

Table of contents

Eight years before William Jones (1746–1794) delivered his third Anniversary Discourse before the Asiatick Society of Calcutta, with its infinitely cited ‘philologer passage’ about the common source of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin et al. (Jones 1787: 422–3), German naturalist and traveller Johann Reinhold Forster (1729–1798) published a strikingly similar passage about a different language family, in his Observations made during a Voyage round the World. Like Jones, Forster found the resemblances between languages impossible to ignore:

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