In the decades around 1800, a global network of amateur and professional scholars formed to study the whole world’s languages. Collectively, they pursued an ambition that had never before been possible. Manuscripts in foreign tongues had been accumulating in European libraries for centuries, but onlywith Europe’s eighteenth-century colonial expansion did dictionaries, grammars, and translation samples frommany hundreds of languages and dialects become available from all parts of the globe. Learned academies were founded, specialized journals launched, prize competitions established, translations published, encyclopedic surveys produced, and university chairs funded, all to make sense of this mass of material. The appeal went beyond the passion for collecting and taxonomy typical of the high Enlightenment. Since text samples were taken as proxies for languages, and languages were taken as proxies for nations, assembling linguistic materials was thought to shed light on the character, culture, and mental habits of entire peoples. Beyond that, comparing multiple languages promised to allow humanity’s family tree—or trees—to be reconstructed back to the dawn of prehistory. So too, the structural and cognitive features of language as suchwere for the first time systematically and empirically investigated, even if linguistics was not yet the autonomous discipline it would soon become. Instead, the study of languages remained firmly allied with anthropology, geography, natural history, and other fields as part of an attempt to trace human origins, migrations, habitats, and physical and cultural variety on an unprecedented scale. Most historians know this age in linguistics through the great discoveries of Orientalist heroes like William Jones, who intimated the existence of the IndoEuropean language family in the 1780s, or Jean-François Champollion, who deciphered the Rosetta Stone in the 1820s. Both figures took part in an “Oriental Renaissance” centering on the written languages of the East—Hebrew, Arabic,

中文翻译：

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文学共和国的最后一个项目：威廉·冯·洪堡的全球语言学

在 1800 年左右的几十年里，一个由业余和专业学者组成的全球网络形成，以研究全世界的语言。他们共同追求了一个前所未有的雄心壮志。几个世纪以来，外语手稿一直在欧洲图书馆中积累，但只有随着欧洲 18 世纪的殖民扩张，来自全球各地的数百种语言和方言的词典、语法和翻译样本才变得可用。学术学院的建立、专业期刊的发行、奖项竞赛的建立、翻译的出版、百科全书调查的制作以及大学教席的资助，所有这些都是为了理解大量的材料。这种吸引力超出了高启蒙时代典型的收藏和分类的热情。由于文本样本被视为语言的代表，语言被视为国家的代表，因此人们认为组装语言材料可以揭示整个民族的性格、文化和心理习惯。除此之外，比较多种语言有望让人类的家谱——或树木——重建回到史前时代的黎明。同样，语言本身的结构和认知特征也第一次被系统地和实证地研究，即使语言学还不是一门自治学科，它很快就会成为一门学科。相反，语言研究仍然与人类学、地理学、自然历史和其他领域紧密结合，作为以前所未有的规模追踪人类起源、迁徙、栖息地以及自然和文化多样性的尝试的一部分。大多数历史学家都通过东方主义英雄的伟大发现来了解这个时代的语言学，例如威廉·琼斯（William Jones）在 1780 年代暗示印欧语系的存在，或者让-弗朗索瓦·商博良（Jean-François Champollion）在 1820 年代破译了罗塞塔石碑。两位人物都参加了以东方书面语言为中心的“东方文艺复兴”——希伯来语、阿拉伯语、