Forward to the past : modernizing linguistic typology by returning to its roots

• Main Author: LaPolla, Randy J.
• Other Authors: School of Humanities
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2021
• Subjects: Humanities::Language::Linguistics; History of Linguistics; Wilhelm von Humboldt; Linguistic Typology; Romanticism
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/152669
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

The comparative study of unrelated languages did not begin with Joseph Greenberg in the 1960’s, but began more than 150 years earlier in Europe with scholars of the Romanticist movement. The most prominent of these scholars was the German scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose goal in studying 75 diffe...