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Gustav Gröber
(1996)
Hervás y Panduro, Lorenzo
(2006)
The grammatization of European vernacular languages began in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance and continued up until the end of the 18th century. Through this process, grammars were written for the vernaculars and, as a result, the vernaculars were able to establish themselves in important areas of communication. Vernacular grammars largely followed the example of those written for Latin, using Latin descriptive categories without fully adapting them to the vernaculars. In accord with the Greco-Latin tradition, the grammars typically contain sections on orthography, prosody, morphology, and syntax, with the most space devoted to the treatment of word classes in the section on “etymology.” The earliest grammars of vernaculars had two main goals: on the one hand, making the languages described accessible to non-native speakers, and on the other, supporting the learning of Latin grammar by teaching the grammar of speakers’ native languages. Initially, it was considered unnecessary to engage with the grammar of native languages for their own sake, since they were thought to be acquired spontaneously. Only gradually did a need for normative grammars develop which sought to codify languages. This development relied on an awareness of the value of vernaculars that attributed a certain degree of perfection to them. Grammars of indigenous languages in colonized areas were based on those of European languages and today offer information about the early state of those languages, and are indeed sometimes the only sources for now extinct languages. Grammars of vernaculars came into being in the contrasting contexts of general grammar and the grammars of individual languages, between grammar as science and as art and between description and standardization. In the standardization of languages, the guiding principle could either be that of anomaly, which took a particular variety of a language as the basis of the description, or that of analogy, which permitted interventions into a language aimed at making it more uniform.
The idea of a linguistic worldview was clearly expressed in German national romantic thought of the early 19th century, where language was seen as the expression of the spirit of a nation. Wilhelm von Humboldt argued that every language shaped the world-view of its speakers, but he also saw a possibility to improve human knowledge in the co-action of languages.
The idea of linguistic relativity can be found in John Locke’s statement that words interpose themselves between our understandings and the truth which it would contemplate and apprehend. In the 18th century, we can find formulations that our language accustoms us to arrange our ideas in a specific way, that some languages are more suitable for certain kinds of thought, or that metaphors have significant influence on peoples’ thought. In the 20thcentury the Neo-Humboldtian school revitalised the idea of an influence of language on thought in a reductionist way. At the end of the 20th century, some authors, for example John J. Gumperz and Stephen C. Levinson, tried to rethink linguistic relativity and to prove it by empirical results.