• Aristotle: words are thing we apply to existing ideas to communicate
• French Enlightenment era: le génie de la langue or the indescribable character of each language

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1772: Treatise on the Origin of Language by the German philosopher and poet Johann Gottfried von Herder

• human language is different from animal communication because of our capacity for self-reflection; we can think about our own thoughts [personal note: educators call this "metacognition"]
• we choose words based on which properties we deem most important, and this varies from culture to culture.
• throughout the generations, differences in ways of thinking are more refined. We have to trace words back to etymological origin to really understand them

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Wilhelm von Humboldt

• linguistic determinism
• "Language is the forming organ of thought."
• grammar & vocabulary are the "skeleton" of a language. What matters most is the literature & how people use it [personal note: this is why studying corpus is important for language teachers]
• "inner form" vs. "outer form" of a language. It's grammar/vocab vs. its literature and how it is used.

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Heymann Steinthal (1823-99)

• Völkerpsychologie
• aimed to describe "inner character" of a country based on its language

Georg von der Gabelentz (1840-93)

• explaining structure of language as a manifestation of the "national mind."

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Franz Boas (1858-1942)

• 'father of American anthropology'
• 1911- Handbook of American Indian Languages
• In the 19th century, many saw the world in terms of a "hierarchy," with white Europeans at the top [personal note: ...sigh ]
• Boas argued against this idea; argued that these languages don't have abstract concepts like indefinite numbers because they aren't needed, not because speakers are mentally incapable of understanding this concept.

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Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) introduced a distinction between la langue (language) and la parole (speech)

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Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

• structure of a language influences a native speaker's perception of the world and categorization of experiences

Source: Does Language Mirror the Mind?