In his memoir, read two years later, “On the Origin of Grammatic Forms, and their Influence on the Development of Ideas,” he chose most of his examples from the idioms of the New World;[[270]] and the year following, he read the monograph on the Verb in American languages, which I refer to on a later page.
In a subsequent communication, he announced his special study of this group as still in preparation. It was, however, never completed. His earnest desire to reach the fundamental laws of language led him into a long series of investigations into the systems of recorded speech, phonetic hieroglyphics and alphabetic writing, on which he read memoirs of great acuteness.
In one of these he again mentions his studies of the American tongues, and takes occasion to vindicate them from the current charge of being of a low grade in the linguistic scale. “It is certainly unjust,” he writes, “to call the American languages rude or savage, although their structure is widely different from those perfectly formed.”[[271]]
In 1828, there is a published letter from him making an appointment with the Abbé Thavenet, missionary to the Canadian Algonkins, then in Paris, “to enjoy the pleasure of conversing with him on his interesting studies of the Algonkin language.”[[272]] And a private letter tells us that in 1831 he applied himself with new zeal to mastering the intricacies of Mexican grammar.[[273]]
All these years he was working to complete the researches which led him to the far-reaching generalization which is at the basis of his linguistic philosophy.
Let me state in a few words what this philosophy teaches.
It aims to establish as a fundamental truth that the diversity of structure in languages is both the necessary antecedent and the necessary consequent of the evolution of the human mind.[[274]]
In the establishment of this thesis he begins with a subtle analysis of the nature of speech in general, and then proceeds to define the reciprocal influences which thought exerts upon it, and it upon thought.
It will readily be seen that a corollary of this theorem is that the Science of Language is and must be the most instructive, the indispensable guide in the study of the mental evolution of the human race. Humboldt recognized this fully. He taught that in its highest sense the philosophy of language is one with the philosophy of history. The science of language misses its purpose unless it seeks its chief end in explaining the intellectual growth of the race.[[275]]
Each separate tongue is “a thought-world in tones” established between the minds of those who speak it and the objective world without.[[276]] Each mirrors in itself the spirit of the nation to which it belongs. But it has also an earlier and independent origin; it is the product of the conceptions of antecedent generations, and thus exerts a formative and directive influence on the national mind, an influence not slight, but more potent than that which the national mind exerts upon it.[[277]]