9 - From the Americas to the Pacific

Summary

With its “emic” underpinnings and multi-faceted comparative principles, Humboldt’s Americanist platform proved suitable for the initial description and analysis of the languages of the Pacific such as Old Javanese and other Malayo-Polynesian languages in their own terms (“inner forms”) in contrast to the unidimensional Sanskrit-derived models by Indo-Europeanists. Humboldt instead concentrated on linguistic-sociohistorical diversity as key notions in the description and analysis of Southeast Asian and Pacific languages, alternative models of language change, including language contact, and complementary historical methodological resources. He did not suggest any common ancestry between the languages of the Americas and the Pacific beyond that of modern humanity; but he merely argued for linguistic processes that applied in the Americas also to hold true in the Pacific or in still other areas, and thus defined a modern anthropologically-based historical linguistics in truly comparative terms with special attention to the analysis of grammar.