6 - First Exposure to American Languages at the Vatican Library in Rome and the Significance of Alexander’s American Resources (1803–1808)

Summary

When called as Prussia’s emissary to the Vatican beginning in 1803, Humboldt gained access to its library with one of the richest collections of American linguistic materials in Europe, offering a piecemeal impression of the Americas’ great linguistic diversity. Shortly, he raised doubts about the missionaries’ Eurocentric analyses, their motivation of converting speakers to Christianity, and the sociocultural contexts of use. By his analysis of Nahuatl, Humboldt came to recognize the need for original in-situ descriptive-analytical research as he had pursued with Basque; but short of such opportunities, Americanist linguistics had to rely on high-quality historical analyses in their own terms (“inner forms”) and within their own, traditional sociolinguistic contexts, as made available by Alexander and others. By a variety of grammars, Wilhelm von Humboldt became ever more sensitive to notions of linguistic and sociocultural diversity in the Americas, but disagreed vociferously with any biologistic, racist interpretation of their findings.