Page "Wilhelm von Humboldt" Paragraph 16

More recently Humboldt has also been credited as an originator of the linguistic relativity hypothesis ( more commonly known as the Sapir – Whorf hypothesis ), developed by linguists Edward Sapir or Benjamin Whorf a century later.

Nonetheless, the reception of Humboldt's work remains problematic in English-speaking countries, despite the work of Langham Brown, Manchester and Underhill ( Humboldt, Worldview & Language, 2009 ).

Indeed, although encyclopédias often cite Humboldt as being the founder of the term ' worldview ', a confusion is invariably made by citing the German term Weltanschauung, which is rightly associated with ideologies and cultural mindsets in both German and English.

Humboldt's work was concerned more with what he called Weltansicht, the linguistic worldview.

This distinction was cleared up by one of the leading contemporary German Humboldt scholars, Jürgen Trabant, in his works in both German and French.

Polish linguists, working in the Lublin School ( see Jerzy Bartmiński ) preserve this distinction between worldviews of a personal or political kind and the worldview implicit in the language as a conceptual system, in their reading of Humboldt and in their research into the Polish-speaker's worldview.