Editing Linguistic relativity (section)

=== German Romantic philosophers ===
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the idea of the existence of different national characters, or ''Volksgeister'', of different ethnic groups was a major motivator for the German romantics school and the beginning ideologies of ethnic nationalism.{{sfn|Leavitt|2010|p=75}}

==== Johann Georg Hamann ====
[[Johann Georg Hamann]] is often suggested to be the first among the actual German Romantics to discuss the concept of the "genius" of a language.<ref>Robert L. Miller ''The Linguistic Relativity Principle and Humboldtian Ethnolinguistics'' p. 18.</ref>{{sfn|McAfee|2004}} In his "Essay Concerning an Academic Question", Hamann suggests that a people's language affects their worldview:

{{blockquote|The lineaments of their language will thus correspond to the direction of their mentality.<ref>Quoted in Bernard D. Den Ouden, ''Language and Creativity: An Interdisciplinary Essay in Chomskyan Humanism,'' p. 25.</ref>}}

==== Wilhelm von Humboldt ====
[[File:WilhelmvonHumboldt.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Wilhelm von Humboldt]]]] In 1820, [[Wilhelm von Humboldt]] associated the study of language with the national romanticist program by proposing that language is the fabric of thought. Thoughts are produced as a kind of internal dialog using the same grammar as the thinker's native language.<ref name="Trabant">Trabant, Jürgen. "How relativistic are Humboldts "Weltansichten"?", in {{harvnb|Pütz|Verspoor|2000|p=}}.</ref> This opinion was part of a greater idea in which the assumptions of an ethnic nation, their "''[[Worldview|Weltanschauung]]''", was considered as being represented by the grammar of their language. Von Humboldt argued that languages with an [[inflection]]al [[Morphological typology|morphological type]], such as German, English and the other [[Indo-European languages]], were the most perfect languages and that accordingly this explained the dominance of their speakers with respect to the speakers of less perfect languages. Wilhelm von Humboldt declared in 1820:

{{blockquote|The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world.<ref name="Trabant" />}}In Humboldt's humanistic understanding of linguistics, each language creates the individual's worldview in its particular way through its lexical and [[grammatical category|grammatical categories]], conceptual organization, and syntactic models.<ref name="Kahane&Kahane_1983">{{cite journal |last1=Kahane |first1=Henry |last2=Kahane |first2=Renée |date=1983 |title=Humanistic linguistics |journal=The Journal of Aesthetic Education |volume=17 |issue=4 |pages=65–89 |doi=10.2307/3332265 |jstor=3332265}}</ref>

Herder worked alongside Hamann to establish the idea of whether or not language had a human/rational or a divine origin.<ref>{{cite web |last1=Beek |first1=Wouter |title=Linguistic Relativism Variants and Misconceptions |url=https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/b.bredeweg/pdf/BSc/20052006/Beek.pdf |website=Universiteit van Amsterdam |access-date=18 November 2022 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210126014428/https://staff.fnwi.uva.nl/b.bredeweg/pdf/BSc/20052006/Beek.pdf |archive-date=26 January 2021 |language=en |quote=Linguistic relativism is a relatively new concept, it did not exist in the Enlightenment. It was posed for the first time, as will be treated below, in the Romantic era by Hamann and Herder, and later by Humboldt. |url-status=live}}</ref> Herder added the emotional component of the hypothesis and Humboldt then took this information and applied to various languages to expand on the hypothesis.