Talen die geschiedenis schrijven: taalstudies voorbij taalkunde (1700-1860)

In 1710, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz noted that "languages will serve as monuments in our investigations since the peoples' origins reach further back than history's tradition can tell.' In his opinion, the study of language, and language comparison in particular, was the historian's foremost source of knowledge about the earliest stages of humanity as well as its migrations (see Van Hal 2014 and other contributions in Li 2014). For him, as for many of his contemporaries, languages had 'written history'. More generally, during the early modern period, languages were studied in many different contexts besides simply language description and language acquisition. Before language study became institutionalized, and concentrated, in the discipline of linguistics in the 19th century, languages were central to understanding mankind and, thus, to the making of the humanities. This project aims to (1) measure the impact of the broadening of the linguistic scope on the study of the humanities in general, (2) map the ways and strategies through which (a) the instrumental study of languages evolved into linguistics as an independent discipline and (b) linguistic arguments continued to play a vital role in adjacent branches of learning. In this connection, we will also (3) examine what 'got lost' in the process of turning linguistics into a discipline, or else, what now required a trade-off between different fields of specialized expertise.