Georg von der Gabelentz

Hans Georg Conon von der Gabelentz (b. 1840–d. 1893) was a versatile and productive German linguist. He did not belong to the group of historical-comparative linguistics that dominated the field during the 19th century. Instead, from the very beginning of his linguistic career, his descriptive focus was on non-Indo-European languages, which could not be approached by the historical-comparative method. In this respect he followed the example of Wilhelm von Humboldt (b. 1767–d. 1835). Gabelentz developed a strictly synchronic method to describe languages “from within,” also paying attention to language-related cultural characteristics of speakers, in line with the approach of Völkerpsychologie (ethnopsychology) as developed by Heymann Steinthal (b. 1823–d. 1899). Gabelentz was born in Poschwitz (near Altenburg) at the estate of his old aristocratic family. His father, Hans Conon von der Gabelentz (b. 1807–d. 1874), was a renowned government minister, but also a passionate language scholar. His library contained a multitude of documents about languages from all over the world. In this environment, Georg’s interest in “exotic” languages developed very early. Like his father, he studied law and administration, but Georg also studied linguistics in Jena. He entered civil service, but he simultaneously continued his linguistic studies in Leipzig. In 1876 he received a PhD from Dresden for a translation of a philosophical Chinese text. In 1878 Gabelentz acquired a professorship of East Asian languages at the University of Leipzig and resigned his civil service post. His first magnum opus was published in 1881: Chinesische Grammatik (Chinese grammar), which is still regarded as a standard work today. Gabelentz became a professor of sinology and general linguistics at the University of Berlin in 1889. In 1891 his second magnum opus, Die Sprachwissenschaft (The science of language) was published, providing a comprehensive overview of the content and methods of general linguistics, which was a relatively new academic discipline at the time. Alongside these two important books, Gabelentz mainly published numerous articles, some of which became relatively well known, such as his two articles about comparative syntax, published in 1869 and 1875, and his programmatic article about language typology, which appeared posthumously in 1894. Unlike his orientalist work, Gabelentz’s general linguistic work fell into oblivion rather soon after his early death. Its neglect was mainly due to his Humboldtian approach, which included the “evaluation” of languages (Sprachwürderung), a project that was rapidly declining from the turn of the century onward. Gabelentz’s position in earlier linguistic historiography used to be a modest one. However, during the last few decades the importance and surprisingly innovative character of Gabelentz’s work has been more and more recognized. Nowadays, there is an increasing interest in Gabelentz, which has induced a growing number of publications about his work.