Language, Nature, Translation, Man

Wilhelm von Humboldt gives this profound explanation of the role of language in human life: “Just as the individual sound intervenes between object and man, the entire language does so between hum and nature acting upon him both externally and internally. He surrounds himself with an ambient of sounds in order to assimilate and process the world of objects. These expressions do not in any way exceed the measure of simple truth. Man lives principally, or even exclusively, with objects, since his feelings and actions depend upon his concepts as language presents them to his attention. By the same act through which he spins the thread of language he weaves himself into its tissues. Each tongue draws a circle about the people to whom it belongs, and it is possible to leave this circle only by simultaneously entering that of another people.”

To that he immediately adds this about translation and learning foreign languages: “Learning a foreign language ought hence to be the conquest of a new standpoint for the previously prevailing world-view of the individual. In fact, it is so to a certain extent, inasmuch as every language contains the entire fabric of concepts and the conceptual approach of a portion of humanity. But this achievement is never complete, because one always carries over into a foreign tongue to a greater or lesser degree one’s own viewpoint and that of one’s mother tongue.”