Philosophy of Being and Knowledge

Philosophy of Language

Neogrammarians

At the end of the 19th century, as the scientific community was enthralled by the natural sciences and deemed its methods exemplary for all scientific research, scholars in every field began to seek methodological foundations for their disciplines based on the same principles that underpinned natural science. This trend extended into linguistics through the efforts of the Leipzig Linguistic School. The most notable representatives of this school were August Leskien (1840-1916), Karl Brugmann (1849-1919), and Hermann Osthoff (1847-1909). Due to the innovative nature of their ideas, these linguists faced criticism from their older peers. It was the senior linguists who dubbed the members of the Leipzig School "Neogrammarians," deriding their youthful inexperience. Nevertheless, this term took root, and the Neogrammarians themselves embraced it, highlighting the originality of their ideas.

As the Neogrammarians sought to apply the methods of natural scientists to the study of language, they were tasked with demonstrating that language could be analyzed using these scientific methods, thereby showing that the subject matter of natural science and linguistics were analogous. A defining characteristic of natural laws is their absence of exceptions. This led the Neogrammarians to search for linguistic laws that permitted no exceptions, thereby being universally applicable to an entire class of phenomena. They also made some adjustments to the focus of linguistic research. While the Humboldtian scholars examined language within the context of national culture and cognition, the Neogrammarians concentrated on the study of language itself, striving to avoid any connection of their research subject with other fields, in essence aiming to study language purely as it is.