"Languages writing history: the impact of language studies beyond linguistics (1700-1860)" KU Leuven
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 ...