Wilhelm von Humboldt

Prussian philosopher, diplomat and linguist who theorized the inner form of language: that a language's grammatical structure expresses its speakers' distinctive way of perceiving the world, a concept tied to what he called Weltansicht, or linguistic worldview. His posthumous On the Diversity of Human Language Structure and its Influence on the Mental Development of Mankind (1836) is regarded as a founding text of general and philosophical linguistics, and he is credited as an originator of the idea that a later generation, working independently, developed as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity.