Enchanted Tongues: Religion and Ideas of Linguistic Perfection in German Romantic Thought from Hamann to the Brothers Schlegel, 1760–1840

My project draws together intellectual and religious history to examine six German Romantic scholars and their religious views in the longue durée history of linguistic theories about perfection in human languages. Normative questions about ideals in languages, including how one could improve existing languages or invent new ones for human betterment, have interested scholars in different periods of European history. Some motivations included the improvement of scientific reasoning, world peace and commerce with a universal lingua franca, accessibility of language to people with disabilities, interactions with artificial intelligence, imagination and entertainment through science fiction, or connection with the divine. Hitherto, histories of perfect language theories have centred around inventions of “rational” languages in seventeenth-century England and proposals for lingua francas like Esperanto in the twentieth century. German Romanticism, to the extent it appears in this literature, was an aesthetic movement that opposed linguistic perfection by championing the subjectivity and pluralism of knowledge, and imagining language as an arbitrary construct irreducible to any objective correspondence to truth. However, I argue that a closer look at Romantic writers reveals diverse normative speculations on languages often shaped by their religious values, although the ideals of improvement they envisioned differed significantly from their Baroque and Enlightenment predecessors.

The German Romantics’ normative views on language are important because they stressed how language shapes thought, and were key precursors to the modern linguistic turn. Considering six Romantics Johann Georg Hamann, Johann Gottfried Herder, August Bernhardi, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and the brothers Friedrich and August Schlegel, my project finds both disagreements and convergence of ideas. Although they did not invent radically new languages, they held diverse phenomena as models for linguistic perfection ranging from Hamann and Herder’s privileging of poetry, art, and nature as a hieroglyphic script to Bernhardi’s idealisation of philosophical and mathematical language, and some common preferences for primordial languages, mother tongues, and translations. At the height of Romanticism in the early 1800s, a shared idea prevailed that combining opposites like the sensuousness of poetic language with abstract philosophical language and concepts from foreign languages was ideal. Such enthusiastic linguistic imagination became subdued with the rise of empirical historical linguistics and Realism by the 1840s. The German Romantic era witnessed intense religiosity and challenges to established confessions, and linguistic ideals were influenced by religious values alongside other cultural factors. The late Enlightenment and French Revolution paralleled an inward and emotional turn in religion that encouraged a focus on the agency of language in relation to divinity and the supernatural, with diverse religions like Pietism, Catholicism, Jewish Kabbalism, and Asian religions leaving a mark on Romanticism. Rather than seeing ever-increasing secularisation and disenchantment in a Weberian sense, my project emphasises religious persistence and imaginations afforded by theological thought.

My poster will visually present the argument using multiple related images like cutouts and quotes from key primary sources concerning perfect languages, examples of constructed languages, pictures of the six Romantic thinkers I study, maps, and religious imagery of the Kabbalah and Christian traditions that shaped linguistic thought.