 Wilhelm (Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand) von Humboldt, German man of letters extraordinary, close friend of the poets Goethe and Schiller, whose life’s work encompasses the areas of philosophy, literature, linguistics, anthropology, education, and political thought as well statesmanship was born in Potsdam on June 22, 1767 and died at Tegel near Berlin on April 8, 1835. Although there has always been strong interest in Humboldt expressed by political and cultural historians and educationists in Germany, it is only in recent decades that his contributions to the formation of modern linguistics, to semiotics, hermeneutics and philosophy of language have given rise to renewed attention to his pioneering achievements in these areas, even though much of his work in linguistics has remained unknown or unexplored until recently. Yet numerous linguists beginning with Pott and Steinthal in Germany and the American Brinton in the nineteenth century to Boas, Sapir, Bühler, Weisgerber, and Chomsky in the twentieth century derived or claimed to have derived important insights from Humboldt. But their interest in Humboldt was partial at best and limited to those aspects of his work that could be utilized to reinforce or to legitimize their own projects and methodologies. It is quite misleading to associate the term “Humboldtian linguistics” or “Humboldtian philosophy of language” with any one specific direction, for example with the Whorfian thesis of “linguistic relativity” or with Chomsky’s opposite notion of a universalist “generative grammar” because these tend to ignore other equally or more important dimensions of Humboldt’s work. After his death in 1835 his linguistic work was effectively disregarded by mainstream linguists in Germany whose primary interest was focused on the Indo-European language group. Thus a prominent figure like Franz Bopp would maintain that the languages of the South Pacific represented but decayed forms of Sanskrit despite the fact that Humboldt had already thoroughly disproved this opinion in his Kavi Work and demonstrated that these languages constituted what is called today the Austronesian language group (Mueller-Vollmer 1991). Even the linguist Heyman Steinthal, who published in 1884 a two volume edition of Humboldt’s writings entitled Die Sprachphilosophischen Werke Wilhelm’s von Humboldt (Humboldt’s works in philosophy of language) (see “Works”, bibliography), in his introduction and commentaries criticises Humboldt from a reductionist psychologistic position and neither here or anywhere in his other writings made a serious attempt to discuss Humboldt’s own arguments and to investigate his actual philosophical position. In France, on the other hand, we find throughout the nineteenth century a comparatively sustained interest in Humboldt that was confined chiefly to his work in the Asian languages and to his Basque studies. As a member of the Société Asiatique in Paris he published a number of articles in the society’s official journal, the Journal Asiatique (for a list of these articles, see Bösch 2006, p. 234) and the latter in turn carried reviews of some of his writings. It has to be noted that this French reception resulted largely from the personal contacts and scholarly exchanges that he maintained with a number of prominent French linguists such as Jean-François Champollion, Jean-Pierre Abel-Rémusat, Eugène Jacquet, and Eugène Burnouf. Yet Humboldt’s French reception, while including some of his important linguistic studies, all but omitted their philosophical concerns and underlying principles. Typical is the review of Humboldt’s groundbreaking treatise from 1827, “On the Dual” that appeared in the Nouvelle Revue Germanique, I: 378–381 (1829), where the reviewer blended out entirely the philosophical intent and key argument of the piece (Ibid. 105/6) and thus distorted beyond recognition Humboldt’s integration of linguistic research and philosophy of language, which lies at the heart of his linguistic enterprise. It is only in the late twentieth century that the philosopher of language and linguist Humboldt has been discovered in France by men like Henri Meschonic, Jean Rousseau or Denis Thouard (For their publications see, Bösch 2006, pp. 239f, 243f, and 247f). Surprisingly, Humboldt’s name has been notoriously absent in the extensive debates prompted by Jacques Derrida and his Grammatology concerning the role of writing (écriture) for an understanding of language and culture and its alleged neglect in the Western tradition because of its inherent phonocentrism. For Humboldt had in effect produced, on the basis of his extensive study of the world’s different writing systems past and present, a comprehensive theory of writing that does not fit into the rubrics of phonocentrism or eurocentrism. Writing constituted in his view an essential part of language, the material embodiment of the specific formative principle a language employs to construct meaning rather than being the mere representational mirror of speech. For him, the development of language and writing were mutually dependent on each other (On this issue see the extensive and groundbreaking work by Messling 2008).