 At the behest of Alexander von Humboldt, who had written a “Preface” to the entire work, a separate edition of the “Introduction” was brought to publication to serve as a memorial to the deceased, its text shortened and adjusted by the editor to its new purpose which made it appear as an independent treatise containing a summary of Humboldt’s theoretical views on language. Therefore, the word “Introduction” was dropped from its title altogether: The Diversity of Human Language-Structure and its Influence on the intellectual and spiritual Development of Mankind (Ueber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus und seinen Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts) (Berlin, 1836). This text, often confused with the “Introduction” proper or even with the whole work, became the single most important text for the Humboldt reception throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth  century.[3]  While in this text Humboldt elaborated broadly on his understanding of language and human speech, it is no longer evident that he intended it as a clearing of the ground for the large-scale empirical investigations that were to make up the body of the work. Yet from a strictly philosophical perspective this text does not measure up in its organization, articulation of issues or its philosophical stringency to some of Humboldt’s earlier posthumous treatises. These, however, were not published until the twentieth century. Among these groundbreaking works (of which no English translations yet exist) must be counted the Grundzüge des allgemeinen Sprachtypus (Fundamentals of the Linguistic Prototype) and Vom grammatischen Baue der Sprachen (On the Grammatical Structure of Languages). It is only in the light of twentieth century linguistics, anthropology and philosophy, that is, after Saussure, Cassirer, Jakobson, Whorf, Chomsky and Wittgenstein, that the true scope of Humboldt’s linguistic philosophy has become visible and its actuality been perceived. During the nineteenth century Humboldt was for the representatives of the academically established discipline of linguistics with its positivistic historicist and strictly Indo-European orientation nothing but the odd man out. What separated him from the mainstream was his philosophically grounded understanding of language and linguistics and his decidedly non-Eurocentric orientation, which preserved the enlightenment Universalist tradition by providing it with a new philosophical base.