This document summarizes Herman Kellgren's work analyzing the Finnish language through the lens of Wilhelm von Humboldt's linguistic theory. As a Fennoman scholar in 19th century Finland, Kellgren sought to elevate the status of Finnish by showing how it fulfilled the requirements of an ideal language according to Humboldt. However, Humboldt's theory favored languages with inflection over agglutination, and Finnish posed challenges as an agglutinative language. The document discusses how Kellgren engaged in an intellectual struggle to defend the legitimacy of Finnish grammar in the face of these theoretical "inconveniences".

1. “Sanskrit has brought me to my Finnish
language and fatherland”
Herman Kellgren:
a Fennoman in Berlin, a Humboldtian in Helsinki
Łukasz Sommer
University of Warsaw

2. Research context
• Ideologies of Fenno-Ugricity
– a comparative study in the history of ideas
– various notions of Fenno-Ugric kinship
– their roles in identity building projects
– philosophical background and ideological
entanglements of linguistics

3. Herman Kellgren (1822–1856)
• son of a Swedish-speaking pharmacist from Kuopio
• joined the Fennoman movement as a student in
Helsinki
• friend and disciple of J.V. Snellman
• turned to philology and linguistic studies
• academic visits to Germany:
– Berlin 1843 (Franz Bopp’s lectures on Sanskrit)
– Leipzig 1846 (collaboration with Hermann
Brockhaus)
• 1854 professorship in Oriental languages and
literatures at the University of Helsinki
• pioneer of Indian studies andcomparative linguistics
in Finland

4. Oriental studies and Fennomania
• from a letter to Snellman (October 1843)
– I must thank you, Brother, for the advice to go abroad and study Sanskrit:
now I have a cause to live for, because Sanskrit has brought me to my
Finnish language and fatherland.
linguistics + romantic nationalism – prominent examples in 19th century Finland:
• E.Lönnrot
• J.A. Sjögren all focused on Finnish and/or related languages
• M. A. Castrén
• A. Ahlqvist
H.Kellgren’s uniqueness:
→ non-Fennicist background
→ extra theoretical awareness
→ tried to analyze Finnish with the tools tested in Sanskritic studies:
• comparative method
• language philosophy of Wilhelm von Humboldt

5. Kellgren’s works on Finnish
• ”I hvad förhållande står språket till nationaliteten?”
– in Fosterländskt album II, utgifvet af H. Kellgren, R. Tengström, K.
Tigerstedt. Helsingfors 1845, pp. 33–59
• ”I hvad mån uppfyller Finska språket fordringarne af ett
språkideal?”
– in Fosterländskt album II pp. 118–188.
• Die Grundzüge der finnischen Sprache mit Rücksicht auf
den ural-altaischen Sprachstamm, Berlin 1847, 95 pp.
• „Das Finnische Volk und der Ural-Altaische Völkerstamm“
– in Jahresbericht der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft für das
Jahr 1846, Leipzig 1847, pp. 180–197.
• “Kirjoittajat ja kieli”,
– Suometar 23 08.06.1852.

6. Humboldt’s linguistic theory (1)
• opus magnum: Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus und
ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts, 1836.
(On the diversity of human language structure and its influence on
mankind’s mental development)
• philosophical relevance of language diversity
– unity of language and thought
– thinking patterns conditioned by particular language structures
• language formed by two principles, material and
intellectual
– Humboldtian language ideal: a synthesis of the two, neither
principle dominant
• some language structures closer to the ideal than others
• better language structure → better stimulation of mental
development

7. Humboldt’s linguistic theory (2)
• typology of grammatical structures:
– isolation (e.g. Classical Chinese):
• the intellectual dominating over the material: no inflection, bare word
roots organized only by sentence structure
– incorporation (e.g. Native American languages)
• the material dominating over the intellectual: uniform syntactic wholes
ruled by the verb
– inflection (Indo-European and Semitic languages)
• a synthesis of the material and the intellectual: internal transformation
of word roots or suffixation
 „Sanskritic” (= Indo-European) languages superior to all
others – structurally, intellectually and aesthetically

8. Finnish in the light of Humboldt’s theory
• very few references to Finnish (or any other Uralic or
Altaic language) in Humboldt’s works
• Indo-Eurocentric language ideal
• open disregard for agglutinative structures
– agglutination = every grammatical category is marked by a
separate suffix of its own, e.g.
• number and case in talo-i-ssa
• tense and person in istu-i-tte
– by Humboldt’s standards agglutination = failed inflection:
• „mechanical adding, not a truly organic accretion”
• indicates “a weakness of the inwardly organizing sense
of language”

9. Kellgren vs. the inconveniences of
Humboldtianism (1)
I hvad mån uppfyller Finska språket fordringarne af ett
språkideal? ( To what degree does Finnish fulfill the
requirements of a language ideal?, 1845)
• numerous references to Humboldt
• agglutination mentioned with no reference to Finnish
• Finnish characterized (without further explanation) as a
„markedly inflectional language”
• apart from minor imperfections in the phonetic system,
Finnish comes close to the high „Sanskritic” standards

10. Kellgren vs. the inconveniences of
Humboldtianism (2)
Die Grundzüge der finnischen Sprache mit Rücksicht auf den ural-
altaischen Sprachstamm (Main characteristics of the Finnish
language with regard to the Uralo-Altaic family, 1847)
• Finnish analyzed in a comparative perspective, along withTurkic,
Mongol and Tungusic languages
» presented as the most characteristic member of the „Uralo-
Altaic” family – least influenced by other languages
• a defense of Finnish as an inflected language
» no direct references to Humboldt
» main polemical reference: Wilhelm Schott’s Versuch über die
Tatarischen Sprachen (1836) →

11. Kellgren vs. the inconveniences of Humboldtianism
(2.1)
• Schott:
– in the “High Asian” (= Altaic and Uralic) languages the word root
[…] tolerates no modification by any grammatical ending”;
therefore there is only adhesion and no true cohesion to be
observed.
• Kellgren:
– true, many Uralo-Altaic languages have not elevated themselves
to true inflection, or cohesion, but this does not apply to
Finnish:
» a Finnish word root remains dominant in all grammatical
forms, retaining the initial stress and assimilating the suffixes’
qualities
» this means succesful blending of stem and suffix  inflection

12. Kellgren vs. the inconveniences of Humboldtianism (2.2)
I do not t know what more a language could do to blend the stems and suffixes
together! In the better known languages the root is indeed more flexible and not as
stiff as in Finnish, but the ending is firmer; Finnish concentrates its blending capability
in the end of the stem, while other tongues stretch out the entire word, including the
root. Is the former way less legitimate just because the latter is more familiar?
Why is Kellgren’s defense of Finnish unconvincing from a
Humboldtian perspective?
• according to Humboldt, suffixation is a secondary mechanism
of inflection, inferior to internal change of word roots
• even Finnish suffixation does not meet the Humboldtian
standards
– in proper inflectional suffixation, the inflected word remains
an organic whole
– in Finnish, distinct grammatical functions remain visible

13. Concluding remarks
• Kellgren’s struggle for the reputation of Finnish as an
illustration of a more general mechanism of intellectual
import:
– a peripheral intellectual engaged in an identity-building
project
– powerful stimuli from a foreign center: simultaneously a
source of inspiration and threat, a tool of emancipation and
self-denial
– (cf. East European Herderians, Hegelians, Marxists etc.)
• relevance in analyzing the concept of Fenno-Ugricity:
– an imported concept that became part of the Finns’ (and
other „Fenno-Ugric nations’”) self-definition