The rippling of<i>Verschiedenheit</i>: Wilhelm von Humboldt on philology, usage and intra‐linguistic diversity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s concept of desynonymization, although it has been said to justify the philological record of usage amassed in dictionaries such as the OED, can only partially explain the late‐stage processes that result in diversity within a language. A stronger conceptual alternative to desynonymization can be found in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s reflections on linguistic diversity (Verschiedenheit) in his great essay of 1836. He supposed a criss‐crossing of conformity and freedom to be the key principle at play in divergences not only among languages and peoples but also among individual speakers. The striving of individuals to join thought and utterance results in the modifications of usage and the varying fates of those instances of usage (namely their perpetuation or vanishing through time). The re‐generation of language happens not primarily in the formation of new words or the recovery of old ones, but in daily use, in actions always subject to variation. It is exemplary use that extends the range of a language, not the imposition of a rationally improved vocabulary. The successes or failures of divergent utterance depend upon an ongoing wooing and winning and breaking of agreement about which words to use and understand and do things with.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".