Leo Weisgerber

Johann Leo Weisgerber (25 February 1899, Metz – 8 August 1985, Bonn) was a Lorraine-born German linguist who also specialized in Celtic linguistics. He developed the "organicist" or "relativist" theory that different languages produce different experiences. He was son of a village-teacher who served as a young man in the German army in Flanders and could not return to his home city for that. During World War II his pan-Celticist ideology was co-opted to support the German war effort, as did pro-Polish and pro-Czech ideology on the side of the allies.

After studying in Bonn (1918–), Weisgerber taught as a professor of general and comparative linguistics at (1927–), Marburg University (1938–) and Bonn University (1942–). He was an editor of the journal Wörter und Sachen, which he used as a vehicle for his ideas. After the Second World War he taught mainly in Bonn. He wrote prolifically throughout his career. Among other activities he founded the modern German language journal Wirkendes Wort and was a co-founder of the Institut für Deutsche Sprache (Mannheim).

Reacting to older linguists' emphasis on form (especially phonology and morphology), Weisgerber initiated what he called inhaltbezogene Grammatik ('content-related grammar'). Starting from the study of translation problems and of colour amnesia, he contributed notably to the theory that language determines and structures our apprehension of reality. This was initially influenced by the structuralist theories of Ferdinand de Saussure, but Weisgerber's theory soon took him far beyond the simple Saussurean linkage of (linguistic) form and (semantic) content. His other debts were to Wilhelm von Humboldt (notably the insight that language diversity implies a diversity of world-views) and Jost Trier (concurrently with whom he developed the structuralist idea of a word-field or lexical field).

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