Lazarus violinist

Lazarus Geiger (born May 21, 1829 in Frankfurt am Main ; † August 29, 1870 there ) was a German linguist and philosopher.

Life

Geiger was first a bookseller and later studied classical philology at the universities of Marburg , Heidelberg and Bonn . In contrast to his uncle Abraham Geiger , the pioneer of Reform Judaism , he was one of the supporters of Orthodox Judaism in Germany. From 1861 until his death he was a teacher at the Philanthropin in Frankfurt am Main. In his main works (The Origin and Development of Human Language and Reason and The Origin of Language ) he sought, in addition to Steinthal , to apply the psychological-philosophical method to language research.

The lecture on the sense of color in primeval times and its development , which Geiger gave at the conference in Frankfurt am Main in September 1867, is considered the beginning of a new linguistic direction, linguistic archeology . In 1871 this report was published in German.

Geiger's research is notable because the author came to recognize the process of evolution before Charles Darwin and applied the theory of evolution to the field of thought and language. According to Geiger, the language is based on insignificant exclamations that are close to the interjections (the author himself calls them "Sprachschrei"). According to the scientist's considerations, language is a source of human thought activity, the mind develops from it, and Geiger assigns a determining role in this development not to hearing but to sight. In the violinist's opinion, once people got used to the words and their sensitivity to sounds and sound differences increased significantly, they noticed that their ability to distinguish objects also increased.

Public lectures given by Lazarus Geiger at various times were published by his brother, Alfred Geiger, in 1871 under the heading On the History of Human Development .

Works

• About the extent and source of experience-free knowledge. Frankfurt am Main 1865.
• Origin and Development of Human Language and Reason. Stuttgart 1868–1872, 2 vols. (Digitized vol. 1 , vol. 2 )
• The origin of language. Stuttgart 1869 ( digitized version )
• On the history of human development. 1871

literature

• August Leskien :  Geiger, Lazarus . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 8, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1878, p. 507 f.
• Gerhard Baader:  Geiger, Elieser Lazarus Salomon. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 6, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1964, ISBN 3-428-00187-7 , p. 143 f. ( Digitized version ).

Web links

• Violinist . In: Meyers Konversations-Lexikon . 4th edition. Volume 7, Verlag des Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig / Vienna 1885–1892, p. 22.
• Ludwig August Rosenthal : Lazarus Geiger, his teaching, his life.
• Woodworth RS: The puzzle of color vocabularies . Ed .: Psychological Bulletin. Woodworth, 1910, p. 325-334 , doi : 10.1037 / h0071190 .
• Orsucci A .: The historical development of color sense and the "linguistic archeology" By L. Geiger and H. Magnus: A commentary on Aphorism 426 von Morgenröthe . Ed .: Nietzsche Studies. 2010, ISSN  1613-0790 , p. 243-256 , doi : 10.1515 / 9783110244410.243 ( degruyter.com ).

Individual evidence

• Brent Berlin, Paul Kay: Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution . Ed .: University of California Press. 1991, ISBN 978-0-520-07635-8 , pp. 135 .