Editing Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (section)

==Philology ==
Leibniz the [[philologist]] was an avid student of languages, eagerly latching on to any information about vocabulary and grammar that came his way. In 1710, he applied ideas of [[gradualism]] and [[uniformitarianism]] to linguistics in a short essay.<ref>Gottfried Leibniz, "Brevis designatio meditationum de originibus gentium, ductis potissimum ex indicio linguarum", ''Miscellanea Berolinensia''. 1710.</ref> He refuted the belief, widely held by Christian scholars of the time, that [[Hebrew language|Hebrew]] was the primeval language of the human race. At the same time, he rejected the idea of unrelated language groups and considered them all to have a common source.<ref>Henry Hoenigswald, [https://books.google.com/books?id=GXttDfuc4NEC&dq=leibniz+historical+linguistics&pg=PA93 "Descent, Perfection and the Comparative Method since Leibniz"], ''Leibniz, Humboldt, and the Origins of Comparativism'', eds. Tullio De Mauro & Lia Formigari (Amsterdam–Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1990), 119–134.</ref> He also refuted the argument, advanced by Swedish scholars in his day, that a form of proto-[[Swedish language|Swedish]] was the ancestor of the [[Germanic languages]]. He puzzled over the origins of the [[Slavic languages]] and was fascinated by [[classical Chinese]]. Leibniz was also an expert in the [[Sanskrit]] language.<ref name="Springer, Cham">{{cite book|last1=Agarwal|first1=Ravi P|last2=Sen|first2=Syamal K|title=Creators of Mathematical and Computational Sciences|date=2014|publisher=Springer, Cham|isbn=978-3-319-10870-4|page=186}}</ref>

He published the ''princeps editio'' (first modern edition) of the [[Late Middle Ages|late medieval]] ''[[Chronicon Holtzatiae]]'', a Latin chronicle of the [[County of Holstein]].