Herrschaft und Staat

Comprising a collection of lectures given at a conference at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, this volume deals with the development of a vocabulary of civilisation in the period 1840-1870 in the languages of South-Eastern Europe. The noted lexical layers are not determined by language boundaries and can thus be observed, recorded and presented in a cross border manner, which is ultimately the only meaningful way to explain and understand them. This leads to an entirely new structure of language diversity that is not based on the principle of genetic relatedness but on an intellectual-historical and conceptual-history-related foundation. The picture that emerges from such research is not ruled by language families but by cultural areas. For various reasons, not all languages of this geographical area could be recorded: The Albanian language could not be included, because it had no written-language civilisation vocabulary at the time the research was being conducted; despite its closeness to Croatian, the Slovenian language does not belong to the primary cultural area recorded here.