The last decades of the nineteenth century represent a crucial period in the history of linguistics. This is the era in which the historical-comparative method, the flag-bearer of the new scientific language study of the nineteenth century, reached the peak of its institutional dominance and its most extreme form in the Neogrammarian school. But it is also the eve of the structuralist revolution, whose mounting challenges overwhelmed the historical paradigm and swept it away shortly after the turn of the century.

An outlier in this intellectual environment is the German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893). As Professor of East Asian Languages first at the Neogrammarian stronghold of the University of Leipzig from 1878 to 1889 and then Professor of Sinology and General Linguistics in Berlin from 1889 until his death in 1893, Gabelentz was present at the chief centres of linguistic scholarship of the time. His work was marked, however, by an adherence to the seemingly antiquated doctrines of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Reviewing the posthumous second edition of Gabelentz's (2016 [1891]) magnum opus, Die Sprachwissenschaft(The Science of Language), the Indo-Europeanist Ludwig Sutterlin (1863–1934) summed up the contemporary reception of Gabelentz when he remarked: ‘Even though its first edition came out as recently as 1891 and its second edition in 1901, Gabelentz's book seems to us like a remnant of a former time: with him dies a point of view that in the end was established by Wilhelm von Humboldt’ (Sutterlin, 1904, p. 319).

But Gabelentz was not simply old-fashioned: he sought to update the Humboldtian programme as a means to overcoming the perceived limitations that linguistics had acquired through the course of the nineteenth century. He hoped to revive the study of ‘general linguistics’, which he conceived as the broad investigation on the Humboldtian model of the human capacity for language (see Elffers, 2012). This programme was opposed to the narrow focus of the Neogrammarians, whose work concerned itself almost exclusively with historical sound change in Indo-European languages.