You could say the postmodern humanities are about the “metafication” of the traditional humanities. That is, a shift in focus from the specific activity to the activity as an abstract and general category. In the case of language, this transition is enshrined in Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole, the latter referring to individual acts and instances of speech, the former referring to language as an abstract system or category.
In the traditional humanities, we studied languages—vocabulary and grammar (phonology, morphology, and syntax) as a prelude to reading, writing, and above all speaking. The most important languages for Renaissance humanists were Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, followed by French and German, and eventually English. This had to do with Western Europe’s connection to the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions on the one hand, and on the other to the connection between culture and empire: greatest sphere of military, diplomatic, and political influence equals most important modern European language.
Of course, we still study languages so we can read, speak, and write them. But language took on a markedly different importance for humanists beginning with the posthumous publication in 1916 of Ferdinand de Saussure’s Cours de linguistique générale. In addition to revolutionizing the study of language itself, Saussure’s ideas about language as a synchronous structure gave birth to the literary theories and critical methods of Russian Formalism on the one hand, and on the other to the theories and methods of cultural study represented by Claude Lévi-Strauss and structural anthropology.
I should say reams more about all of this, but I will doubtless do so slowly and haltingly. If you want to get a jump on me, run out and get Fredric Jameson’s 1973 monograph, The Prison House of Language (Princeton), a critical account of structuralism and Russian Formalism that I found inspirational when I first read it as a college student in the very early 1980s.
Much more to come