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.[185] He refuted the belief, widely held by Christian scholars of the time, that 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.[186] He also refuted the argument, advanced by Swedish scholars in his day, that a form of proto-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.[187]
He published the princeps editio (first modern edition) of the late medieval Chronicon Holtzatiae, a Latin chronicle of the County of Holstein.
