They thought it would be particularly useful for writing in a certain voice or character, or for coming up with thematically exciting words. They wondered what kind of thesaurus would come from a corpus of nautical novels (like Moby Dick)

The German polymath Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), brother of the famous explorer Alexander von Humboldt, likewise tried to develop a universalist and philosophical approach to the study of languages. The central fact of language is that speakers can make infinite use of the finite resources provided by their language. Though the capacity for