ABSTRACT
In this chapter, as well as in chapters six and eleven, I want to retrace the many layered metaphor-cluster that developed in Europe around the notions of mother-tongue, native speaker and national language from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. I would like to use this narrative as a backdrop for multilingual metaphors that implicitly or explicitly challenge the monolingual view. The focus is on the organic metaphor of lactation, its association with the cultivation of trees (Bonfiglio 2010:72–105), and the notion of language as an organism developed by German comparative linguistics in the course of the nineteenth century. Corporeal metaphors play a central role in the work of Johann Gottfried von Herder, Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Franz Bopp, August Schleicher and Wilhelm von Humboldt.
