This book is a linguistic bike tour guide for Leipzig and its surroundings. It contains twenty
scenic cycling routes in the flat Leipzig Basin each of which focuses on a scholar who studied
or worked here. The tours not only highlight places associated with famous linguists they also
target many cultural and natural attractions. In the 1870s Leipzig became the world centre of
linguistics. It retained this role for several decades and continued to be highly visible
after the Chomskyan revolution beginning in the 1950s. Based on the groundwork laid by Karl
Brugmann and August Leskien many important linguists spent substantial amounts of time in
Leipzig to study carry out research write a dissertation finish a habilitation or work as
a professor among them Ferdinand de Saussure Jan Baudouin de Courtenay Eduard Sievers
Hermann Paul Leonard Bloomfield Lucien Tesnière Nikolaj Trubetzkoy and Manfred Bierwisch.
These and several other scholars featured in the present volume played a decisive role in
shaping the field of linguistics as we know it today and the book takes great care to
introduce their main ideas and discoveries. The twenty chapters thus combine in a highly
original way descriptions of linguistically oriented bike rides with accounts of major
developments in the history of language science.
