EN
The aim of the paper is to examine the beginning of the Romantic turn as regards the relation between language, thought and reality. The author claims that Kant’s critical philosophy played an important role. First, Kant's philosophy had a conservative influence: the categories presented in the Critique of Pure Reason led scholars to seek for universal notions in diverse languages more intensively. But, secondly, it engendered the objection of Hamann and Herder, which led to the explicit formulation of the thesis of how language influences thinking. Thirdly, in spite of their „metacriticism” of Kant, it was due to the transcendental turn that Hamann and Herder could consider the relation between language and reality. And last but not least, Kant's teleological conceptions gave a frame for the Romantic theory of language as organism, which subsequently evolved into the modern system approach.