History of linguistics

Linguistics as a study endeavors to describe and explain the human faculty of language and has been of scholarly interest throughout recorded history. Contemporary linguistics is the result of a continuous European intellectual tradition originating in ancient Greece that was later influenced by the ancient Indian tradition of linguistics due to the study of Sanskrit grammar by European linguists from the 18th century. China has also independently produced native schools of linguistic thought.

At various stages in history, linguistics as a discipline has been in close contact with such disciplines as philosophy, anthropology and philology. In some cultures linguistic analysis has been applied in the service of religion, particularly for the determination of the religiously preferred spoken and written forms of sacred texts in Hebrew, Sanskrit and Arabic. Contemporary Western linguistics is close to philosophy and cognitive science.

Linguistics in antiquity

India

Linguistics was pursued in ancient India for many centuries. The Sanskrit grammar of Pāṇini (c. 520–460 BC), who is often considered the founder of linguistics, contains a particularly detailed description of Sanskrit morphology, phonology and roots, evincing a high level of linguistic insight and analysis. In particular, he is most famous for formulating the 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology in the text Aṣṭādhyāyī. His sophisticated grammar of Sanskrit continues to be in use to this day. The Indian grammatical tradition is believed to have been active for many centuries before Pāṇini, and anticipates by millennia certain developments in the West, such as the phoneme and the generation of word forms by the successive application of morphological rules for example. (Outside of India, the phoneme seems to have been discovered and forgotten several times through history.)

The South Indian linguist Tolkāppiyar (c. 3rd century BC) wrote the Tolkāppiyam, the grammar of Tamil, which is also still in use today. Bhartrihari (c. 450–510) was another important author on Indic linguistic theory. He theorized the act of speech as being made up of three stages: conceptualization by the speaker; performance of speaking; and comprehension by the interpreter. The work of Pāṇini, and the later Indian linguist Bhartrihari, had a significant influence on many of the foundational ideas proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, professor of Sanskrit, who is widely considered the father of modern structural linguistics.

Greece

While ancient Indian scholars pursued grammar, ancient Greek philosophers were debating the nature and origins of language. A subject of concern was whether language was man-made or supernatural in origin. The possibilities that the meaning of language is agreed to by consensus versus having a predetermined fixed value was also considered. An example for the Greek debates about language is available in Plato's Cratylus. It was not until relatively late that the Greeks developed a set of grammatical rules for their language. It was upon this foundation that Roman philosophers built the grammar rules for Latin.

Medieval linguistics

Medieval Europe accepted the Greek and Latin without change until the start of the Italian Renaissance. In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day. Dante, in a significant reversal of the typical medieval prioritization of Latin, regarded the vernacular as the "primary" speech as it was first learned. He famously declared that the vernacular with "without any rules" (sine omnia regula), by which of course he meant written, codified rules as taught in schools. Nevertheless, he was hampered, as were most medieval writers on the subject, by the limited ability to compare texts, and the lexical elements within them, over time.

Modern linguistics

Historical linguistics

In the eighteenth century James Burnett, Lord Monboddo analyzed numerous primitive languages and deduced logical elements of the evolution of human language. His thinking was interleaved with his precursive concepts of biological evolution. Some of his early concepts have been validated and are considered correct today. The Sanscrit Language (1786), Sir William Jones proposed that Sanskrit and Persian had resemblances to classical Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Celtic languages. From this idea sprung the field of comparative linguistics and historical linguistics. Through the 19th century, European linguistics centered on the comparative history of the Indo-European languages, with a concern for finding their common roots and tracing their development.

Working from a biblical perspective some scholars believed that all human languages were descended from the language of Adam and Eve, a language called the Adamic language. Many of these scholars believed that the Hebrew language was, in fact, the same as the Adamic language.

In the 1820s, Wilhelm von Humboldt observed that human language was a rule-governed system, anticipating a theme that was to become central in the formal work on syntax and semantics of language in the 20th century, of this observation he said that it allowed language to make infinite use of finite means (Über den Dualis 1827).

About 1880, scholars in the United States began to record the hundreds of native languages once found in North America. The concern with describing languages spread throughout the world, and thousands of languages around the world have now been analyzed to varying degrees. As this work was developing in the early twentieth century, mainly in America, linguists were confronted with languages whose structures differed greatly from those of known European languages.

Scholars decided they needed a theory of linguistic structure and methods of analysis.

From such concerns came the field of structural linguistics. Pioneers in it include the anthropologists Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, and Leonard Bloomfield.

When historical-comparative linguistics first met unfamiliar languages, the linguist's first job was to thoroughly describe the language.

Descriptive linguistics

In Europe there was a parallel development of structural linguistics, influenced most strongly by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss student of Indo-European and general linguistics whose lectures on general linguistics, published posthumously by his students, set the direction of European linguistic analysis from the 1920s on; his approach has been widely adopted in other fields under the broad term "Structuralism."

During the second World War, Leonard Bloomfield and several of his students and colleagues developed teaching materials for a variety of languages whose knowledge was needed for the war effort.

This work led to an increasing prominence of the field of linguistics, which became a recognized discipline in most American universities only after the war.

Other specialties

From roughly 1980 onwards, pragmatic, functional, and cognitive approaches have steadily gained ground, both in the U.S. and in Europe.

See also

• History of communication

References

• Mario Pei (1965). Invitation to Linguistics. Doubleday & Company. ISBN 0-385-06584-1. 
• W. P. Lehmann, editor (1967). A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-34840-4. 
• Frederick J. Newmeyer (2005). The History of Linguistics. Linguistic Society of America.