History of Linguistics Overview

History of Linguistics

• Speculation about language dates back thousands of years, with ancient Greek philosophers discussing language origins, grammar rules, and word classification.
• By the 3rd century BC, Greeks had categorized words into parts of speech.
• In India, religious motivations drove language study. Hindu priests noticed language changes since the Vedas (sacred texts), compiled around 1000 BCE.
• Panini, an Indian grammarian (c.400 BCE), produced the earliest Sanskrit grammar.
• Romans adopted Greek grammatical models, creating Latin grammars. Cicero (1st century BCE) and later Roman grammarians, like Donatus and Priscian, wrote extensively about rhetoric and Latin grammar. Roman works served as language study standards for over 1000 years.
• In the 17th and 18th centuries, modern languages (French, English) replaced Latin, leading to wider language studies. Improvements in printing brought more language texts into circulation.
• Phonetics (the study of sounds) gained importance, leading to comparisons across languages and laying groundwork for Indo-European linguistics.
• 18th century observation of similarities between Sanskrit, Latin, and Greek led to the field of Indo-European linguistics.
• 19th century saw an emphasis on philology (historical language analysis) to explore language evolution and relationships.

20th Century Linguistics

• Early 20th century: Language studies expanded to include previously unwritten languages, particularly Native American languages.
• Anthropologists like Boas and Saussure developed descriptive linguistics techniques for studying unwritten languages.
• Structuralism, a language theory: Language is a structured system, building on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure, who distinguished between spoken language and the shared understanding of grammatical rules underlying it.
• Structuralism emphasizes the relationships between speech elements within a system.
• Noam Chomsky's transformational-generative grammar revolutionized linguistics. Grammar is viewed as a system of universal rules that are innate to all humans.
• Chomsky proposed that language is a mental capacity (language competence), distinct from the use of language (language performance);
• Chomsky emphasized universal grammar (shared by all languages) and language acquisition as innate.

Recent Developments

• 20th-century linguistic theory focused more on grammar's underlying systems ("grammar" as a mental process) rather than recorded examples.
• Linguistic approaches incorporate universals, historical/comparative analysis, and language acquisition processes.
• Modern linguistics includes psycholinguistics (how people acquire and use language), sociolinguistics (how social factors influence language), and the study of animal communication.