History of linguistics
is the scientific study of language. It involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context.
Linguistics began to be studied systematically by the Indian scholar Pānini in the 6th century BCE. Beginning around the 4th century BCE, China also developed its own grammatical traditions. Aristotle laid the foundation of Western linguistics as part of the study of rhetoric in his Poetics ca. 335 BC. Traditions of Arabic grammar and Hebrew grammar developed during the Middle Ages in a religious context like Pānini's Sanskrit grammar.
Modern approaches began to develop in the 18th century when the classical discipline of rhetoric was gradually removed. During the 19th century linguistics became to be regarded as belonging to either psychology or biology, and such views remain the foundation of today's mainstream Anglo-American linguistics. They were however contested in the early 20th century by Ferdinand de Saussure who established linguistics as an autonomous discipline within social sciences. Following Saussure's concept, general linguistics consists of the study of language as a semiotic system which includes the subfields of phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. The linguist's approach to these can be diachronic or synchronic.
Today, linguistics is considered as relating to a large number of scientific approaches, and is further split into several subfields including applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, computational linguistics, and so on.
Antiquity
Across cultures, the early history of linguistics is associated with a need to disambiguate discourse, especially for ritual texts or in arguments. This often led to explorations of sound-meaning mappings, and the debate over conventional versus naturalistic origins for these symbols. Finally this led to the processes by which larger structures are formed from units.Babylonia
The earliest linguistic texts – written in cuneiform on clay tablets – date almost four thousand years before the present. In the early centuries of the second millennium BCE, in southern Mesopotamia there arose a grammatical tradition that lasted more than 2,500 years. The linguistic texts from the earliest parts of the tradition were lists of nouns in Sumerian, the language of religious and legal texts at the time. Sumerian was being replaced in everyday speech by a very different language, Akkadian; it remained however as a language of prestige and continued to be used in religious and legal contexts. It therefore had to be taught as foreign language, and to facilitate this, information about Sumerian was recorded in writing by Akkadian-speaking scribes.Over the centuries, the lists became standardised, and the Sumerian words were provided with Akkadian translations. Ultimately texts emerged that gave Akkadian equivalents for not just single words, but for entire paradigms of varying forms for words: one text, for instance, has 227 different forms of the verb ĝar “to place”.
India
Linguistics in ancient India derives its impetus from the need to correctly recite and interpret the Vedic texts. Already in the oldest Indian text, the Rigveda, is deified. By 1200 BCE, the oral performance of these texts becomes standardized, and treatises on ritual recitation suggest splitting up the Sanskrit compounds into words, stems, and phonetic units, providing an impetus for morphology and phonetics.Some of the earliest activities in the description of language have been attributed the Indian grammarian Pāṇini, who wrote a rule-based description of the Sanskrit language in his .
Over the next few centuries, clarity was reached in the organization of sound units, and the stop consonants were organized in a 5x5 square, eventually leading to a systematic alphabet, Brāhmī, by the 3rd century BCE.
In semantics, the early Sanskrit grammarian Śākaṭāyana proposes that verbs represent ontologically prior categories, and that all nouns are etymologically derived from actions. The etymologist Yāska posits that meaning inheres in the sentence, and that word meanings are derived based on sentential usage. He also provides four categories of words—nouns, verbs, pre-verbs, and particles/invariants—and a test for nouns both concrete and abstract: words which can be indicated by the pronoun that.
Pāṇini opposes the Yāska view that sentences are primary, and proposes a grammar for composing semantics from morphemic roots. Transcending the ritual text to consider living language, Pāṇini specifies a comprehensive set of about 4,000 aphoristic rules that:
- Map the semantics of verb argument structures into thematic roles
- Provide morphosyntactic rules for creating verb forms and nominal forms whose seven cases are called karaka that generate the morphology
- Take these morphological structures and consider phonological processes by which the final phonological form is obtained
The extremely succinct specification of these rules and their complex interactions led to considerable commentary and extrapolation over the following centuries. The phonological structure includes defining a notion of sound universals similar to the modern phoneme, the systematization of consonants based on oral cavity constriction, and vowels based on height and duration. However, it is the ambition of mapping these from morpheme to semantics that is truly remarkable in modern terms.
Grammarians following Pāṇini include Kātyāyana, who wrote aphorisms on Pāṇini and advanced mathematics; Patañjali, known for his commentary on selected topics in Pāṇini's grammar and on Kātyāyana's aphorisms, as well as, according to some, the author of the Yoga Sutras, and Pingala, with his mathematical approach to prosody. Several debates ranged over centuries, for example, on whether word-meaning mappings were conventional or eternal.
The Nyaya Sutras specified three types of meaning: the individual, the type universal, and the image.
That the sound of a word also forms a class was observed by Bhartṛhari, who also posits that language-universals are the units of thought, close to the nominalist or even the linguistic determinism position. Bhartṛhari also considers the sentence to be ontologically primary.
Of the six canonical texts or Vedangas that formed the core syllabus in Brahminic education from the 1st century CE until the 18th century, four dealt with language:
- Shiksha : phonetics and phonology, Gārgeya and commentators
- Chandas : prosody or meter, Pingala and commentators
- Vyakarana : grammar, Pāṇini and commentators
- Nirukta : etymology, Yāska and commentators
Unfortunately, Pāṇini's rule-based method of linguistic analysis and description has remained relatively unknown to Western linguistics until more recently. Franz Bopp used Pāṇini's work as a linguistic source for his 1807 Sanskrit grammar but disregarded his methodology. Pāṇini's system also differs from modern formal linguistics in that, since Sanskrit is a free word-order language, it did not provide syntactic rules. Formal linguistics, as first proposed by Louis Hjelmslev in 1943, is nonetheless based on the same concept that the expression of meaning is organised on different layers of linguistic form.
The Pali Grammar of Kacchayana, dated to the early centuries CE, describes the language of the Buddhist canon.
Greece
The Greeks developed an alphabet using symbols from the Phoenicians, adding signs for vowels and for extra consonants appropriate to their idiom. In the Phoenicians and in earlier Greek writing systems, such as Linear B, graphemes indicated syllables, that is sound combinations of a consonant and a vowel. The addition of vowels by the Greeks was a major breakthrough as it facilitated the writing of Greek by representing both vowels and consonants with distinct graphemes. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented on, forming the basis of philology and criticism.Along with written speech, the Greeks commenced studying grammatical and philosophical issues. A philosophical discussion about the nature and origins of language can be found as early as the works of Plato. A subject of concern was whether language was man-made, a social artifact, or supernatural in origin. Plato in his Cratylus presents the naturalistic view, that word meanings emerge from a natural process, independent of the language user. His arguments are partly based on examples of compounding, where the meaning of the whole is usually related to the constituents, although by the end he admits a small role for convention. The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics as a new text genre. The Platonic dialogs contain definitions of the meters of the poems and tragedy, the form and the structure of those texts.
Aristotle supports the conventional origins of meaning. He defined the logic of speech and of the argument. Furthermore, Aristotle's works on rhetoric and poetics became of the utmost importance for the understanding of tragedy, poetry, public discussions etc. as text genres. Aristotle's work on logic interrelates with his special interest in language, and his work on this area was fundamentally important for the development of the study of language. In Categories, Aristotle defines what is meant by "synonymous" or univocal words, what is meant by "homonymous" or equivocal words, and what is meant by "paronymous" or denominative words. He divides forms of speech as being:
- Either simple, without composition or structure, such as "man," "horse," "fights," etc.
- Or having composition and structure, such as "a man fights," "the horse runs," etc.
The Stoics made linguistics an important part of their system of the cosmos and the human. They played an important role in defining the linguistic sign-terms adopted later on by Ferdinand de Saussure like "significant" and "signifié". The Stoics studied phonetics, grammar and etymology as separate levels of study. In phonetics and phonology the articulators were defined. The syllable became an important structure for the understanding of speech organization. One of the most important contributions of the Stoics in language study was the gradual definition of the terminology and theory echoed in modern linguistics.
Alexandrian grammarians also studied speech sounds and prosody; they defined parts of speech with notions such as "noun", "verb", etc. There was also a discussion about the role of analogy in language, in this discussion the grammatici in Alexandria supported the view that language and especially morphology is based on analogy or paradigm, whereas the grammatic in schools in Asia Minor consider that language is not based on analogical bases but rather on exceptions.
Alexandrians, like their predecessors, were very interested in meter and its role in poetry. The metrical "feet" in the Greek was based on the length of time taken to pronounce each syllable, with syllables categorized according to their weight as either "long" syllables or "short" syllables. The foot is often compared to a musical measure and the long and short syllables to whole notes and half notes. The basic unit in Greek and Latin prosody is a mora, which is defined as a single short syllable. A long syllable is equivalent to two moras. A long syllable contains either a long vowel, a diphthong, or a short vowel followed by two or more consonants.
Various rules of elision sometimes prevent a grammatical syllable from making a full syllable, and certain other lengthening and shortening rules can create long or short syllables in contexts where one would expect the opposite. The most important Classical meter as defined by the Alexandrian grammarians was the dactylic hexameter, the meter of Homeric poetry. This form uses verses of six feet. The first four feet are normally dactyls, but can be spondees. The fifth foot is almost always a dactyl. The sixth foot is either a spondee or a trochee. The initial syllable of either foot is called the ictus, the basic "beat" of the verse. There is usually a caesura after the ictus of the third foot.
The text Tékhnē grammatiké, possibly written by Dionysius Thrax, is considered the earliest grammar book in the Greek tradition. It lists eight parts of speech and lays out the broad details of Greek morphology including the case structures. This text was intended as a pedagogic guide, and also covers punctuation and some aspects of prosody. Other grammars by Charisius and Diomedes were popular in Rome as pedagogic material for teaching Greek to native Latin-speakers.
One of the most prominent scholars of Alexandria and of the antiquity was Apollonius Dyscolus. Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. Happily, four of these are preserved—we still have a Syntax in four books, and three one-book monographs on pronouns, adverbs, and connectives, respectively.
Lexicography become an important domain of study as many grammarians compiled dictionaries, thesauri and lists of special words "λέξεις" that were old, or dialectical or special at that period. In the early medieval times we find more categories of dictionaries like the dictionary of Suida, etymological dictionaries etc.
At that period, the Greek language functioned as a lingua franca, a language spoken throughout the known world of that time and, as a result, modern linguistics struggles to overcome this. With the Greeks a tradition commenced in the study of language. The Romans and the medieval world followed, and their laborious work is considered today as a part of our everyday language. Think, for example, of notions such as the word, the syllable, the verb, the subject etc.
Rome
In the 4th century, Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages. A smaller version, Ars Minor, covered only the eight parts of speech; eventually when books came to be printed in the 15th century, this was one of the first books to be printed. Schoolboys subjected to all this education gave us the current meaning of "grammar".China
Similar to the Indian tradition, Chinese philology, Xiaoxue, began as an aid to understanding classics in the Han dynasty. Xiaoxue came to be divided into three branches: Xungu, Wenzi and Yinyun and reached its golden age in the 17th century CE. The glossary Erya, comparable to the Indian Nighantu, is regarded as the first linguistic work in China. Shuowen Jiezi, the first Chinese dictionary, classifies Chinese characters by radicals, a practice that would be followed by most subsequent lexicographers. Two more pioneering works produced during the Han Dynasty are Fangyan, the first Chinese work concerning dialects, and Shiming, devoted to etymology.As in ancient Greece, early Chinese thinkers were concerned with
the relationship between names and reality. Confucius famously emphasized the moral commitment implicit in a name, stating that the moral collapse of the pre-Qin was a result of the failure to rectify behaviour to meet the moral commitment inherent in names: "Good government consists in the ruler being a ruler, the minister being a minister, the father being a father, and the son being a son... If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things.".
However, what is the reality implied by a name? The later Mohists or the group known as School of Names,
consider that ming may refer to three kinds of shi : type universals, individual, and unrestricted. They adopt a realist position on the name-reality connection - universals arise because "the world itself fixes the patterns of similarity and difference by which things should be divided into kinds". The philosophical tradition is well known for conundra resembling the sophists, e.g. when Gongsun Longzi questions if in copula statements, are X and Y identical or is X a subclass of Y. This is the famous paradox "a white horse is not a horse".
Xun Zi revisits the principle of zhengming, but instead of
rectifying behaviour to suit the names, his emphasis is on
rectifying language to correctly reflect reality. This is consistent with a more "conventional" view of word origins.
The study of phonology in China began late, and was influenced by the Indian tradition, after Buddhism had become popular in China. The rime dictionary is a type of dictionary arranged by tone and rime, in which the pronunciations of characters are indicated by fanqie spellings. Rime tables were later produced to aid the understanding of fanqie.
Philological studies flourished during the Qing Dynasty, with Duan Yucai and Wang Niansun as the towering figures. The last great philologist of the era was Zhang Binglin, who also helped lay the foundation of modern Chinese linguistics. The Western comparative method was brought into China by Bernard Karlgren, the first scholar to reconstruct Middle Chinese and Old Chinese with Latin alphabet. Important modern Chinese linguists include Y. R. Chao, Luo Changpei, Li Fanggui and Wang Li.
The ancient commentators on the classics paid much attention to syntax and the use of particles. But the first Chinese grammar, in the modern sense of the word, was produced by Ma Jianzhong. His grammar was based on the Latin model.
Middle Ages
Arabic grammar
Due to the rapid expansion of Islam in the 8th century, many people learned Arabic as a lingua franca. For this reason, the earliest grammatical treatises on Arabic are often written by non-native speakers.The earliest grammarian who is known to us is ʿAbd Allāh ibn Abī Isḥāq al-Ḥaḍramī. The efforts of three generations of grammarians culminated in the book of the Persian linguist Sibāwayhi.
Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology.
European vernaculars
The Irish Sanas Cormaic 'Cormac's Glossary' is Europe's first etymological and encyclopedic dictionary in any non-Classical language.The Modistae or "speculative grammarians" in the 13th century introduced the notion of universal grammar.
In De vulgari eloquentia, Dante expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from Latin/Greek to include the languages of the day. Other linguistic works of the same period concerning the vernaculars include the First Grammatical Treatise or the Auraicept na n-Éces.
The Renaissance and Baroque period saw an intensified interest in linguistics, notably for the purpose of Bible translations by the Jesuits, and also related to philosophical speculation on philosophical languages and the origin of language.
Modern linguistics
Modern linguistics did not begin until the late 18th century, and the Romantic or animist theses of Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Christoph Adelung remained influential well into the 19th century.Historical linguistics
During the 18th century conjectural history, based on a mix of linguistics and anthropology, on the topic of both the origin and progress of language and society was fashionable. These thinkers contributed to the construction of academic paradigms in which some languages were labelled "primitive" relative to the English language. Within this paradigm a primitive people could be discerned by their primitive language, as in the case of Hugh Blair who argued that Native Americans gesticulated wildly to compensate for poor lexicon of their primitive language. Around the same time, James Burnett authored a 6 volume treatise that delved more deeply into the matter of "savage languages". Other writers theorized that Native American languages were "nothing but the natural and instinctive cries of the animal" without grammatical structure. The thinkers within this paradigm connected themselves with the Greeks and Romans, viewed as the only civilized persons of the ancient world, a view articulated by Thomas Sheridan who compiled an important 18th century pronunciation dictionary: "It was to the care taken in the cultivation of their languages, that Greece and Rome, owed that splendor, which eclipsed all the other nations of the world".In the 18th century James Burnett, Lord Monboddo analyzed numerous languages and deduced logical elements of the evolution of human languages. His thinking was interleaved with his precursive concepts of biological evolution. Some of his early concepts have been validated and are considered correct today. In his The Sanscrit Language, 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.
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". Humboldt's work is associated with the movement of Romantic linguistics, which was inspired by Naturphilosophie and Romantic science. Other notable representatives of the movement include Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel and Franz Bopp.
It was only in the late 19th century that the Neogrammarian approach of Karl Brugmann and others introduced a rigid notion of sound law.
Historical linguistics also led to the emergence of the semantics and some forms of pragmatics.
Structuralism
In Europe there was a development of structural linguistics, initiated by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss professor 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".Descriptive linguistics
During the second World War, North American linguists Leonard Bloomfield, William Mandeville Austin 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.In 1965, William Stokoe, a linguist from Gallaudet University published an analysis which proved that American Sign Language fits the criteria for a natural language.