A glance at the history of Linguistics
Fundamentals of Linguistics July, 18 th 2015 Licda. Milvia Rosales
Definition and beginnings • Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. • Linguistics can be broadly broken into three categories or subfields of study:
Language form, Language Language in context.
meaning,
and
• The earliest known activities in descriptive linguistics have been attributed to Panini around 500 BCE, with his analysis of Sanskrit.
The Role of Linguistics • The role of Linguistics is to analyze and explain language. • It is also the study of the way language is used in everyday life, the way it is employed.
Subfields • Grammar: it was studied by the Greeks and then by the French. It was based on rules for distinguishing between correct and incorrect forms. • Philology: Especially to correct, interpret and comment upon written texts. It had an interest in literary history. • Languages can be compared “comparative Philology”: Franz Bopp compared Sanskrit with German, Greek, Latin, etc. He established that all these languages belong to a single family.
Early grammarians • The formal study of language began in India with Panini, who formulated 3,959 rules of Sanskrit morphology. • Pāṇini’s systematic classification of the sounds of Sanskrit into consonants and vowels, and word classes, such as nouns and verbs, was the first known instance of its kind. • In the Middle East Sibawayh made a detailed description of Arabic in 760 AD, the first known author to distinguish between sounds and phonemes (sounds as units of a linguistic system).
AD • Anno Domini (AD or A.D.) and Before Christ (BC or B.C. • The term Anno Domini is Medieval Latin, translated as In the year of the Lord, and as in the year of Our Lord. (Gregorian calendars). • English followed Latin usage by placing the "AD" abbreviation before the year number. Since BC is not derived from Latin it is placed after the year number (for example: AD 2014, but 68 BC).
Phases in the development of linguistics: Phase 1: Philosophy: • Linguistics was part of Philosophy, the “Mother of All Sciences”
• Ancient Greek thinkers started questioning the mystical belief that language was a gift from the gods, and saw the origins of speech in human imitation of natural sounds. • They also speculated about the relationship between Language and Thinking, and so invented‘ both Grammar and Logic.
Ancient Thoughts about Language: • "The power of speech has the same relation to the order of the soul as drugs have to the nature of bodies” • On Language Change: Socrates (469–399 B.C.): Cratylus • On the Symbolic nature of Language: Aristotle (384-323 BC): • Spoken words are the symbols of mental experience and written words are the symbols of spoken words. • Just as all men have not the same writing, so all men have not the same speech sounds, but the mental experiences, are the same for all.
Prescriptive Grammar
(the kind you learnt in school) • It was invented by the Ancient Greek philosophers. It prescribes correct and condemns incorrect usage, but does not even try to understand Language as a whole. • Prescriptive Grammar of Latin and Greek was taught in the monasteries of medieval Europe for centuries. • The printing press made education more accessible to the common man.
• The invention of gunpowder started a new Exploration Age, marked by European expansion
Phase 2: PhilologyComparative & Historical Linguistics • Languages were in many ways alike, and could be compared with one another. • Comparative studies identified remarkable structural similarities between Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit. • Ferdinand de Saussure (the Father of modern linguistics) established that:
A bond or relationship existed between languages often separated geographically by great distance and that there were also great language families, in particular the Indo-European family.
Phase 3: Modern Linguistics • Saussure‘s approach became known as Structuralism. • Saussure was one of the first scholar to view Language as one structural system. • Linguistics in the 19th century expanded knowledge in highly specialized areas, such as phonetics and phonology, historical and comparative studies, etc. • Saussure defined Language as a system of distinct signs corresponding to distinct ideas.
Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar • Noam Chomsky brought meaning back; his ‘Syntactic Structures’ (1957) transformed linguistics from a mechanical analysis of linguistic forms into a major social science relevant to everyone • He wanted to discover not just the structures of language, but what it is in our heads that produces utterances (the rules of Universal Grammar).
Reading comprehension (A glance at the History of Linguistics: 1- What is the first part of Linguistics that was studied? Grammar 2- What was the main goal of grammar? To give rules for distinguishing between correct and incorrect forms. 3- Who did initiate to study Grammar?
The Greeks and French
4- What is Comparative Philology? Languages can be compared. 5- What´s the main contribution of Franz Bopp? He compared sanskrit with German, Greek and Latin. All these languages belong to a single family.
6- Name in order the three stages of Linguistics: First: Grammar
Second: Philology Third: Comparative Philology
E-graphy • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistics • A brief survery on the history of linguistics