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The History of Linguistics
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THE HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS
GRAMMATICAL
TRADITIONS
1. Old-Babylonian Tradition
GRAMMATICAL TRADITIONS
2. Hindu Tradition
3. Greek-grammatical Tradition
4. Arabic-grammatical Tradition
5. Hebrew-linguistic Tradition
Old-Babylonian Tradition
PARADIGMS: Different forms of the same word.
=
Alkadian
Sumerian
Hindu Tradition (Sanskrit)
- Grammatical rules.
- Pānini (w4w recitation and continuous recitation).
"Grammar is the most scientific of the sciences"
Greek-grammatical tradition
- Plato, Aristotle and Stoics (origin of language, parts of speech and relation language / thought).
- Homer (basic education).
Roman linguistics
+Roman linguistics
- Morphology (noun declensions and verb conjugations).
- Parts of speech.
Arabic-grammatical tradition
- Following Aristotle.
- Sacred and immutable / PERFECT (inflectional endings: symmetry and logicalness).
Hebrew-linguistic tradition
- Old Testament.
- System for morphology.
- Parts of speech: noun, verb and particles.
UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
THE RISE OF UNIVERSAL GRAMMAR
- After 1100, grammarians followed Aristotle's view that scientific knowledge is universal or general and applies to all subject matter, including grammar.
- Roger Bacon (1214-1294) stated that "grammar is substantially one and the same in all languages, although it may vary accidentally".
- Speculative grammar (Modistae) ----> The grammarian's job was to explain how the intellect had created a system of grammar.
- Philosophical grammar ----> The 'convention' was 'reasoned', and since the reasoning is universal, God-given, it comes from 'nature'.
- Following René Descartes (1596-1650), the scholars thought that the particular grammatical systems of existing languages were merely aproximations of the universal ideal, partly corrupted by neglect in usage.
COMPARATIVE METHOD
THE RISE OF THE COMPARATIVE METHOD
• Colonization and voyages from sixteenth century.
• Variety of languages (Africa, Asia and America).
• Historical linguistic interests.
• Background in Greek tradition (nature-vs-convention).
• Hebrew-Biblically known as the original language.
• Comparative linguistics.
The Scythian hypotheis and the notion of Indo-European
Scythian h. and n. Indo-European
• Early recognition of the family relationship among Indo-European languages.
• Johannes Goropius Becanus’ Emphasis on “Scythian” (1569).
•Raphelengius correspondences between Persian and Germanic languages.
•Similarities between Sanskrit, Greek and Persian numerals.
Sir William Jones
Sir William Jones (1798)
- Sanskrit and its wonderful structure, with stronger affinity to Greek and Latin in roots of verbs and forms of grammar.
- Gothic and Celtick had the same origin with Sanskrit and that Old Persian could also be added to the same family.
- Usually credited with founding comparative linguistics.
Johannis Sanjovics (1770)
- Relationship between Hungarian, Lapp and Finnish.
Andreas Jäger (1686)
- “Mother” and “daughters”.
- Dialects became independent with time.
- Descendants of the ancestral languages - Persian, Greek, Italic, Slavonic languages, Celtic and Gothic.
Jonathan Edwards (1787)
- Demonstrated the relationship among Algonquian languages - list of 60 vocabulary items and grammatical features, in contrast with Jones, who left no linguistic evidence.
Edward Lhuyd (1707)
- Comparison between several Indo-European languages including a list of cognates, sounds correspondings and changes.
- Discovered the Grimm’s Law.
Jones had little interest in linguistics, it was only a source of information to him.
NEOGRAMMARIANS
THE NEO-GRAMMARIANS
The Neogrammarians
- Younger scholars who antagonized the leaders of the field around 1876 in Germany.
- Slogan: "Sound laws suffer no exceptions" / "Every sound change, in as much as it occurs mechanically, takes place according to laws that admit no exceptions".
- The pre-Neogrammarian position is the "family tree model" (languages related by a common ancestor).
- Opponent's slogan: "Each word has its own history" and they followed the "Wave Theory" (intended to deal with changes due to contact among languages and dialects).
- Family tree + Wave Theory = complete.