History of linguistics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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[1] 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 and the Middle East have 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.
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[edit] Ancient and Medieval linguistics
Across cultures, the early history of linguistics is associated with a need to disambiguate discourse, esp. for ritual texts or in arguments. This often led to explorations of sound-meaning mappings, and the debate over conventional vs. naturalistic origins for these symbols. Finally this leads to the processes by which larger structures were formed from units.
[edit] India
Linguistics in ancient India derived its impetus from the need to interpret the Vedic texts, and also to define standards of enunciation. Rig Veda (4:58:3; 10:125) suggest a bipolar structure for language: sentences composed of words have two forms, the vocal or phonological, and the perceptual or semantic. The early Sanskrit linguist Sakatayana (ca. 8th c. BCE) proposes that verbs represent ontologically prior categories, and that all nouns are etymologically derived from actions. The etymologist Yāska (ca. 7th c. BCE) 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. He also provides a test for nouns both concrete and abstract: words which can be indicated by the pronoun that.
Pāṇini (c. 520–460 BC) 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, Panini specifies a comprehensive set of about 4000 aphoristic rules (sutras) that
- map the semantics of verb argument structures into thematic roles,
- provide morphosyntactic rules called karaka (similar to [[grammatical case|case) that generate the morphology,
- take these morphological structures and consider phonological processes (e.g. stem modification) by which the final phonological form is obtained. phonology
In addition, Pāṇini also provides a lexicon of 2000 verb roots which form the objects on which these rules are applied, and a list of 260 idiosyncratic words (not derivable by the rules)[2].
The extremely succinct specification of these rules and their complex interactions led to considerably commentary and extrapolation over the coming 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, vowels based on height and duration. However, it is the ambition of mapping these from morpheme to semantics that is truly breathtaking in today's terms.
Other linguists in the Sanskritic tradition included Gargeya (5th c. BCE, primarily phonetics), Pingala (3d c. BCE, prosody), Patanjali (3d c. BCE, Pāṇini commentary and Yoga sutra), Katyayana (2nd c. BCE, Pāṇini commentary and mathematics). Several debates ranged over centuries, e.g. on whether word-meaning mappings were conventional (Vaisheshika-Nyaya) or eternal (Katyayana-Patanjali-Mimamsa).
The Nyaya Sutras (2nd c. BCE) specified three types of meaning: the individual (this cow), the type universal (cowhood), the image (draw the cow). That the sound of a word also forms a class (sound-universal) was observed by Bhartrihari (c. 500 AD), who also posits that language-universals are the units of thought, close to the nominalist or even the linguistic determinism position. Bhartrihari also considers the sentence to be ontologically primary (word meanings are learned given their sentential use).[3]
The South Indian linguist Tolkāppiyar (c. 3rd century BC) in his Tolkāppiyam, presented a grammar of Tamil, derivatives of which are still used today; this constitutes the oldest written grammar for a living language.
Of the six canonical texts or Vedangas that formed the core syllabus in Brahminic educational from the first century AD till the eighteenth century, four dealt with language:
- Shiksha (śikṣā): phonetics and phonology (sandhi), (Gārgeya and commentators)
- Chandas (chandas): prosody or meter, (Pingala and commentators)
- Vyakarana (vyākaraṇa): grammar, (Pāṇini and commentators)
- Nirukta (nirukta): etymology, (Yāska and commentators)
This body of work became widely known in 19th c. Europe, and is thought to have influenced early sanskrit scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure and Roman Jakobson. In particular, many of the foundational ideas proposed by de Saussure are thought to have been influenced by the Indian grammatical tradition, particularly by Pāṇini and Bhartrihari.
[edit] Greece and Rome
Around the same time as the Indian developments, Ancient Greek philosophers were also debating the nature and origins of language. A subject of concern was whether language was man-made or supernatural in origin. Plato in his Cratylus presents the naturalistic view, that word meanings emerge out of 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. Aristotle supports the conventional origins of meaning. Plato also adopts a nominalist position in that universals are only in the mind and not in the outside world.
Subsequently, the text Tékhnē grammatiké (ca. 100BCE, Gk. gramma meant letter, and this title means "Art of letters"), possibly written by Dionysius Thrax, 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 (as was Panini), and also covers punctuation and some aspects of prosody. Other grammars by Charisius (mainly a compilation of Thrax, as well as lost texts by Remmius Palaemon and others) and Diomedes (focusing more on prosody) were popular in Rome as pedagogic material for teaching Greek to native Latin speakers.
In the 4th c., 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 c., this was one of the first books to be printed. Schoolboys subjected to all this education gave us the current meaning of "grammar" (attested in English since 1176).
In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from Latin / Greek to include the languages of the day. Grammars and vocabularies of the languages of Europe were then explored. By then many vernaculars had dropped or relaxed case declensions, which were the heart of "grammar" until then, so considerable rework was needed.
[edit] China
The relation between words and their actualization is discussed by Confucius (6th c. BCE), but he is mostly concerned with the fulfillment of the moral commitment implied by language. Early Chinese thinking on language is associated with the later Mohists or the group known as School of Names (ming jia, 479-221 BCE), who adopt a realist position on the problem of how names or words (ming) refer to things (shi, ohjects, events, situations). Names may embody three types of reference: type universals (horse), individual (John), and unrestricted (thing). Gongsun Longzi (4th c. BCE) asks if in copula statements like X is Y, are X and Y identical or is X a subclass of Y. Xun Zi (3d c. BCE) considers language as conventional.
The Chinese script is logographic (independent of the phonetic change), and changes and divergences in speech patterns were not reflected in Chinese writing. Possibly the pre-eminence of writing in the Chinese view of "language" postponed thorough discussion of phonological considerations in [[spoken Chinese]] until the 18th c. (Dai Zhen, Duan Yucai and others). Ma Jianzhong worked on Chinese grammar in the late 19th c.
[edit] Middle East
In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology.
[edit] Modern linguistics
[edit] Historical linguistics
- Further information: 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. Its pioneers 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.
[edit] Descriptive linguistics
- Further information: 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.
[edit] Generative linguistics
- Further information: Generative linguistics
[edit] Other specialties
From roughly 1980 onwards, pragmatic, functional, and cognitive approaches have steadily gained ground, both in the U.S. and in Europe.
[edit] See also
[edit] 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.
[edit] Line notes
- ^ James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, The Origin and Progress of Man and Language (6 volumes, 1773-1792)
- ^ Paul Kiparsky, On the Architecture of Panini's Grammar. Three lectures delivered at the Hyderabad Conference on the Architecture of Grammar, Jan. 2002, and at UCLA, March 2002. 55 pages.
- ^ Bimal Krishna Matilal (1990). The word and the world: India's contribution to the study of language. Oxford.
