History of linguistics

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Linguistics as a study endeavors to describe and explain the human faculty oflanguage. In ancient civilization, linguistic study was originally motivated by the correct description of classical liturgical language, notably that of Sanskrit grammar byPini (fl. 4th century BC), or by the development of logic and rhetoric amongGreeks. Beginning around the 4th century BC, China also developed its own grammatical traditions and Arabic grammar and Hebrew grammar developed during the Middle Ages. Modern linguistics began to develop in the 18th century, reaching the "golden age of philology" in the 19th century. The first half of the 20th century was marked by the structuralist school, based on the work of Ferdinand de Saussure in Europe and Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield in the United States. The 1960s saw the rise of many new fields in linguistics, such as Noam Chomsky's generative grammar, William Labov's sociolinguistics, Michael Halliday's systemic functional linguistics and also modern psycholinguistics.
Contents
[hide]

1 Antiquity

o o o o

1.1 India

1.2 Greece

1.3 Rome

1.4 China

2 Middle Ages

o o

2.1 Middle East

2.2 Europe

3 Modern linguistics

o o o o
4 See also

3.1 Historical linguistics

3.2 Descriptive linguistics

3.3 Generative linguistics

3.4 Other subfields

5 Notes

6 References

[edit]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.
[edit]India

Main articles: Vyakarana, Tolkppiyam, and Kavirajamarga 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, vk ("speech") is deified. By 1200 BCE,[1] 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 formorphology and phonetics. Over the next few centuries, clarity was reached in the organization of sound units, and the stop consonants were organized in a 5x5 square (c. 800 BCE, Pratisakhyas), eventually leading to a systematic alphabet, Brhm, around the 6th century BCE. In semantics, the early Sanskrit grammarian kayana (before c. 500 BCE) proposes that verbs represent ontologically prior categories, and that all nouns are etymologically derived from actions. The etymologist Yska (c. 5th century BCE) posits that meaning inheres in the sentence, and that word meanings are derived based on sentential usage. He also provides four categories of wordsnouns,verbs, pre-verbs, and particles/invariantsand a test for nouns both concrete and abstract: words which can be indicated by the pronoun that. Pini (c. 4th century BC) opposes the Yska view that sentences are primary, and proposes a grammar for composing semantics from morphemic roots. Transcending the ritual text to consider living language, Pini specifies a comprehensive set of about 4,000 aphoristic rules (sutras) that: 1. Map the semantics of verb argument structures into thematic roles 2. Provide morphosyntactic rules for creating verb forms and nominal forms whose seven cases are called karaka (similar to case) that generate themorphology 3. Take these morphological structures and consider phonological processes (e.g., root or stem modification) by which the final phonological form is obtained In addition, the Pinian school also provides a list of 2000 verb roots which form the objects on which these rules are applied, a list of sounds (the so-called Shiva-sutras), and a list of 260 words not derivable by the rules. 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 Pini include Ktyyana (c. 3rd century BCE), who wrote aphorisms on Pini (the Varttika) and advanced mathematics; Patajali (2nd century BCE), known for his commentary on selected topics in Pini's grammar (the Mahabhasya) and on Ktyyana's aphorisms, as well as, according to some, the author of the Yoga Sutras, and Pingala, with his mathematical approach toprosody. Several debates ranged over centuries, for example, on whether word-meaning mappings were conventional (VaisheshikaNyaya) or eternal (Ktyyana-Patajali-Mms). The Nyaya Sutras specified three types of meaning: the individual (this cow), the type universal (cowhood), and the image (draw the cow). That the sound of a word also forms a class (sound-universal) was observed by Bharthari (c. 500 AD), who also posits that language-universals are the units of thought, close to the nominalist or even the linguistic determinism position. Bharthari also considers the sentence to be ontologically primary (word meanings are learned given their sentential use). Of the six canonical texts or Vedangas that formed the core syllabus in Brahminic education from the 1st century AD till the 18th century, four dealt with language:

Shiksha (ik): phonetics and phonology (sandhi), Grgeya and commentators Chandas (chandas): prosody or meter, Pingala and commentators Vyakarana (vykaraa): grammar, Pini and commentators Nirukta (nirukta): etymology, Yska and commentators

Bhartrihari around 500 AD introduced a philosophy of meaning with his sphoa doctrine. This body of work became known in 19th century Europe, where it influenced modern linguistics initially through Franz Bopp, who mainly looked at Pini. Subsequently, a wider body of work influenced Sanskrit scholars such as Ferdinand de Saussure,Leonard Bloomfield, and Roman Jakobson. Frits Staal[2] discussed the possible European impact of Indian ideas on language. After outlining the various aspects of the contact, Staal posits the theory that the idea of formal rules in language, first proposed by de Saussure in 1894, and finally developed by Chomsky in 1957, based on which formal rules were also introduced in computational languages, may indeed lie in the European exposure to the formal rules of Paninian grammar. In particular, de Saussure, who lectured on Sanskrit for three decades, may have been influenced by Pini and Bhartrihari; his idea of the unity of signifier-signified in the sign is somewhat similar to the notion of Sphoa. More importantly, the very idea that formal rules can be applied to areas outside of logic or mathematics, may itself have been catalyzed by Europe's contact with the work of Sanskrit grammarians. The Pali Grammar of Kacchayana dated to the early centuries CE. describes the language of the Buddhist canon.

The Tolkppiyam (dated to 7th century CE) presents a grammar of Tamil, derivatives of which are still used today. The Kavirajamarga is a treatise on Kannada grammar that is comparable in age to the Tolkappiyam.
[edit]Greece

The first important advancement of the Greeks was the creation of the alphabet based on a system previously used by thePhoenicians, adding vowels and other consonants needed in Greek (see Robins, 1997). 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 ofphilology and criticism. Along with written speech, the Greeks commence its study in grammatical and philosophical bases. 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 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. The sophists and Socrates introduced also dialectics as a new text genre. In his platonic dialogs there are definitions about the meter of the poems and tragedy, the form and the structure of those texts (see the Republic and Phaidros, Ion etc.).[3] Aristotle supports the conventional origins of meaning. He defined the logic of speech and the argument. Furthermore Aristotle's works on rhetoric and poetics were of the utmost importance for the understating 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 (logos in Greek means both language and logic reasoning). 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. It then 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.

Next, he distinguishes between a subject of predication, namely that of which anything is affirmed or denied, and a subject of inhesion. A thing is said to be inherent in a subject, when, though it is not a part of the subject, it cannot possibly exist without the subject, e.g., shape in a thing having a shape. The categories are not abstract platonic entities but are found in speech, these are substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action and affection. In de Interpretatione, Aristotle analyzes categoric propositions, and draws a series of basic conclusions on the routine issues of classifying and defining basic linguistic forms, such as simple terms and propositions, nouns and verbs, negation, the quantity of simple propositions (primitive roots of

the quantifiers in modern symbolic logic), investigations on the excluded middle (what to Aristotle isn't applicable to future tense propositions the Problem of future contingents), and on modal propositions. Stoics made linguistics an important part of their understanding about the cosmos and the human. The important role of theStoics in defining the linguistic sign terms adopted later on by Ferdinand de Saussure like "significant" and "signifie".[4] 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 offers 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, 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 discussions the grammatici in Alexandria supported that language and especially morphology is based on analogy or paradigm, whereas the grammatic in schools Asia Minor consider that language is not based on analogical bases but rather on exceptions. Alexandrians, like their predecessors, were very interested in the meter and its relation with poetry. The metrical "feet" in the Greek was based on the length of time taken to pronounce each syllable, which were categorized according to their weight as either "long" syllables or "short" syllables (also known as "heavy" and "light" syllables, respectively, to distinguish from long and short vowels). 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 (such as correption) 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 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. Subsequently, the text Tkhn grammatik (c. 100 BCE, 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 casestructures. 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 Latinspeakers.

One of the most prominent scholars of Alexandria and of the antiquity was Apollonius Dyscolus.[5] Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. Happily, four of these are preservedwe still have a Syntax in four books, and three one-book monographs on pronouns, adverbs, and connectives, respectively. Lexicography become an important study domain as dictionaries, thesauri and lists of special words "" that were old, or dialectical or special such as medical words, botanic words were made at that period by many grammarians. In the early medieval times we find more categories of dictionaries like the dictionary of Suida that is considered the first encyclopedic dictionary, etymological dictionaries etc. At that period, the Greek language was considered a lingua franca, i.e. the language spoken in the known world (for the Greeks and Romans) 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.
[edit]Rome

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).
[edit]China

Similar to the Indian tradition, Chinese philology, Xiaoxue ( "elementary studies"), began as an aid to understanding classics in the Han dynasty (c. 3d c. BCE). Xiaoxue came to be divided into three branches: Xungu ( "exegesis"), Wenzi ( "script [analysis]") and Yinyun ( "[study of] sounds") and reached its golden age in the 17th. c. AD (Qing Dynasty). The glossaryErya (c. 3d c. BCE), comparable to the Indian Nighantu, is regarded as the first linguistic work in China. Shuowen Jiezi (c. 2nd c. BCE), 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 (6th c. BCE) famously emphasized the moral commitment implicit in a name, (zhengming) stating that the moral collapse of the pre-Qinwas 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." (Analects 12.11,13.3).

However, what is the reality implied by a name? The later Mohists or the group known as School of Names (ming jia, 479-221 BCE), consider that ming ( "name") may refer to three kinds of shi ( "actuality"): type universals (horse), individual (John), and unrestricted (thing). They adopt a realist position on the namereality connection - universals arise because "the world itself fixes the patterns of similarity and difference by which things should be divided into kinds".[6] The philosophical tradition is well known for conundra resembling the sophists, e.g. when Gongsun Longzi (4th c. BCE) questions if in copula statements (X is Y), 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 (3d c. BCE) 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 (yueding sucheng). 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 Westerncomparative method was brought into China by Bernard Karlgren, the first scholar to reconstruct Middle Chinese and Old Chinese with Latin alphabet (not IPA). Important modern Chinese linguists include Y. R. Chao, Luo Changpei, Li Fanggui andWang 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 (late 19th century). His grammar was based on the Latin(prescriptive) model.
[edit]Middle

Ages

[edit]Middle

East

Main article: 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 Abd Allh ibn Ab Isq al-aram (d. 735-736 AD, 117 AH). The efforts of three generations of grammarians culminated in the book of the Persian linguist Sibwayhi (c. 760-793).

Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760 in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi alnahw (, The Book on Grammar). In his book he distinguished phonetics from phonology.[citation
needed]

[edit]Europe

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 ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), 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 (Icelandic) or the Auraicept na n-ces (Irish). The Renaissance and Baroque period saw an intensified interest in linguistics, notably for the purpose of Bible translations by theJesuits, and also related to philosophical speculation on philosophical languages and the origin of language.
[edit]Modern

linguistics

Further information: Philology Modern linguistics does not begin until the late 18th century, and the romantic or animist theses of Johann Gottfried Herder andJohann Christoph Adelung remained influential well into the 19th century.
[edit]Historical

linguistics

Further information: Historical linguistics and Indo-European studies In the 18th 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. In his The Sanscrit Language (1786), Sir William Jonesproposed 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" (ber den Dualis 1827).

It was only in the late 19th century that the Neogrammarian approach of Karl Brugmann and others introduced a rigid notion ofsound law.
[edit]Descriptive

linguistics

Main articles: Descriptive linguistics and structuralism In Europe there was a parallel development of structural linguistics, influenced most strongly 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". 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. In 1965, William Stokoe, a linguist from Gallaudet University published an analysis [1] which proved that American Sign Language fits the criteria for a natural language.
[edit]Generative

linguistics

Historical linguistics
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics

Cognitive linguistics

Generative linguistics

Functional theories of grammar

Quantitative linguistics

Phonology

Morphology

Morphophonology

Syntax

Lexis

Semantics

Pragmatics

Graphemics

Orthography

Semiotics

Descriptive linguistics

Anthropological linguistics

Comparative linguistics

Historical linguistics

Phonetics

Graphetics

Etymology

Sociolinguistics

Applied and

experimental linguistics

Computational linguistics

Evolutionary linguistics

Forensic linguistics

Internet linguistics

Language acquisition

Language assessment

Language development

Language education

Linguistic anthropology

Neurolinguistics

Psycholinguistics

Second-language acquisition

Related articles

History of linguistics

Linguistic prescription

List of linguists

List of unsolved problems in linguistics

Portal

Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study oflanguage change. It has five main concerns:

to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics)

to develop general theories about how and why language changes to describe the history of speech communities to study the history of words, i.e. etymology.
Contents
[hide]

1 History and development

2 Evolution into other fields

3 Sub-fields of study

o o o o o o

3.1 Comparative linguistics

3.2 Etymology

3.3 Dialectology

3.4 Phonology

3.5 Morphology

3.6 Syntax

4 Conservative, innovative, archaic

5 See also

6 Citations and notes

7 References

8 Recommended readings

[edit]History

and development

Modern historical linguistics dates from the late 18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity. At first, historical linguistics was comparative linguistics. Scholars were concerned chiefly with establishing language families and reconstructing prehistoric proto-languages, using the comparative method and internal reconstruction. The focus was initially on the well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had long written histories; the scholars also studied the Uralic languages, another European language family for which less early written material exists. Since then, there has been significant comparative linguistic work expanding outside of European languages as well, such as on the Austronesian languages and various families of Native American languages, among many others. Comparative linguistics is now, however, only a part of a more broadly conceived discipline of historical linguistics. For the Indo-European languages, comparative study is now a highly specialised field. Most research is being carried out on the subsequent development of these languages, in particular, the development of the modern standard varieties. Some scholars have undertaken studies attempting to establish super-families, linking, for example, IndoEuropean, Uralic, and other families into Nostratic. These attempts have not been accepted widely. The information necessary to establish relatedness becomes less available as the time depth is increased. The time-depth of linguistic methods is limited due to chance word resemblances and variations between language groups, but a limit of around 10,000 years is often assumed. The dating of the various proto-languages is also difficult; several methods are available for dating, but only approximate results can be obtained.
[edit]Evolution

into other fields

Initially, all modern linguistics was historical in orientation, even the study of modern dialects involved looking at their origins.Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics is fundamental to the present day organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics is defined as the study of successive synchronic stages. Saussure's clear demarcation, however, is now seen to be idealised. In practice, a purely synchronic linguistics is not possible for any period before the invention of the gramophone, as written records always lag behind speech in reflecting linguistic developments. Written records are difficult to date accurately before the development of the modern title page. Also, the work of sociolinguists on linguistic variation has shown synchronic states are not uniform: the speech habits of older and younger speakers differ in ways that point to language change. Synchronic variation is linguistic change in progress.

The biological origin of language is in principle a concern of historical linguistics, but most linguists regard it as too remote to be reliably established by standard techniques of historical linguistics, such as the comparative method. Less-standard techniques, such as mass lexical comparison, are used by some linguists to overcome the limitations of the comparative method, but most linguists regard them as unreliable. The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses about the groupings and movements of peoples, particularly in the prehistoric period. In practice, however, it is often unclear how to integrate the linguistic evidence with thearchaeological or genetic evidence. For example, there are numerous theories concerning the homeland and early movements of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, each with its own interpretation of the archaeological record.
[edit]Sub-fields

of study

[edit]Comparative

linguistics

Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their historical relatedness. Languages may be related by convergence through borrowing or by genetic descent, thus languages can change and are also able to crossrelate. Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language. Comparative linguistics has the goal of constructing language families, reconstructing proto-languages, and specifying the changes that have resulted in the documented languages. To maintain a clear distinction between attested language and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an asterisk to any form that is not found in surviving texts.
[edit]Etymology

Etymology is the study of the history of words when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. A word may enter a language as a loanword (i.e., as a word from one language adopted by speakers of another language), through derivational morphology by combining pre-existing elements in the language, by a hybrid of these two processes called phono-semantic matching, or in several other minor ways. In languages with a long and detailed history, etymology makes use of philology, the study of how words change from culture to culture over time. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that are too old for any direct information (such as writing) to be known. By analyzing related languages with a technique known as the comparative method, linguists can make inferences, about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In this way, word roots that can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the Indo-European language family have been found. Although originating in the philological tradition, much current etymological research is done in language families for which little or no early documentation is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian.

[edit]Dialectology

Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, the varieties of a language that are characteristic of particular groups, based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. This is in contrast to variations based on social factors, which are studied in sociolinguistics, or variations based on time, which are studied in historical linguistics. Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and synchronic variation. Dialectologists are concerned with grammatical features that correspond to regional areas. Thus, they are usually dealing with populations living in specific locales for generations without moving, but also with immigrant groups bringing their languages to new settlements.
[edit]Phonology

Main article: Sound change Phonology is a sub-field of historical linguistics, which studies the sound system of a specific language or set of languages and change over time. Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages. An important part of phonology is studying which sounds are distinctive units within a language. For example, the "p" in "pin" isaspirated while the same phoneme in "spin" is not. In some other languages, for example Thai and Quechua, this same difference of aspiration or non-aspiration does differentiate phonemes. In addition to the minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English, and topics such as syllable structure, stress, accent, and intonation. The principles of phonological theory have also been applied to the analysis of sign languages, although the phonological units do not consist of sounds. The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones.
[edit]Morphology

Morphology is the study of the formal means of expression in a language; in the context of historical linguistics, how the formal means of expression change over time; for instance, languages with complex inflectional systems tend to be subject to a simplification process. This field studies the internal structure of words as a formal means of expression.[1] Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology. While words are generally accepted as being (with clitics) the smallest units of syntax, it is clear that, in most (if not all) languages, words can be related to other words by rules. The rules understood by the speaker reflect specific patterns (or regularities) in the way words are formed from smaller units and how those smaller units interact in speech. In this way, morphology is

the branch of linguistics that studies patterns of word-formation within and across languages, and attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of the speakers of those languages, in the context of historical linguistics, how the means of expression change over time. See grammaticalisation.
[edit]Syntax

Syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages. The term syntax is used to refer directly to the rules and principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as in "the syntax of Modern Irish". Modern researchers in syntax attempt to describe languages in terms of such rules. Many professionals in this discipline attempt to find general rules that apply to all natural languages in the context of historical linguistics, how characteristics of sentence structure in related languages changed over time. See grammaticalisation.

Philology
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For the narrower field of "comparative philology", see comparative linguistics.

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Philology is the study of language in written historical sources; it is a combination of literary studies, history and linguistics.[1] Classical philology is the philology of Greek and Classical Latin. Classical philology is historically primary, originating in European Renaissance Humanism, but was soon joined by philologies of other languages both European (Germanic, Celtic, Slavistics, etc.) and non-European (Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Chinese, etc.). IndoEuropean studies involves the comparative philology of all Indo-European languages. Any classical language can be studied philologically, and indeed describing a language as "classical" is to imply the existence of a philological tradition associated with it. Because of its focus on historical development (diachronic analysis), philology came to be used as a term contrasting withlinguistics. This is due to a 20th-century development triggered by Ferdinand de Saussure's insistence on the importance ofsynchronic analysis, and the later emergence of structuralism and Chomskyan linguistics with its emphasis on syntax.
Contents
[hide]

1 Etymology

2 Branches of philology

o o o o
3 See also

2.1 Comparative philology

2.2 Textual philology editing

2.3 Cognitive philology

2.4 Decipherment

4 Notes

5 External links

[edit]Etymology

The term philology is derived from the Greek (philologia),[2] from the terms (philos), meaning "love, affection, loved, beloved, dear, friend" and (logos), meaning "word, articulation, reason", describing a love of learning, of literature as well as of argument and reasoning, reflecting the range of activities included under the notion of . The term changed little with the Latin philologia, and later entered the English language in the 16th century, from the Middle French philologie, in the sense of "love of literature". The adjective (philologos) meant "fond of discussion or argument, talkative", in Hellenistic Greek also implying an excessive ("sophistic") preference of argument over the love of true wisdom, (philosophos). As an allegory of literary erudition, Philologia appears in 5th-century post-classical literature (Martianus Capella, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii), an idea revived in Late Medieval literature (Chaucer, Lydgate). The meaning of "love of learning and literature" was narrowed to "the study of the historical development of languages" (historical linguistics) in 19th-century usage of the term. Due to the rapid progress made in understanding sound laws and language change, the "golden age of philology" lasted throughout the 19th century, or "from Friedrich Schlegel to Nietzsche".[3] In the Anglo-Saxon world, the term philology to describe work on languages and literatures, which had become synonymous with the practices of German scholars, was abandoned as a consequence of anti-German feeling following World War I. Most continental European countries still maintain the term to designate departments, colleges, position titles, and journals. J. R. R. Tolkienopposed the nationalist reaction against philological practices, claiming that "the philological instinct" was "universal as is the use of language".[4][5] In British English usage, and in British academia, "philology" remains largely synonymous with "historical linguistics", while in US English, and US academia, the wider meaning of "study of a language's grammar, history and literary tradition" remains more widespread.[6][7]
[edit]Branches

of philology

[edit]Comparative

philology

Main article: Comparative philology The comparative linguistics branch of philology studies the relationship between languages. Similarities between Sanskrit andEuropean languages were first noted in the early 16th century[8] and led to speculation of a common ancestor language from which all these descended. It is now named Proto-Indo-European. Philology's interest in ancient languages led to the study of what were, in the 18th century, "exotic" languages, for the light they could cast on problems in understanding and deciphering the origins of older texts.
[edit]Textual

philology editing

Main article: Textual criticism Philology also includes the study of texts and their history. It includes elements of textual criticism, trying to reconstruct an author's original text based on variant copies of manuscripts. This branch of research arose in Biblical studies and has a long tradition, dating back to the Reformation.[9] Scholars have tried to reconstruct the original readings of the Bible from the manuscript variants. This method was applied to Classical Studies and to medieval texts as a way to reconstruct the author's original work. The method produced so-called "critical editions", which provided a reconstructed text accompanied by a "critical apparatus", i.e., footnotes that listed the various manuscript variants available, enabling scholars to gain insight into the entire manuscript tradition and argue about the variants.[9] A related study method known as higher criticism studies the authorship, date, and provenance of text to place such text in historical context.[9] As these philological issues are often inseparable from issues of interpretation, there is no clear-cut boundary between philology and hermeneutics.[9] When text has a significant political or religious influence (such as the reconstruction of Biblical texts), scholars have difficulty reaching objective conclusions. Some scholars avoid all critical methods of textual philology,[9] especially in historical linguistics, where it is important to study the actual recorded materials. The movement known as New Philology has rejected textual criticism because it injects editorial interpretations into the text and destroys the integrity of the individual manuscript, hence damaging the reliability of the data. Supporters of New Philology insist on a strict "diplomatic" approach: a faithful rendering of the text exactly as found in the manuscript, without emendations.
[edit]Cognitive

philology

Main article: Cognitive philology Another branch of philology, cognitive philology, studies written and oral texts, considering them as results of human mental processes. This science compares the results of textual science with the results of experimental research of both psychology and artificial intelligence production systems.

[edit]Decipherment

In the case of Bronze Age literature, philology includes the prior decipherment of the language under study. This has notably been the case with the Egyptian, Sumerian, Assyrian, Hittite, Ugaritic and Luwian languages. Beginning with the famous decipherment and translation of the Rosetta Stone by Jean-Franois Champollion in 1822, a number of individuals attempted to decipher the writing systems of the Ancient Near East and Aegean. In the case of Old Persian and Mycenaean Greek, decipherment yielded older records of languages already known from slightly more recent traditions (Middle Persian andAlphabetic Greek). Work on the ancient languages of the Near East progressed rapidly. In the mid-19th century, Henry Rawlinson and others deciphered the Behistun Inscription, which records the same text in Old Persian, Elamite, and Akkadian, using a variation ofcuneiform for each language. The elucidation of cuneiform led to the decipherment of Sumerian. Hittite was deciphered in 1915 by Bedich Hrozn. Linear B, a script used in the ancient Aegean, was deciphered in 1952 by Michael Ventris, who demonstrated that it recorded an early form of Greek, now known as Mycenaean Greek. Linear A, the writing system that records the still-unknown language of theMinoans, resists deciphering, despite many attempts. Work continues on scripts such as the Maya, with great progress since the initial breakthroughs of the phonetic approach championed by Yuri Knorozov and others in the 1950s. Since the late twentieth century, the Maya code has been almost completely deciphered, and the Mayan languages are among the most documented and studied in Mesoamerica. The code is described as a logosyllabic style of writing, which could be used to fully express any spoken thought.

Grammar
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
(Redirected from History of grammar)

For the rules of the English language, see English grammar. For the topic in mathematics, logic, and theoretical computer science, see Formal grammar.
Linguistics

Theoretical linguistics

Cognitive linguistics

Generative linguistics

Functional theories of grammar

Quantitative linguistics

Phonology

Morphology

Morphophonology

Syntax

Lexis

Semantics

Pragmatics

Graphemics

Orthography

Semiotics

Descriptive linguistics

Anthropological linguistics

Comparative linguistics

Historical linguistics

Phonetics

Graphetics

Etymology

Sociolinguistics

Applied and

experimental linguistics

Computational linguistics

Evolutionary linguistics

Forensic linguistics

Internet linguistics

Language acquisition

Language assessment

Language development

Language education

Linguistic anthropology

Neurolinguistics

Psycholinguistics

Second-language acquisition

Related articles

History of linguistics

Linguistic prescription

List of linguists

List of unsolved problems in linguistics

Portal

In linguistics, grammar is the set of structural rules that govern the composition ofclauses, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology, syntax, andphonology, often complemented by phonetics, semantics, and pragmatics. Linguists do not normally use the term to refer to orthographical rules, althoughusage books and style guides that call themselves grammars may also refer to spelling and punctuation.
Contents
[hide]

1 Use of the term

2 Etymology

3 History

4 Development of grammars

5 Grammar frameworks

6 Education

7 See also

8 Notes and references

9 External links

[edit]Use

of the term

The term grammar is often used by non-linguists with a very broad meaning. As Jeremy Butterfield puts it: "Grammar is often a generic way of referring to any aspect of English that people object to." [1] However, linguists use it in a much more specific sense. Every speaker of a language has, in his or her head, a set of rules[2] for using that language. This is a grammar, andat least in the case of one's native languagethe vast majority of the information in it is acquired not by conscious study or instruction, but by observing other speakers; much of this work is done during infancy. Language learning later in life, of course, may involve a greater degree of explicit instruction. [3] The term "grammar" can also be used to describe the rules that govern the linguistic behaviour of a group of speakers. The term "English grammar", therefore, may have several meanings. It may refer to the whole of English grammarthat is, to the grammars of all the speakers of the languagein which case, the term encompasses a great deal of variation.[4] Alternatively, it may refer only to what is common to the grammars of all, or of the vast majority of English speakers (such as subjectverbobject word order in simple declarative sentences). Or it may refer to the rules of a particular, relatively well-defined variety of English (such as Standard English). "An English grammar" is a specific description, study or analysis of such rules. A reference book describing the grammar of a language is called a "reference grammar" or simply "a grammar." A fully explicit grammar that exhaustively describes thegrammatical constructions of a language is called a descriptive grammar. Linguistic description contrasts with linguistic prescription, which tries to enforce rules of how a language is to be used. Grammatical frameworks are approaches to constructing grammars. The most known among the approaches is the traditional grammar which is traditionally taught in schools. The standard framework of generative grammar is the transformational grammar model developed in various ways by Noam Chomsky and his associates from the 1950s onwards.
[edit]Etymology

Further information: grapheme The word grammar derives from Greek (grammatik techn), which means "art of letters", from (gramma), "letter", itself from (graphein), "to draw, to write".[5]
[edit]History

Further information: History of linguistics The first systematic grammars originated in Iron Age India, with Yaska (6th c. BC), Pini (4th c. BC) and his commentatorsPingala (ca. 200 BC), Katyayana, and Patanjali (2nd c. BC). In the West, grammar emerged as a discipline in Hellenism from the 3rd c. BC forward with authors like Rhyanus and Aristarchus of Samothrace, the oldest extant work

being the Art of Grammar( ), attributed to Dionysius Thrax (ca. 100 BC). Latin grammar developed by following Greek models from the 1st century BC, due to the work of authors such as Orbilius Pupillus, Remmius Palaemon, Marcus Valerius Probus, Verrius Flaccus, and Aemilius Asper. Tolkppiyam is the earliest Tamil grammar; it has been dated variously between 1st CE and 10th CE. A grammar of Irish originated in the 7th century with the Auraicept na n-ces. Arabic grammar emerged from the 8th century with the work of Ibn Abi Ishaq and his students. The first treatises on Hebrew grammar appeared in the High Middle Ages, in the context of Mishnah (exegesis of the Hebrew Bible). The Karaite tradition originated in Abbasid Baghdad. The Diqduq (10th century) is one of the earliest grammatical commentaries on the Hebrew Bible.[6] Ibn Barun in the 12th century compares the Hebrew language with Arabic in the Islamic grammatical tradition.[7] Belonging to the trivium of the seven liberal arts, grammar was taught as a core discipline throughout the Middle Ages, following the influence of authors from Late Antiquity, such as Priscian. Treatment of vernaculars began gradually during the High Middle Ages, with isolated works such as the First Grammatical Treatise, but became influential only in the Renaissance and Baroqueperiods. In 1486, Antonio de Nebrija published Las introduciones Latinas contrapuesto el romance al Latin, and the first Spanish grammar, Gramtica de la lengua castellana, in 1492. During the 16th century Italian Renaissance, the Questione della linguawas the discussion on the status and ideal form of the Italian language, initiated by Dante's de vulgari eloquentia (Pietro Bembo,Prose della volgar lingua Venice 1525). The first grammar of Slovene language was written in 1584 by Adam Bohori. Grammars of non-European languages began to be compiled for the purposes of evangelization and Bible translation from the 16th century onward, such as Grammatica o Arte de la Lengua General de los Indios de los Reynos del Per (1560), and aQuechua grammar by Fray Domingo de Santo Toms. In 1643 there appeared Ivan Uzhevych's Grammatica sclavonica and, in 1762, the Short Introduction to English Grammar ofRobert Lowth was also published. The Grammatisch-Kritisches Wrterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart, a High Germangrammar in five volumes by Johann Christoph Adelung, appeared as early as 1774. From the latter part of the 18th century, grammar came to be understood as a subfield of the emerging discipline of modernlinguistics. The Serbian grammar by Vuk Stefanovi Karadi arrived in 1814, while the Deutsche Grammatik of the Brothers Grimm was first published in 1818. The Comparative Grammar of Franz Bopp, the starting point of modern comparative linguistics, came out in 1833.
[edit]Development

of grammars

Main article: Historical linguistics Grammars evolve through usage and also due to separations of the human population. With the advent of writtenrepresentations, formal rules about language usage tend to appear also. Formal grammars are codifications of

usage that are developed by repeated documentation over time, and by observation as well. As the rules become established and developed, the prescriptive concept of grammatical correctness can arise. This often creates a discrepancy between contemporary usage and that which has been accepted, over time, as being correct. Linguists tend to view prescriptive grammars as having little justification beyond their authors' aesthetic tastes, although style guides may give useful advice about standard language employment, based on descriptions of usage in contemporary writings of the same language. Linguistic prescriptions also form part of the explanation for variation in speech, particularly variation in the speech of an individual speaker (an explanation, for example, for why some people say, "I didn't do nothing"; some say, "I didn't do anything"; and some say one or the other depending on social context). The formal study of grammar is an important part of education for children from a young age through advanced learning, though the rules taught in schools are not a "grammar" in the sense most linguists use the term, particularly as they are often prescriptiverather than descriptive. Constructed languages (also called planned languages or conlangs) are more common in the modern day. Many have been designed to aid human communication (for example, naturalistic Interlingua, schematic Esperanto, and the highly logiccompatibleartificial language Lojban). Each of these languages has its own grammar. Syntax refers to linguistic structure above the word level (e.g. how sentences are formed)though without taking into accountintonation, which is the domain of phonology. Morphology, by contrast, refers to structure at and below the word level (e.g. how compound words are formed), but above the level of individual sounds, which, like intonation, are in the domain of phonology.[8]No clear line can be drawn, however, between syntax and morphology. Analytic languages use syntax to convey information that is encoded via inflection in synthetic languages. In other words, word order is not significant and morphology is highly significant in a purely synthetic language, whereas morphology is not significant and syntax is highly significant in an analytic language.Chinese and Afrikaans, for example, are highly analytic, and meaning is therefore very context-dependent. (Both do have some inflections, and have had more in the past; thus, they are becoming even less synthetic and more "purely" analytic over time.)Latin, which is highly synthetic, uses affixes and inflections to convey the same information that Chinese does with syntax. Because Latin words are quite (though not completely) self-contained, an intelligible Latin sentence can be made from elements that are placed in a largely arbitrary order. Latin has a complex affixation and simple syntax, while Chinese has the opposite.
[edit]Grammar

frameworks

Main article: Grammar framework Various "grammar frameworks" have been developed in theoretical linguistics since the mid 20th century, in particular under the influence of the idea of a "universal grammar" in the United States. Of these, the main divisions are:

Transformational grammar (TG) Systemic functional grammar (SFG)

Principles and Parameters Theory (P&P) Lexical-functional Grammar (LFG) Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) Dependency grammars (DG) Role and reference grammar (RRG)

[edit]Education

Further information: orthography Prescriptive grammar is taught in primary school (elementary school). The term "grammar school" historically refers to a school teaching Latin grammar to future Roman citizens, orators, and, later, Catholic priests. In its earliest form, "grammar school" referred to a school that taught students to read, scan, interpret, and declaim Greek and Latin poets (including Homer, Virgil, Euripides, Ennius, and others). These should not be confused with the related, albeit distinct, modern British grammar schools. A standard language is a particular dialect of a language that is promoted above other dialects in writing, education, and broadly speaking in the public sphere; it contrasts with vernacular dialects, which may be the objects of study in descriptive grammar but which are rarely taught prescriptively. The standardized "first language" taught in primary education may be subject to politicalcontroversy, since it establishes a standard defining nationality or ethnicity. Recently, efforts have begun to update grammar instruction in primary and secondary education. The primary focus has been to prevent the use of outdated prescriptive rules in favor of more accurate descriptive ones and to change perceptions about relative "correctness" of standard forms in comparison to non standard dialects. The pre-eminence of Parisian French has reigned largely unchallenged throughout the history of modern French literature. Standard Italian is not based on the speech of the capital, Rome, but on the speech of Florence because of the influence Florentines had on early Italian literature. Similarly, standard Spanish is not based on the speech of Madrid, but on the one of educated speakers from more northerly areas like Castile and Len. In Argentina and Uruguay the Spanish standard is based on the local dialects of Buenos Aires and Montevideo (Rioplatense Spanish). Portuguese has for now two official written standards, respectively Brazilian Portuguese and European Portuguese, but in a short term it will have a unified orthography.[9] The Serbian language is divided in a similar way; Serbia and the Republika Srpska use their own separate standards. The existence of a third standard is a matter of controversy, some consider Montenegrin as a separate language, and some think it's merely another variety of Serbian. Norwegian has two standards, Bokml and Nynorsk, the choice between which is subject to controversy: Each Norwegian municipality can declare one of the two its official language, or it can remain "language neutral". Nynorsk is endorsed by a minority of 27 percent of the municipalities. The main language used in primary schools normally follows the official

language of its municipality, and is decided by referendum within the local school district. Standard German emerged out of the standardized chancellery use of High German in the 16th and 17th centuries. Until about 1800, it was almost entirely a written language, but now it is so widely spoken that most of the former German dialects are nearly extinct. Standard Chinese has official status as the standard spoken form of the Chinese language in the People's Republic of China(PRC), the Republic of China (ROC) and the Republic of Singapore. Pronunciation of Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese, while grammar and syntax are based on modern vernacular written Chinese. Modern Standard Arabic is directly based on Classical Arabic, the language of the Qur'an. The Hindustani language has two standards, Hindi andUrdu.