The History of Linguistics

1. Greeks
(i) Before 19th century, philosophers like Plato and Aristotle made some contributions, for example, Greeks were interested in the origin of language than in analysing it.
(ii) They had little systematic knowledge of other languages.
Plato was the 1st. person to distinguish between nouns and verbs. (iii)
(iv) Grammarians of Alexandria dealt with grammatical matters as tense, mood, case, and aspect.
(v) They had special interests in the grammatical categories of nouns and verbs.
2. Romans
(i) They copied the Greeks exactly in all aspects of linguistics.
(ii) Varro (the most learned man of his time) wrote a twenty-five volume work on the Latin language under the heading etymology, morphology, and syntax.
(iii) The most famous Latin grammars are done by Donatos (A. D. 400) and Priscian (A. D. 500) which were used as standard textbooks as late as the middle ages.
(iv) They follow the Greek and introduced a similar speculative approach to language.
3. The middle ages and after
(i) The prime concern of the speculative grammarians was to find the relationship between words and physical world of object.
(ii) They believe that grammar is universal.
(iii) They were also interested in the origin of language, whether or not all languages came from a single source.
(iv) They believe that Hebrew was Man s original language.
4. Sir William Jones (1786) and the 19th C.
a) 1786
(i) He pointed out that Sanskrit (the old Indian language), Greek, Germanic, Latin and Celtic all had structural similarities.
(ii) He concluded that all these languages sprang from one common source.
b) 19th Century
(i) Linguists in the 19th Century concentrated on writing detailed comparative grammars, comparing the different Cal forms of the various members of the Indo – European language family.
(ii) They focused on written records.
(iii) The interest was historical analysis and interpretation.
c) Junggrammatiker (or Young grammarians/Neo grammarians)
i) They centred near Leipzing, investigated the sound change of many )
European languages.
(ii) They thought that sound laws are regular (without exceptions).
(iii) Older scholars objected this view and pointed out numerous exceptions to these so called laws.