Comparetive and Historical Linguistics in the 19th Century

Comparetive and Historical Linguistics in the 19th Century

The 19th century * was the era of the comparative and historical study of languages (especially of the Indo-European l-ges); * saw the development of modern conceptions, theoretical and methodological of comparative and historical linguistics, and the greatest concentration of scholarly effort and scholarly ability in linguistics was devoted to this aspect of the subject; * prevailed the opinion that linguistics was mainly historical study; * applied ideas of primary historical view of l-ge.

Pre-19th century * involved historical work on l-ges as sporadic, because people’s suggestions and researchers remained in isolation; * developed by a continuous succession of scholars; * each new thinker had little to build on or to react to; * scholarship focused on a specialized field of theory and practice; * mostly Germans or scholars trained in German built up the subject on the basis of what had been done.
Work on the historical relations of particular groups of l-ges by European writers:
Dante (1265-1321)
“De Vulgari cloquentia” * gives an account of the genesis of dialect differences; * thence of different languages from a single source l-ge; * recognizes 3 properly European l-ge families: * Germanic -North * Latin - South * Greek – part of Europe and adjacent Asia * used a method of labeling device – later binary division of Indo-European into the centum and satem; * was aware of dialect-differences.

Dante (1265-1321)
“De Vulgari cloquentia” * gives an account of the genesis of dialect differences; * thence of different languages from a single source l-ge; * recognizes 3 properly European l-ge families: * Germanic -North * Latin - South * Greek – part of Europe and adjacent Asia * used a method of labeling device – later binary division of Indo-European into the centum and satem; * was aware of dialect-differences.

though: the relationship of Islandic and English by wirtue of resembles in word form

the 12th century “First Grammarian” though: the relationship of Islandic and English by wirtue of resembles in word form

the 12th century “First Grammarian”

The monogenesis of all l-ges and ascription of the status of the original or oldest l-ge to Hebrew * was a general y held idea during the first of the Christian era; * continued to be accepted for several centuries; * was challenged by the submition of a rival l-ge as the surviving original or ‘oldest l-ge’.

Latin survived * as a written l-ge in the use during the period before Renaissance; * as spoken l-ge of the Roman Catholic church services; * as a lingua franca for educated persons.
Alternative models of the historian relations of l-ges weren’t lacking during the period from Dante to Sir William Jones; it was just that they were not taken up and developed by their contemporaries.

J.J. Scaliger * dispensed with two fallacious dogmas that distorted the historical dimension of language study; * recognized 11 l-ge families: * 4 major (Romance, Greek, Germanic and Slavic groups within Indo-European); * 7 minor * covering the continent of Europe, within the member l-ges were genetically related; * recognized the subfamilies of separate larger families.
The Scaliger’s grouping and his justification of them were not examined or made the basis of further work by his contemporaries.

The end of 17th century a more developed model of historian relationship between l-ges was put forward by two Swedish scholars:
A.Stiernhielm – edition of the Gothic Bible – set side by side the inflexion of Latin and Gothic, despite the non-cognation of the roots, from the personal endings that the two l-ges were closely related descendants of a single ancestor. A.Jäger spoke of an ancient l-ge spreading, as the result of migrations, over Europe and part of Asia and producing thereby ‘daughter’ l-ges which in turn produced today known l-ges.

Leibniz (1646-1716) * turned his attention to the historical linguistics; * didn’t discount a monogenetic theory of the world’s l-ges; * didn’t seek for origins in any living or attested; * set up two major divisions of the original l-ge, covering the l-ges of the north and south of Europe; * indicated some of the principles by which historical linguistic research is fruitfully undertaken; * pointed to the evidence in placenames and river names of the earlier distribution of l-ges over areas from which they had later receded; * pressed for the preparation of grammars and dictionaries of the l-ges of the world, linguistic atlases, and universal roman-based alphabet into which the non-roman scripts of l-ges could be transliterated.

German P.S.Pallas (due to linguistic interests of Catherine II in her Russian dominion) “The comparative vocabularies of the l-ges of the whole world” were complied in 1786-9. C.J.Kraus in 1787 after reviewing Pallas work, wrote an essay which covered the important fields in which comparative linguistics must look for the advances: * Phonetics * Semantics * Grammar structure * Geographical position of l-ges * Distribution of l-ges.

The 18th century * appeared general theories on the origin and development of l-ge; * the seminal discovery of the relations between Sanskrit and the major l-ges of Europe; * concentrated on the historical study of the Indo-European l-ges; * in 1808 F.Schlegel – a treatise ‘On the language and the learning of the Indians’ – importance of studying the ‘inner structures’ of l-ges, appears the term ‘vergleichende Grammatik’ – it was a comparison of the inflexional and deriavational morphology of Sanskrit and the other Indo-European l-ges.

The 19th century * R. Rask, J. Grimm, F. Bopp and W. von Humboldt are best known scholars of linguistic study; * R. Rask and J. Grimm began the comparative and historical study of the Indo-European family; F. Bopp and W. von Humboldt; * R. Rask, J. Grimm, F. Bopp were the founders of scientific historical linguistics; * Rask wrote the first systematic grammars of Old Norse and Old English; * Grimm wrote Deutsche Grammatik – the start of germanic linguistics; * ‘Grimm’s Law’ first appeared in the 2nd edition of Deutsche Grammatik; * the first sound law to form the structur and support of Indo-european and other l-ge families’; * remains of all sets of sound correspondences within Indo-european l-ges; * were set in Greek, Gothic and Old High German; * later supplemented by Verner’s Law. * Grimm applied the ideas of Herder on the close relationship between a nation and its l-ge to the histirical dimension of l-ge; * Linguistics change was conceived as the breakdown of an original integral l-ge state; * Sanskrit was considered at this time to be the nearest to the morphological structure of the original l-ge; * Bopp kept alive some 18th century ideas in analysing the inflexional forms of l-ges of the Indo-european family – tended to regard inflexions as the result of earlier affixation of formerly separate auxiliary words.

Wilhelm von Humbold * didn’t concentrated predominantly on history, no sharp distinction of linguistic syncrony and diachrony; * Humboldt’s theory of l-ge lays stress on the creative linguistic ability inherent in every speaker’s brain or mind; * l-ge couldn’t originate just environmentally; * l-ge is a particular proper of the nation; * Humboldt’s innere Sprachform is the semantic and grammatical structure of a l-ge, embodying elements, patterns and rules imposed on the raw material of speech; * every l-ge is a product of its past, some l-ges show a greater advance than others; * the thought and l-ge are interdependent and inseparable; * the words of every l-ge are organised in a systematic whole; * differences between the l-ges turn not merely on the different speech sounds used by them, but involve differences in the speaker’s interpretation and understanding of the world they live in; * Kant’s theory of perception was adapted by Humboldt relativistically and linguistically; * Humboldt’s best known contribution to linguistic theory is a tripartite l-ge typology, isolating, agglutinative, and flexional, according to the predominant structure of the word as a grammatical unit.
F.Schlegel divided l-ges into those making grammatical use of internal changes of word form and those employing serially ordered elements. A.W. Schlegel set up the three classes of isolating, affixing and inflecting l-ges.