The History of Linguistics

AYDIN UNIVERSITY

INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL SCIENCES

DEPT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE (PHD PROGRAM)



LINGUISTICS

DR VEYSEL KILIÇ

ESMA ŞENEL

Y1112.620021





HISTORY OF LINGUISTICS



















Linguistics as a study endeavors to describe and explain the human faculty of language. The history of linguistics is a branch of intellectual history, for it deals with history of ideas- ideas about language- and not directly with language itself (Law, 2003, p.2). Many histories of linguistics have been written over the last two hundred years, and since 1970s linguistic historiography has become a specialized subfield. Early developments in linguistics were considered part of philosophy, rhetoric, logic, psychology, biology, pedagogy, poetics, and religion, making it difficult to separate the history of linguistics from intellectual history in general, and, as a consequence, work in the history of linguistics has contributed also to the general history of ideas.

  In ancient civilization, linguistic study was originally motivated by the correct description of classical liturgical language, notably that of Sanskrit grammar by Panini. Panini is known for his Sanskrit grammar, particularly for his formulation of the 3,959 rules (of Sanskrit morphology, syntax and semantics in the grammar known as Ashtadhyayi which is one of the earliest known grammars. Asstadhyayi is the earliest known work on descriptive linguistics, and stands at the beginning of the history of linguistics itself. Pāini’s theory of morphological analysis was more advanced than any equivalent Western theory before the mid-20th century (Staal, 1988 (Staal)), and his analysis of noun compounds still forms the basis of modern linguistic theories of compounding. European scholarship in Sanskrit, begun by Heinrich Roth (1620–1668) and Johann Ernst Hanxleden (1681–1731), is regarded as responsible for the discovery of the Indo-European language family by Sir... [continues]

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