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- ...It would hardly be a waste of time if sometimes even the most
advanced students in the cognitive sciences were to pay a visit to their
ancestors. It is frequently claimed in American philosophy departments
that, in order to be a philosopher, it is not necessary to revisit the
history of philosophy. It is like the claim that one can become a
painter without having ever seen a single work by Raphael, or a writer
without having ever read the classics. Such things are theoretically
possible; but the 'primitive' artist, condemned to an ignorance of the
past, is always recognizable as such and rightly labeled as naïf. It is
only when we consider past projects revealed as utopian or as failures
that we are apprised of the dangers and possibilities for failure for
our allegedly new projects. The study of the deeds of our ancestors is
thus more than an atiquarian pastime, it is an immunological precaution.
- -Umberto Eco, The Search for the Perfect Language, page 316
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- India
- Greece
- Rome
- The Middle Ages
- The Renaissance
- 18th Century Linguistics
- 19th Century Linguistics
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- "General linguistic theory was debated by Indian scholars as it
was by scholars in the west, though before the end of the eighteenth
century there was no contact between them. Language was considered
against the background both of literary studies and of philosophical
enquiry; and a number of the topics familiar to western scholarship, and
almost inevitable in a serious examination of language, were also
familiar to Indian linguists from early times" (Robins 1997:171-2).
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- "Indian linguistics was not itself historical in orientation,
though its roots lay in the changes languages undergo in the course of
time. But the topics covered by modern descriptive linguistics:
semantics, grammar, phonology, and phonetics, were all treated at length
in the Indian tradition; and in phonetics and in certain aspects of
grammar, Indian theory and practice was definitely in advance of
anything achieved in Europe or elsewhere before contact had been made
with Indian work. The stimulation afforded by Sanskritic linguistic
scholarship carried by Buddhist monks into China has already been
noticed. European scholars realized immediately that they had
encountered in India a mass of linguistic literature of the greatest
importance and stemming from an independent source, even though their
interpretation and full appreciation of it was in part halting and
delayed" (Robins 1997:170).
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- Pānini: wrote a grammar of Sanskrit (between 600 B.C. and 300 B.C.)
called Astadhyāyī (literally 'eight books').
- Tolkāppiyam: early grammar of Tamil written around the second
century B.C.
- Bhartrhari: wrote Vākyapadīya (5th-7th Century A.D.), which
states that the sentence should be interpreted as a single unit - which
"conveys its meaning 'in a flash', just as a picture is first
perceived as a unity, notwithstanding subsequent analysis into its
component coloured shapes" (Robins 1997:173). In other words, the
sentence is not understood as a sequence of words put together, but the
full meaning of each word is only understood in the context of the other
words around it.
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- Indian linguistic theory set out three requirements for a string of
words to be considered a sentence: (1) (ākānksā) the
words are members of suitable grammatical categories with appropriate
morphology (inflection), (2) (yogyatā) the words must be
'semantically appropriate' to one another, (3) (samnidhi) and the words
must be uttered as a concatenation.
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- Plato's Cratylus
- Aristotle
- "Language is by convention, since no names arise naturally" (De
interpretatione 16a 27).
- "Speech is the representation of the experiences of the mind, and
writing is the representation of speech" (De interpretatione 16a
4-5).
- The Stoics: Words/naming are/is intrinsic.
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- Epicurus: Word forms are intrinsic, but are modified through use (i.e.
through convention).
- Sextus Empiricus: Distinguished between the gender (masculine, feminine,
and neuter) of nouns. Such classification was a remarkable insight for
the time, however, it should be noted that distinguishing animacy
markers by human gender is not the best way of looking at noun
classification. In other words, the nouns that fall into the feminine
gender don't necessarily have female characteristics (ex. the Greek word
for battle helmet is feminine).
- Apollonius: made a "tentative development of the formal concept of
syntactic government between transitive verbs and nouns" (Robins
1997:47).
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- "Roman linguistics was largely the application of Greek thought,
Greek controversies, and Greek categories to the Latin language"
(Robins 1997:60).
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- Most of the linguistic work from the Middle Ages was focused on grammar,
emphasizing Latin and Greek analyses.
- "Latin remained the language of learning, and its authority was
increased by its use as the language of patristic literature and of the
services and the administration of the western (Roman) Church. This
alone ensured the language a high place, and linguistic studies in the
early years of the Middle Ages were largely represented by studies in
Latin grammar" (Robins 1997:82).
- Isidore of Seville: did etymology and lexicography during the Seventh
Century
- Donatus & Priscian: were the principle grammarians of the Middle
Ages. All of their work was based on Latin grammatical structure.
- St. Jerome: translated the Bible into Latin; dealt with the theory of
translation (he suggested a sense for sense translation instead of word
for word.
- Aelfric: Englishman; wrote an introduction to Old English grammar. He
noticed marked differences between Latin and Old English grammar
properties.
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- "In the history of linguistic science, the second part of the
Middle Ages, from around 1100 to the close of the period, is the more
significant. This was the period of scholastic philosophy, in which
linguistic studies had an important place and in which a very
considerable amount of linguistic work was carried on. This same era is
also marked by the flowering of mediaeval architecture (the so-called
'Gothic') and literature, and the founding of several of the earliest
universities of Europe. The movements of whole populations had now
ceased, and the ascendancy of the Roman Church, strengthened by the
foundation of the Dominican and Franciscan Orders, provided a central
authority which, despite controversies and antagonisms, united all men's
cultural activities as part of the service of God, and subordinated all
intellectual pursuits to the study of the faith" (Robins 1997:85).
- First grammatical treatise: written by an unknown Icelandic scholar
known as the 'First Grammarian.' His work mostly deals with phonology,
and it makes a distinction in speech sounds very similar to the modern
concept of the phoneme.
- Peter Helias: was a noted medieval grammarian.
- Thomas of Erfurt: described the difference in nominative case marking
for nouns versus adjectives.
- William of Ockham: made famous nominalism, which asserts "that
universals are words or names only, with no real existence outside
language" (Robins 1997:101).
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- During this period, grammatical descriptions were written for several
European languages. The Bible was also translated into many different
languages during the Renaissance.
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Manuel Chrysoloras: produced the first grammar book of Greek in Western
Europe.
- School of Basra: was heavily influenced by the writings of Aristotle.
They believed that language is strongly regular and systematic (similar
ideas to modern Formalism).
- Sībawaih: wrote a grammar of classical Arabic. He also wrote a
phonetic description of the Arabic writing system.
- Dante: wrote De vulgari eloquentia, which experimented with combining
certain aspects of several Italian dialects into a new, highly
regularized philosophical language.
- Pierre Ramée: grammarian whose thought precludes modern concepts of
European and American Structuralism. He made pokes at Aristotelian (from
which Formalism would sprout) approaches to language, and argued that
all languages should be appreciated in their own right.
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- Grammars for American-Indian languages were published during this
period.
- Tarascan (1558)
- Quechua (1560)
- Nahuatl (1571)
- Guarani (1640)
- Cardinal Ricci: his journal outlines the difference between Chinese and
Western European languages (ex. lack of morphology, tones, Chinese
writing system, etc.).
- Académie française: (established 1635); body of scholars who determine
French language standards
- British Royal Society: (established 1660); did a lot of work with
linguistics during the early life of the society.
- George Dalgarno: worked on philosophical languages.
- John Wilkins: worked on philosophical languages.
- Port Royal Grammarians: took a Rationalist approach to language; They
believed in language universals as evidenced by a common thought
structure in people throughout the civilized world.
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- J.G. Herder: believed that language and thought are inseparable. His
teachings serve as a strong precedent to the teachings of Benjamin Whorf
and Noam Chomsky (generative grammar).
- James Harris: held an Aristotelian view of grammar (i.e. he believed in
language universals); he was also aware of the differences between the
world's languages.
- James Burnett (Monboddo): looked for evidence of a proto-language by
studying the languages of 'primitive' peoples.
- Sir William Jones: a judge in the British Royal Court in India; in 1786,
he wrote a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta about the
historical connection between Sanskrit and Western European languages
such as Greek, the Romance Languages, and the Germanic Languages.
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- Wilhelm von Humboldt
- Largely Historical/Comparative Linguistics during this period
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- Wrote The variety of human language structure, which was later hailed
by Leonard Bloomfield as 'the first great book on general linguistics.'
The book promotes the idea that language is the product of the
creativity of the human mind, and so language shouldn't be evaluated
according to antiquated ideas about grammatical structure. "One may
also see how Kantian theory was itself influential in Humboldt's
thinking. Kant's theory of perception involved sensations produced by
the external world being ordered by categories or 'intuitions' (Anschauungen)
imposed by the mind, notably those of space, time, and causality. This
was a universal philosophical theory; Humboldt adapted it
relativistically and linguistically by making the innere Sprachform of
each language responsible for the ordering and categorizing of the data
of experience, so that speakers of different languages live partly in
different worlds and have different systems of thinking. One notes the
use by Humboldt of the three verbal nouns Anschauen, Denken, and Fühlen
(perception, thinking, and feeling) in connection with the operation of
language" (Robins 1997:166).
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- Friedrich von Schlegel (1772-1829): coined the phrase 'comparative
grammar,' which originially referred to comparing morphology in Sanskrit
and other Indo-European languages to determine genetic relationships.
- Dane R. Rask (1787-1832): pioneer in historical/comparative linguistics.
He worked out a methodology for historical/comparative linguistics.
- Jakob Grimm (1785-1863): devised Grimm's law which states that, "If
there is found between two languages agreement in the forms of
indispensable words to such an extent that rules of letter changes can
be discovered for passing from one to the other, then there is a basic
relationship between these languages."
- Franz Bopp (1791-1867): worked further on classification of genetic
relations among the Germanic languages.
- August F. Pott (1802-1887): pioneered Indo-European historical
linguistics and etymological studies. He was a professor of linguistics
at the University of Halle.
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- August Schleicher (1821-1868): Schleicher indicated that contemporary
languages had gone through a process in which simpler Ursprachen had
given rise to descendent languages that obeyed natural laws of
development. He argued that Darwin=s theory was thus perfectly applicable
to languages and, indeed, that evolutionary theory itself was confirmed
by the facts of language descent. "He regarded the three current
language types, isolating, agglutinating, and infexional, as
representing historical stages in the growth of languages to their
highest point of organization. This conviction was expressed more than
once in his statements that coexisting linguistic structural types
represented the products of successive historical developments in the
same way that successively evolved fishes, reptiles, birds, and mammals
are represented today by coexistent species in our biological
world" (Robins 1997:205).
- The Neogrammarians: A theory of linguistics that sought to explain
language change in terms of sound laws without exception and postulated
that modern irregularities in language were the result of past regular
sound changes.
- Ferdinand de Saussure
- Charles Sanders Peirce
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