THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTIC

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTIC

A.   Early Development (Traditional Grammar)

1.      Ancient Greek

Greek philosophers were interested in the study of language phenomenon since as early as the fourth century B. C. they studied language so that they might discover the answers to some great mysteries of life. Their motives for language study were philosophical rather than practical. They believed that language, in this case, the Greek language, had been given to humans as a divine gift.

Among the Greek philosophers who were concerned with the study of language plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, and Dionysius Thrax. Plato developed his theory of “natural logic”. In speculating about words and their meanings, he concluded that a given world beans an inherent, natural, and therefore logical relationship to the thing or concept for which it stand. Believing as he did in the universal “rightness” of words, plato concentrated his philosophical attention on the analysis of words and their meanings. He devised what is possibly the first system of word-classification in the western world. His system was based on meaning and had only two word classes: onoma and rhema. He defined words in the onoma class as those words designating the performer of on action or that about which something is asserted; words in the rhema class were those words representing the performing of the action or the asserting. These two word classes are equivalent to the noun and verb classes in traditional grammar Aristotle, Plato’s most gifted pupil, continued the investigation of words and their meanings in his own philosophical inquiries. Among Aristotle’s important contributions to language study are these: (1) he added a third word class, syndesmoi (roughly equivalent to the conjunction class in traditional grammar, which included all words that fell into neither of plato’s two classes; (2) he made note of certain structural word features, such as that nouns process case and that verbs process tense; (3) he provided the definition of the term word as the smalles meaningful language unit. This definition is probably the earliest definition and very close to the modern structuralist’s definition of morpheme.

After Aristotle, the nest important word in language study is that of the stoics inquiries around 300 B. C. the earliest stoics added one more class, that is, articles, to Aristotle’s three word classes, so that word classes became four, namely, articles, nouns, verbs, and conjunction. Later stoics philosopher subdivided words in the noun class intoproper and common nouns. The concluded that nouns process five cases: nominative, accusative, dative, genitive, and vocative.

The stoics were also concerned with the inquiries of the nature of language. Their goal was to demonstrate that the outer forms of language reveal their inner truth about human nature. The present day linguistics interest in the outer and inner form of language., what TG grammarian refers to as surface structure and deep structure, may have its beginning with the work of the stoics.    

Dionnysius Thrax was a Greek philosopher-grammarian. He lived in Alexandria during the last gread period of the Greek ampire, sometime around the firs century  B. C., when the had become the center of Greek culture. In his book, Techne Grammatike, Thrax expanded the word classes to eight classes, still basing his classifications largely on meaning. His eight  classes  were roughly equivalent to nouns, pronouns, verbs, participles, articles, adverbs, conjuctions, and propocitions. He gave a detailed definition and provided many examples for each of these classes.       

2.      Ancient Rome

Years later, when the center of western eivilization had shifted from Greece to Rome, Geek learning came to influence nearly every aspect of cultural Roman life, including the study of  language. Roman scolars, who their firs Latin Grammars, followed the earlier Greek models. This was possible because both Greek and Latin were highly inflected languages with many grammatical similarities.

Among the scholars who were interested in the study of language were verro, Quintilian, donates, and Priscian. Varro made independent contributions to grammatical study. Besides the five cases of Greek nouns, Latin nouns had an additional case, called the ablative, not fount in Greek. Varro was also interested in the old anomalist-analogist controversy which had concerned language scholars from the time of palto’s Cratylus. Palto had argued the analogist poin of view: that words in particular and language in general and logical. The nomalist, on the other hand, viewed word choices and language practices as arbitrary and assidental. In defens of the anomalist position, Varro pointed to many irregularities of language.

Qunitilian seemed to have sided with the analogist. He stressed the importance of including the study of Grammar and rhetoric in the education of the cultured Roman. In his discussions of language he held that proper usage must be based on trhee criteria : Reason, authority, and antiquality. His tudies of word etymology convinced him that meaning was more significant  than form in word development. He concluded that “reason” was fundamental, that  word choises were made originally on the basic principlesof natural logic and analogy. Concerning the correctness of current language practices, he urged that scholar pay attention to the “authority” of current usage, which he defined as the undisputed practices of educated men. In and when scholarswre unable to agree, however, he supported the exercise of “critical judgment” which the felt to be best served by consulting the older language practices of Greek “antiquity”.

3.      The Middle Ages

The medieval period is the longest period in the history of western Europe, having lasted for apporoximately a thousand years. These years have traditionally been characterized by historians as ones in which scholarship suffered decline and during which few new ideas were generated. Reinaissance scholars referred to the Medieval period as the Dark Ages.

To have a batter understanding of developments in language study during this period, we should try to get a general impression of the times. The relentless invasions of the Roman armies, which took place over a span several centuries, eventually extended the Roman Empire over a vast geographical area reaching from northen Africa to nearly all of Western Europe and England. An inevitable result of this expansion was the widespread dissemination of Roman Culture, Customs, laws, religion, and the Latin language.

The only Roman institutions which not only survived but indeed extended its influence during the Middle Ages was the Catholic church. Within the Catholic church, which became the  guardian of learning, Latin became the official language. Another important Medieval development was the griwing body o written grammar of the europen vernacular languages. By the end of the 16 century grammars had been written for nearly all of the europen vernacular languages.

One was the most fascinating and certainly one of the best vernacular grammars was the firs grammatical Treatise (mid-twefth century). An old norse grammar written in the vernacular by an unknown scolar who has been called the firs grammarian. This work is  especially interesting to modern linguist because many of his language study techniques, such as his detailed study of the phonology of Icelandic and his use of minimal parts, were very much the same as those techniques developed by historical and structural linguist in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

4.      The Renaissance

The renaissance period lasted from sometime in the late 1400s up to the 17 century. Among the Renaissance scolars whose work has only recently received the attention of twentieth century linguist were Francisko Sances de last Brocas, or simply Sanctius, a 16 century Spanish classical scholar, Huarte, a Spanish physician, and Peter Ramus.sanctius’ book, Minerva (around 1587), was for many years considered the standart work  on latin Grammar. He believed thet all languages, despite their superficial differences, were simply varied developments of a single universal set of underlying principles which were common to all human languages. Huarte argued that humans can be distinguished from animals because humans alone posses two powers. The firs of those is rooted in the senses and thus can in no way distinguish human from   beast ; the second however, is the generative or creative ability, which makes the human capable of eloquence and which is quite beyond the power of beast. Peter Ramos wrote grammars of Greek, Latin, and French, and in his work scholae he stressed that the best guide to usage practices is the current usage of native speakers.

5.      The Seventeenth Century and Beyond

The 17 century was marked by the philosopocal debate between the rationalist and the empiricists. The rationalist position was based on the philosophical writings of Rene Descartes, who held that certain human abilities, capabilities, and ideas were innate. He argued that the acquisition of knowledge is determined by certain abstract, hbuilt-in principles in every normal person from the moment of birth. Among the most significant human achievements is the creative use of language.

The empiricists, on the other hand, whose earliest standart bearers were John Locke and David Hume, insisted that everyting humans come to know including language-is entirely explainable as sense-oriented, “learned” behavior. The empiricist denied the existence of innate ideas.

The most important work of the rationalist Certesian Grammarians of this period was done by a group of monks at the port royal monastery in port Royal, France. These scholrs had become interested in the European vernacular languages, particularly in their own native French. Intrigued by the great many similarities among languages revealed by their comparative studies. They came to believe that there must be certain basic universal language principles. They concluded that the Grammarian’s work ough to be focused on the discovery of these universals. They were convinced that these universals would be reflected in all natural human languages. Convinced that French as the scholarly language in france. They argued that any fully developed natural vernacular language was bound to be more accurately representative of universal language principles than was latin.

Believing that any natural language was an outer reflection of the inper workings of human mentality, the port Royalists urged that the only proper role of the Grammarian is to describe, as accuralety and objectively as possible, the actual language practices of a speaking community as they exist, not according to subjective nations about what the “rules” ought to be, and above all not according to the rules of Latin.

Empiricists dismissed such notions as those expressed by Descartes and the port Royalists. They argued that humans acquire language by the simple process of listening to language they hear spoken around them from time to time of their birth, and then by imitating what they hear. Condillac, a French disciple of locke, argued in his philosophical treatise raite des sensations, that language had necessarily evolved before tough. In fact, it is language which makes thought possible.

Among the other scholar whose work seems to have been based, or at least in part, on the ideas of Descartes and his followers were A. w . Sehlegel and Wihelm von Humboldt (both were Germans). Schlegel argued that human language ability cannot be attributed solely to outside forces. He extended the argument, for he was particularly interested in the existence of what he called poetic quality of language, which he  did not limit that highly developed and comparatively rare excellence of language which can be described as rtu art. Wilhalm von Humboldt’ large work Uber die Verschicdenheit des Menschlichen Sprachbaus was published in 1836. He argued in favor of the proposition that there exist an organic  form of language for which there is a certain limited or fixed number of inherent rules, the surface manifestations of which are not, however, predetermined. What  seems to have most fascinated Humboldt was the human ability to produce an infinite and varied number of completely unpredictable surface sentences with only limited number of rules.  He pointed out that this ability is not one possessed only by artist. Indeed, it is expressed all hthe time in every person’s ordinary speech-even in the speech of children. It is his phenomenon which convinced humboldtthat innate language properties resida in the human mind.

B.   New Developments

1.      Historical Comprative Linguistics

Inspired by the discoveries made by Sussetti (an Italian merchant) on Sankrit and those of Sir William Jones 9a government official whit East India Company) on panini’s grammar of Sanskrit, European scholars developed the socalled historical and comperative linguistics. Franz Bopp, a German language scholar who is often called the founder of historical and comparative linguistics, published Uber das Konjugationssystem, in which he did two things. Firs, he repotted the result og his own comparative studies of verb inflections in Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian and several of the European teutonic (Germanic ) languages. Second, he  cotended that his own results, along whit those of other comparative inquiries, furnished confincing support for the theory that not only had all theselanguages developed simultaneously, although independently, from a single parent language, but thatbit also was quite possible to recover anough empirical historical linguistic evidence to be able to reconstruct a fairly close aproxsimation of that ancient Indo-European language which had been the source of them all.

According to LaPalombara (1976:91), among the conclutions on which comparative language scholars soon reached agreement were the following:

1.      It seemed certain beyond reasonable doubt that humans had lived in societics at least as early as six thousand years before the  birth of Crist.

2.      Enough evidence had been accumulated to convincingly support the theory of related languages, or language “familes” English most of the European languages, and a number of Asiatic languages were all though to have been developed from a single parent language which linguists called Indo-European.

3.      The development of the exiting “sister” languages had taken place independently but simultaneously.

4.      This development had, furthermore, taken palce over a very long period of time.

5.      The original Indo-European language had vanished long ago.

6.      All exiting vernacular languages were still changing and developing.

7.      Language changing is acountinous, open-ended process that never stops so long as a language contiunues to be viable spoken togue.

The methods developed by historical and comparative linguists in their  field studies became, over the years, highly meticulous and refined. They developed a rigorously objective scientific approach. The firs step, and possibly the most time consuming one, was to gather masses of data. Once these data began tu accumulate, scholars began to piece together random bits of empirical circumstantial evidence and to draw some tentative conclusions. Once sunch tentative conclusions were reached, more data were required to either  verify or disapprove a theory.

At the last thre different kinds of linguistic stuies were carried out. The greatest number of these were diachronic  language investigations : detailed studies of a particular language over a long period of time, or comparative language research over an extended period historu  al time. Other scholars concentraded on the careful analysis of a particular language at one specific point in historical time. These later descriptions are referred to as synchronic language studies.

2.      American Structural Linguistic

The discoveries of the European histirical comparative linguists were influential both in shedding  much ligh on the understanding of language development and ridding language scholars of some of their earlier ideas about the nature of language. In addition, their newly developed eraporical methods paved the way for new approaches to language study. Perharps the most significarit work which made use of these new field-study methods was that begun by a small group of American anthropologists around the turn of the century.

even before they began their field work, the anthropologists had the termined that they would be rigorously scientific in their methods. This meant that they would begin their work with no picconceived “notions” yhat they would gather a large corpus of linguistic data , making every possible attempt to ensure that these data were representative of the entire tribe ; that they would consider no detail too insignificant or unimportant to record ;and that, above all, they would refrain from making subjective judgment or reching premature and unwarranted conclusions.

Thus, the method of analyzing the sounds of language, which had proved so evaluable as a tool for the historical linguists, became a practical necessity for the American anthropologists. Their method became one of recording hundres and thousands of sounds, then attempting to distinguish those sound differences which were significant. Only then was it possible to devise a tentative alphabet for translating the important sounds of a language.

As much by assident as by design, the linguistic investigations of the American srtucturalist came to follow a specific orther; firs, they must insolate and identify the significant  sounds (phonemes) of a language; next they must determine which particular soud sequences make up the words of the language ; last, the structure of the language’s sentences must be analized and recorded.