the historical development of linguistics

THE HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTICS

A.    Early Development (Traditional Grammar)

1.      Ancient Greek

Greek philosophers were interested in the study of languages phenomenon since as early as the fourth century B. C. They studied language so that they might discover the answer 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 were Plato, Aristotle, the Stoies, and Dionysius Thrax. Plato developed his theory of “natural logic.” In speculating about words and their meanings, he concluded that a given word bears an inherent, natural, and therefore logical relationship to the thing or concept for which it stands. Believing as he did in the universal “rightness” of words, Plato concentrated his philosophical attention on the analysis of word 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 an 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 contribution to language study are these: (1) he added a third word class, syndesmoi (roughly equivalent to the conjunction class in the traditional