An outline of the history of linguistics

• Hindu Tradition

o Had its origins in the 1st millennium BC

o Stimulated by changes in Sanskrit

o Panini (c. 500 BC) is the best known grammarian

o Panini’s grammar of Sanskrit covered phonetics and

morphology

• The Greek Origin

o The Greek tradition of linguistics developed in response to Homer’s epics.

The Greeks founded the European tradition.

o IMPORTANT THEMES IN THE GREEK TRADITION INCLUDE:

The origin of language

Classification of words (parts of speech)

The relation between language and thought

The relation between two aspects of word-signs (whether

form and meaning are connected by nature or by

convention.

o Plato (c. 429-347 BC) distinguished between Nouns and Verbs. He favored
nature over convention.

o Aristotle’s (384-322 BC) main contributions to linguistics are as follows:

• He divided words into Nouns, Verbs, and

Adjectives.

• He divided the sentence into two parts, SUBJECT

and PREDICATE.

• He classified GENDER into masculine, feminine,

and neutral.

• He was the first to distinguish between the

different types of TENSE a verb carries.

o Thrax (100 BC) produced the first complete grammar of Greek. He

concluded that Greek words fell into just eight classes,

which we call the parts of speech. Thrax’s description of Greek has become

the basis of all grammatical description in Europe until the 20th century.

• Roman Tradition

o After the Roman conquest of Greece in the mid-2nd century BC, Roman

scholars learned of the Greek work, and they began to

apply the same analysis to their own language, Latin.

o One of the most influential Roman grammarians is Priscian, who wrote in

the 6th century AD. Priscian’s description of Latin is still what we find in
most school textbooks of Latin today.

• Arabic Tradition

The oldest Arabic grammarian is Abu-Alaswad al-Du'ali, who established

diacritical marks and vowels for Arabic in the mid-600s.

o The schools of Basra and Kufa in the late 700s.

o From the school of Basra, two representatives laid important foundations

for the field: Al-Khalil ibn Ahmad al-Farahidi authored the first Arabic

dictionary and book of Arabic prosody, and his student Sibawayh authored

the first book on theories of Arabic grammar.

3• The Port-Royal Grammar

o The 17th-century French scholars, known as the Port-Royal Circle, put

together a remarkably original “universal” grammar of French that is very

different from the Priscianic tradition. o The central argument of the

Grammar is that grammar is simply mental processes, which are universal;

therefore grammar is universal.

o The Port Royal Grammar had a pedagogical goal as its primary one.

However, this goal was not learning a specific language, but rather learning

any language. It aims to provide an overview of the grammatical features

shared by all languages.

o As such, it was part of Port Royal’s overall program of

changing language teaching methodology