history of linguistics

Panini (4th BCE Century)

600 BCE

Sanskrit
- A sacred language of Hinduism, and the Vedas. the classical literary of India.
- Perfect or complete thought as the divine language of Gods. Astadhyayi (Astaka)
- Major Work.
- Distinguish the language of sacred texts and usual language of communication.
- Came up with extensive rules and definitions to describe sanskrit by codifying language.
- In short, he systematically categorized sanskrit sound into consonants and vowels, and nouns and verbs.

history of linguistics

Period: 600 BCE to 2000

Bhurtrhari (5th Century BCE)

500 BCE

Vakapadiya
- Philosophic conception of spoken word (outer form) and its inner meaning. (Ex. cat)
- The idea is that the meaning exists in the mind of both speaker and listener, but it is through sounds that the meaning is transferred.

Ancient Greeks

427 BCE

The origin of language exists by nature or by convention.

Plato

427 BCE

Cratylus
- By nature (Phonis) or by convetion
- Homos or thesis
- Imitating sound
- Human or Divine invention

Aristotle

384 BCE

De Interpretatione
-Convention

Dionysus Thrax

170 BCE

Tekne Grammaticae
-Morphologic Description of Geek

Stoic School of Grammar

160 BCE

-By nature.
-Specific aspect of language like grammar,etymology and phonetics

Varro

116 BCE

Saturae Menippae
-humorous medleys and prose

Donatus

6 BCE

Ars Minor
- Elements of grammar, eight parts of speech and errors and beauties of language

Priscian

5 BCE

Institutiones Grammaticae
- Profound influence on the teaching grammar of nation and indeed of grammar generally in Europe.
- Gave birth to speculative grammar.

Speculative Grammar

13

-Concern for the notion of modi significandi "ways of signifying"
-Understanding of the world and its content through modes of signifying.
-Modistae compiled the lists of modes of signifying for Donatus and Priscian parts of speech distinguishing essential modes from accidental ones.

St. Thomas Aquinas

1224

Three ways words are used (Univocally, Equivocally, Analogously)
Univocally
- We predicate two things (x and y) one and the same n. Where n has precisely the same meaning when predicated of x and y.
Equivocally
- Two things are given one and the same name n. Where n has one meaning when predicated of x and different meaning of y.
Analogously
- Two things whereas other instances of equivocal naming are complete of uncontrolled.

Roger Bacon

1225

Grammar is substantially one, and the same in all languages, although it may vary accidentally.

Port Royal Grammarians (1660)

1590

They claimed that usage should be dictated by the actual speech of living languages.

Rene Descartes

1596

The principal concern was with the manifestation of universal semantic concepts in individual languages.

English Grammarians (Konrad Gesner, Gottfried Wilhelm Liebniz, Johan Christoph Adelung, Lorenzo Hervas y Panduro, and Peter Simon Pallas)

1660

Comparative Method
- Relationship between two or more languages and the techniques used to discover whether the languages have common ancestors.
- Voyages, conquests, trading, and colonization from 16th
- Variety of Language
-Nature versus Convention.
- Etymology (Hebrew)- Biblically as the origin of language.

Sir William Jones

1746

He found the Asiatic Society of Bengal that discovered the relationship between the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin and Celtic Languages that forced or triggered for the development of comparative method.

Franz Bopp

1791

German linguist who established the importance of Sanskrit in the comparative method

Rasmus Rask

1818

-According to Rask, grammatical agreement is much more sign of kinship or unity.
-He also relied on sound correspondences and basic vocabulary as evidence and later on became 'Grimms Law'.

Grimm Brothers: Jacob Ludwig Carl Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Carl Grimm

1819

-Formulated Grimm’s law
-Earliest “scientific” collection of folktales
-Deutsche Grammatik (1819-37)

Neo-Grammarian School

1870

-Language change (throughout history): sound (phonemes) laws have no exceptions.

Wilhelm Von Humbolt

1872

-Language is an activity of the character and structure of which expresses culture and individuality.

Traditional and Structural Grammar

1873

Traditional Grammar
- Treats the parts of speech as the building blocks for every sentence
- Words are labelled as belonging to one of the eight part of speech (nouns, pronouns, adjective, verbs etc.)
Structural Grammar
-It describes how sounds, word forms and word position affect the meaning.

Synchronic and Diachronic Linguistics

1873

Synchronic
- The descriptive, analyzing how parts of language or grammar work together.
Diachronic
- The same as historical linguistics.
- It is the study of the changes in language over time.

Otto Jepersen

1874

-Danish Linguist
-Contributed greatly to the advancement of phonetics, linguistics theory and history of English.

Ferdinand de Saussure

1875

Cours de Linguistique generale (1916)- This book is credited with turning the tide of linguistic thought from the diachronic (historical) orientation which had dominated nineteenth-century linguistics to interest in synchronic (non-historical) study of language
Concept of Signs
-The signifier and the signified.

Leonard Bloomfield

1885

-He was concerned with the details of Indo-European particularly Germani speech sounds and word formation, turned into larger and wider considerations of language.

Transformational Generative Grammar

1886

-A system of language analysis that recognizes the relationship among the various elements of a sentence and among the possible sentences of language and processes or rules to express these relationships.

Nikolaj Sergevenic Trubetzkoj

1890

-The author of its most important work on phonology
-Influenced by Ferdinand de Saussure, he redefined the phonemic rationally as the smallest distinctive unit within the structure of given language and he further broke these problems into their distinctive unit.

Roman Jakobson

1896

-Jakobson theorized the functions of language and its corresponding model.

Zelling Harris

1900

-Harris was the teacher of Chomsky.
-Surface Structure
Sentence-forms and it is not a device to transform a deep structure into a surface as it is.

Noam Chomsky

1957

-Chomsky is the main propagator of Transformational Grammative Grammar the 2 levels of Structure: deep structure and surface structure.
-He opposed structuralism as well.
-Deep structure (also known as deep grammar or D-structure) is the underlying syntactic structure or level of a sentence.
-Deep structure is an abstract representation that identifies the ways a sentence can be analyzed and interpreted.
-Universal Grammar

Morris Hale

1960

-Expert in Phonology
-Structure of Sound

J.A. Fodor & J.J. Katz

1963

-Semantic interpretation, syntactic structure by projection rules to transformation.