Historical Development of Language Study
Scholars throughout history, from Greek philosophers to 19th-century linguists, have contributed to the study of language. Major advancements, such as distinguishing between nouns and verbs and the regularity of language change, have shaped linguistic theories.
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HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE STUDY
HISTORICAL TRACE OF LANGUAGE STUDY It is important to keep in mind that although linguistics is a relatively new discipline, but the study of language has been of interest to scholars from different background for more than two millennia. The Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle made major contributions to the study of language. Plato, for example, is said to have been the first person to distinguish between nouns and verbs. Medieval Muslim scholars also made major contributions to the study of language
19TH CENTURY 19th-century linguistics was characteristically historical in nature. 19th-century linguists were particularly interested in studying how different languages are related to each other. Their aim was to write comparative grammars for the various members of Indo-European language family in order to reconstruct the hypothetical ancestor of Indo-European languages. This interest started when Sir William Jones delivered a lecture in 1786 about the striking structural similarities between Sanskrit and many European languages.
19TH CENTURY This emphasis on language change eventually led to major theoretical advances in Diachronic Linguistics. For instance, a group of scholars centered around Leipzig, and nicknamed the Young Grammarians , claimed that language change is regular . They argued that if, in any word of a given dialect, one sound changes into another the change will also affect all other occurrences of the same sound in similar phonetic surroundings.
