The History of Linguistics

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History of linguistics

The Era	Pioneers/founders	The works
      The ancient grammarians	Panini	Grammar of Sanskrit. They identified the chief part of the vocal tract involved in producing sounds. They recognized the verb as the central to a sentence.
	Plato	Cratylus, an approach in seeking the origins of words. He offered valuable insight into language including a differentiation between vowels and consonants, an appreciation of word accent, and a division of the sentence into nominal and verbal parts.
	Aristotle	The classification of part of speech.
	Dionysius Thrax	Techne Grammatike, the study of how sounds are produced and the treatment of word classes and functions. He identified eight basic word classes; nouns, verbs, pronouns, articles, participles, preposition, conjunctions, and adverbs. He noted the important properties of classes of words—the gender, number, and case for nouns and of conjunction, tense, voice, mood, and person for verbs. He considered the sentence to be a group of words that expresses a complete thought.
	The Stoics	The treatment of case as a grammatical category of nouns expressed by word endings, the distinction between the nominative and all other cases. The distinction between proper and common nouns.
	Varro	The word endings could be further subdivided according to type. Some endings are used to derive new words; others are inflectional, indicating a word’s relationship to other words in a sentence.
	Priscian and Donatus	The grammars of Latin which served as the basis of learning Latin for learning about language in general.
    The Middle Ages	St. Thomas Aquinas Roger Bacon	Speculative Grammar which sought to explain the difference between parts of speech such as nouns and verbs by looking for differences in the ways the mind perceives the things referred to by nouns and verbs. All languages are essentially the same in nature and differ only in their surface characteristics.
      Linguistics in the Renaissance era	Descartes, Port Royal Grammarian	Linguists became more aware of changes. They were provided with written proof of what they had always suspected: languages change. The universality of thought which was reflected in language. They recognized that creativity in inherent in human language and viewed the phrase as corresponding to complex idea.
	English Grammarians	Studying phonetics or the physical sound system of language. The explanation of the relationship between pronunciation and spelling. The first attempt to create universal phonetic alphabets.
      Linguistics in Nineteenth Century	William Jones	The emerging of historical comparative linguistic approach.
	Franz Bopp, Rasmus Rask, the Grimm brothers.	The comparative method was recognized as a scientific procedure. The procedure established the relatedness of the Indo-European languages.
	Neo-grammarian school	Sounds laws operate without exception. The statement of correspondence between sounds.
	Willem von Humboldt	Universal grammatical rules from the facts of particular languages. The relationship between language and thought. The strong ties between language of a people and their spirit or culture.
      Linguistics in Twentieth Century
      Traditional grammar	Otto Jespersen	Detailed grammar of English
   Structural Linguistics	Ferdinand de Saussure Leonard Bloomfield	Approach to descriptive linguistics. Emphasis on the investigation of concrete linguistic data. Structural linguistics involved isolating, classifying, analyzing, and segmenting the observed language data
      Transformative-Generative Grammar	Noam Chomsky	TGG emphasize that human language is creative—humans are able to produce and interpret an infinitely large number of sentences that they have never before heard. Deep structure is the representation that contain the essential meanings of sentences and that underlie actual utterances.