III.

Early Approaches to Linguistics

From antiquity until the 19th century, the philological approach to written language was the dominant form of linguistics.

As early as the 5th century bc, the Indian grammarian Panini described and analysed the sounds and words of Sanskrit, offering detailed phonetic descriptions. His work is the basis of many modern linguistic concepts. Later, the ancient Greeks and Romans introduced the concept of grammatical categories. The Greeks and Romans did not, however, compare languages with one another.

Centuries later, with the development of printing, the translation of the Bible into many languages, and the subsequent development of new literatures, the comparison of languages became possible. In the early 18th century, the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz suggested that European, Asian, and Egyptian languages might have a common ancestor, thereby stimulating the beginnings of the field of comparative philology or comparative linguistics. (Leibniz's postulation was later proved to be partly correct and partly incorrect.)

Towards the end of the 18th century, Sir William Jones, an English scholar, observed that Sanskrit bore similarities to Greek and Latin, and proposed that the three languages might have developed from a common source. Language scholars in the early 19th century took this hypothesis much further. Jacob Grimm, the German philologist, and Rasmus Christian Rask, a Danish philologist, noted that when the sounds of one language corresponded in a regular pattern to similar sounds in related words in another language, the correspondences were consistent. For example, the initial sounds of Latin pater (“father”) and ped- (“foot”) correspond regularly to English father and foot. See also Grimm's Law.

By the late 19th century much analysis had been done on sound correspondences. A group of European language scholars known as the neogrammarians put forth the theory that not only were sound correspondences between related languages regular, but any exceptions to these phonetic rules could develop only from borrowings from another language (or from an additional regular rule of sound change). For example, Latin d should correspond to English t, as in dentalis: tooth. The English word dental, however, has a d- sound. The neogrammarian conclusion was that English borrowed dental from Latin, whereas tooth (which has the expected or regularly corresponding t) was a “native” English word.

This method of comparing related words in different languages to discover the existence of regular sound changes became known as the comparative method. It served as a tool in establishing language families, that is, groups of related languages. Using the comparative method, linguists posited an Indo-European family composed of numerous subfamilies, or branches. It is to this family that English, one of the Germanic languages, belongs. See Indo-European Languages.

The description of regular sound correspondences also made it possible to compare different forms of a given language as spoken in different regions and by different groups of people. This field is known as dialectology; it may focus on differences in sounds, grammatical construction, vocabulary, or all three. For example, studies of dialect have delineated such broad American dialect areas as Northern, Midland, and Southern.