History of linguistics
The origin of language in philosophers' works of the 17-18 centuries (Rousseau. Descartes Leibniz)
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- Rousseau and Condillac.
- Leibniz
- The historical-comparative linguistics
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- Phonetics and dialectology
- 10. The development of historical-comparative ideas at the end of the 19 century. 11. Main periods and paradigms in linguistic knowledge of the 19 th
7. The origin of language in philosophers' works of the 17-18 centuries (Rousseau. Descartes Leibniz). This problem is the most controversial problem in linguistics; the idea of this problem began to exist many centuries ago, when two main theories appeared: the theory of Phusei and the theory of Thesei – these theories originated to philosophical theories of antiquity. A bit later during the period of the Renaissance and the period of Enlightment (17th – 18th centuries) were mostly connected with 2 main ideas: 1) a language appeared as the result of imitation of different sounds in the natural environment 2) a language could appear as a result of agreement between different people. The theory of imitation The theory of imitation was concerned with different names, among them we usually name Lord Monboddo (lived in the 18th century). He solved the problem by resort to the principle of imitation. He supposed that people required their speech imitating the sounds of animals, plant, birds and other phenomena. This was the case of the onomatopoeia. The problem was mostly connected with the articulation of sounds but this scholar thought that we are to describe how a monkey can imitate different sounds. He tried to describe the situation when a monkey could use his fingers for taking different things – these natural movements led the animal to delicate operations and afterwards to the development of the monkey’s brain. He thought that the process was very slow, but this particular ape could change into a human being, who used different sounds to name the surrounding world. He thought that individuals were in constant intercourse and afterwards could recognize the meaning of different words. The opposite idea was introduced by 2 French philosophers: Rousseau and Condillac. Rousseau thought that the nature origin of the language could be framed by an agreement or social content between different people. It is obvious in this case that some primitive men agreed to name certain things with the help of particular words, but in this case they are to use some speech, words; they are to feel the want of the language and in this case the problem arises: which particular words people used to name some other words Condillac expressed his thoughts in a bit different way. He thought that people started their communication with instinctive cries, violent gestures and notions. And afterwards they repeated these movements and notions many times, so their children could acquire some languages from his / her parents. People simply enriched and developed their real language generation after generation. Condillac wrote: “People uttered certain sounds in circumstances where everybody would be led to refer them to the same perceptions. They fixed the meanings more precisely according to the circumstances, being repeated, accustomed the mind more and more to attach the same ideas to the same signs.” The idea of Condillac differs greatly from the Rousseau’s understanding of the origin of the language. At the end of the 18th century the European philosophers tried to introduce some other understandings of the same problem. They thought that a language could be developed as a conventional language for private use; in this case the private language must consist of a number of conventional signs, rather convenient and concise. Opposite to this idea was the idea to create some artificial language for communication. Descrates saw clearly that thinking of a person involved not only words and their meanings but also ideas in a human mind. He thought that it was necessary to describe the real nature of the thinking process. That is why he formulated the rules of his own philosophical language. This language had to be characterized by a concise structure and must look like the mathematical formula. He described this language in detail using methods of manipulating the symbols of algebra and arithmetic. He spoke about the possibility of creating such a language for purposes of communication. In the 17th century there were about 50 attempts to create an artificial language based on the Descrates’ principles. Some scholars tried to use the mathematical formulas, some others used analytical geometry and physical laws.
Nowadays computational linguistics regards this language to be the most systematic description of the surrounding world. Only in the 20th century on the basis of this Leibniz’s language two other artificial languages were created: the basic and the passal. But mathematical symbols, logical symbols can’t represent a natural language. In the course of time, especially in the 17th and 18th centuries scholars from different countries came to the other idea how to describe different languages.
Different scholars introduced into linguistics terms from the biological science. They began to speak about the birth of the language, its growth and even its death. Scholars introduced 2 main principles according to which any language should be described:
According to the 1st principle language science as well as any language is usually changing. The language is a natural organism. According to the 2nd principle languages can be compared with the living and the dead languages. The European languages were compared with the Sanskrit language and this comparison gave a mighty influence to linguistic studies. The main idea was that linguists tried to look at different languages from the position of comparison. They looked at following languages: Sanscrit compared with examples from Greek, Latin, Gothic, German and English. Sanscrit – pitar [pi’ta:r]; bhratar Greek – patir [pa’ter]; phrater Latin – [‘pa:tə]; frater Gothic – ‘fadar; brothar German – ‘Vater; Bruder English – ‘father; Brother
f, v, f; b, b, b 3) They tried to describe these incidences. The first scholars who began to speak about it was the French monck who in 1767 showed the connections between Latin and Sanacrit. His name was Pierre Couerdoux. He added the material from French. He was simply amazed with these connections. He wrote a special letter to the French academy of science about the similarities between these 3 languages. But they didn’t pay attention to this letter. 4) A bit later in 1796 William Jones read a report in India, Calcutta and he pronounced memorable words which are usually included into books in linguistics. “The Sanscrit language is of a wonderful structure more perfect than the Greek more copious that Latin and more exquisitely refined than either, that couldn’t happen by exident. They may have appeared from one common source and this language may be called one of the Indo-European languages because it belongs to the same linguistic family”. 5) Linguists were not satisfied with general and universal theories of the past (Dekat, Leibniz). These theories didn’t reflect the real world of the language. 6) The philological science tried to find some new ideas which can represent not only language in particular but also thinking and cultural of different people. Mother linguists who paid attention to all these features were 4 linguists: - Rasmus Rask - Franc Bopp - Jacob Grimm - A. Ch. Vostokov Rasmus Rask in 1814 wrote the following words: “A language is our principal means of finding anything about the history of nations. Sometimes it’s very difficult its earlier forms because there are no written documents. The linguists must proceed methodically to examine the whole structure of the language”. These words explain his aim of search. He tried to compare old Islandic with a great number of languages such as Celtic, the Greenlandic language, Slavik languages, Greek, Latin, Gothic and Lethuanian. He showed quite clearly that some of the languages are not connected with each other because they are far from each other. OI------------Sl – no connection Then he compared Celtic, Greek, Latin and Lethuanian: there’s some connection between them and Greenlandic and Old Islandic are closely connected. But he wrote his book in Dutch. That’s why his ideas were unknown to the linguists of Europe. His book was translated into German only 4 years later. Franc Bopp wrote his famous book about inflections in Germanic language in 1816. It was a careful description in which he came to the conclusion that all Germanic languages had common grammatical forms both in inflections and in the verbal roots. He wrote that languages may be considered as natural organic bodies, which are formed according to fixed laws. These languages are developed on the base of inner principles that’s why languages are always changing. Two years later (1818 - 1820) Grimm compiled his german grammar. He was a very clever linguist who collected the data about the development of languages. In it he carefully described each instance (example) of words from Patronemic languages. They belonged only to some particular classes of words. They denoted plants and animals, kinship (brother, sister), colour terms, numerals from 1 – 100, verbs denoting main actions and states. He came to the conclusion that all the germanic sounds came from Indo-European source. He thought that the correspondences between the germanic languages and Indo-European languages in general may be characterized by certain linguistic laws. This law became very famous because it described the consonant shift between voiced and voiceless sounds. IE p, t, k, -» b, d, g -» p, t, k b, d, g -» bh, dh, gh p -» f
pitar, pater, ‘pater, father… A. Ch. Vostokov in 1822 gave a talk to the Russian academy of science. He spoke about the same coincidences which happen between the IE languages and the Slavik languages. He compared Russian, old Slavik, the Ukranian language, the Polish and the Check language. He came to the conclusion that the Slavik languages appeared from some source which is quite close to the Sanscrit language. The ideas expressed by this scholar determined the development of the language science in the 19-th centiry. These scientists gave a new way of looking at different IE languages as they tried to trace the origin of these languages. Their investigations made possible to declare linguistics and independent study different from philosophy and natural sciences. Besides that these people introduced a comparative in linguistics. This method helps to find correspondences between two or more languages especially in the consonant and vowel system. These scholars came to the conclusion that only the relationship between similar languages could demonstrate the phonetic, morphological and sometimes the syntactic development of languages belonging to one and the same IE linguistic family. Approximately at the beginning of 70-th on the 19-th century a lot of data showed that the IE linguistic family is characterized by a common source many brunches and subbranches. Among them e usually name germanic, italic, romanic, slavik, botic, albanian and other languages. Each of these brunches may include living language and dead ones.
It is generally agreed that the most outstanding achievement of linguistic scholarship in the 19th century was the development of the comparative method, which comprised a set of principles whereby languages could be systematically compared with respect to their sound systems, grammatical structure, and vocabulary and shown to be “genealogically” related. As French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and the other Romance languages had evolved from Latin, so Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit as well as the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic languages and many other languages of Europe and Asia had evolved from some earlier language, to which the name Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European is now customarily applied. That all the Romance languages were descended from Latin and thus constituted one “family” had been known for centuries; but the existence of the Indo-European family of languages and the nature of their genealogical relationship was first demonstrated by the 19th-century comparative philologists. (The term philology in this context is not restricted to the study of literary languages.) The main impetus for the development of comparative philology came toward the end of the 18th century, when it was discovered that Sanskrit bore a number of striking resemblances to Greek and Latin. An English orientalist, Sir William Jones, though he was not the first to observe these resemblances, is generally given the credit for bringing them to the attention of the scholarly world and putting forward the hypothesis, in 1786, that all three languages must have “sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists.” By this time, a number of texts and glossaries of the older Germanic languages (Gothic, Old High German, and Old Norse) had been published, and Jones realized that Germanic as well as Old Persian and perhaps Celtic had evolved from the same “common source.” The next important step came in 1822, when the German scholar Jacob Grimm, following the Danish linguist Rasmus Rask (whose work, being written in Danish, was less accessible to most European scholars), pointed out in the second edition of his comparative grammar of Germanic that there were a number of systematic correspondences between the sounds of Germanic and the sounds of Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in related words. Grimm noted, for example, that where Gothic (the oldest surviving Germanic language) had an f, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit frequently had a p (e.g., Gothic fotus, Latin pedis, Greek podós, Sanskrit padás, all meaning “foot”); when Gothic had a p, the non-Germanic languages had a b; when Gothic had a b, the non-Germanic languages had what Grimm called an “aspirate” (Latin f, Greek ph, Sanskrit bh). In order to account for these correspondences he postulated a cyclical “soundshift” (Lautverschiebung) in the prehistory of Germanic, in which the original “aspirates” became voiced unaspirated stops (bh became b, etc.), the original voiced unaspirated stops became voiceless (b became p, etc.), and the original voiceless (unaspirated) stops became “aspirates” (p became f). Grimm's term, “aspirate,” it will be noted, covered such phonetically distinct categories as aspirated stops (bh, ph), produced with an accompanying audible puff of breath, and fricatives (f ), produced with audible friction as a result of incomplete closure in the vocal tract. In the work of the next 50 years the idea of sound change was made more precise, and, in the 1870s, a group of scholars known collectively as the Junggrammatiker (“young grammarians,” or Neogrammarians) put forward the thesis that all changes in the sound system of a language as it developed through time were subject to the operation of regular sound laws. Though the thesis that sound laws were absolutely regular in their operation (unless they were inhibited in particular instances by the influence of analogy) was at first regarded as most controversial, by the end of the 19th century it was quite generally accepted and had become the cornerstone of the comparative method. Using the principle of regular sound change, scholars were able to reconstruct “ancestral” common forms from which the later forms found in particular languages could be derived. By convention, such reconstructed forms are marked in the literature with an asterisk. Thus, from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European word for “ten,” *dekm, it was possible to derive Sanskrit dasa, Greek déka, Latin decem, and Gothic taihun by postulating a number of different sound laws that operated independently in the different branches of the Indo-European family. The question of sound change is dealt with in greater detail in the section entitled Historical (diachronic) linguistics. The role of analogy Analogy has been mentioned in connection with its inhibition of the regular operation of sound laws in particular word forms. This was how the Neogrammarians thought of it. In the course of the 20th century, however, it has come to be recognized that analogy, taken in its most general sense, plays a far more important role in the development of languages than simply that of sporadically preventing what would otherwise be a completely regular transformation of the sound system of a language. When a child learns to speak he tends to regularize the anomalous, or irregular, forms by analogy with the more regular and productive patterns of formation in the language; e.g., he will tend to say “comed” rather than “came,” “dived” rather than “dove,” and so on, just as he will say “talked,” “loved,” and so forth. The fact that the child does this is evidence that he has learned or is learning the regularities or rules of his language. He will go on to “unlearn” some of the analogical forms and substitute for them the anomalous forms current in the speech of the previous generation. But in some cases, he will keep a “new” analogical form (e.g., “dived” rather than “dove”), and this may then become the recognized and accepted form. Inner and outer form One of the most original, if not one of the most immediately influential, linguists of the 19th century was the learned Prussian statesman, Wilhelm von Humboldt (died 1835). His interests, unlike those of most of his contemporaries, were not exclusively historical. Following the German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder (1744–1803), he stressed the connection between national languages and national character: this was but a commonplace of romanticism. More original was Humboldt's theory of “inner” and “outer” form in language. The outer form of language was the raw material (the sounds) from which different languages were fashioned; the inner form was the pattern, or structure, of grammar and meaning that was imposed upon this raw material and differentiated one language from another. This “structural” conception of language was to become dominant, for a time at least, in many of the major centers of linguistics by the middle of the 20th century. Another of Humboldt's ideas was that language was something dynamic, rather than static, and was an activity itself rather than the product of activity. A language was not a set of actual utterances produced by speakers but the underlying principles or rules that made it possible for speakers to produce such utterances and, moreover, an unlimited number of them. This idea was taken up by a German philologist, Heymann Steinthal, and, what is more important, by the physiologist and psychologist Wilhelm Wundt, and thus influenced late 19th- and early 20th-century theories of the psychology of language. Its influence, like that of the distinction of inner and outer form, can also be seen in the thought of Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss linguist. But its full implications were probably not perceived and made precise until the middle of the 20th century, when the U.S. linguist Noam Chomsky re-emphasized it and made it one of the basic notions of generative grammar (see below Transformational-generative grammar). Phonetics and dialectology Many other interesting and important developments occurred in 19th-century linguistic research, among them work in the areas of phonetics and dialectology. Research in both these fields was promoted by the Neogrammarians' concern with sound change and by their insistence that prehistoric developments in languages were of the same kind as developments taking place in the languages and dialects currently spoken. The development of phonetics in the West was also strongly influenced at this period, as were many of the details of the more philological analysis of the Indo-European languages, by the discovery of the works of the Indian grammarians who, from the time of the Sanskrit grammarian Panini (5th or 6th century BC), if not before, had arrived at a much more comprehensive and scientific theory of phonetics, phonology, and morphology than anything achieved in the West until the modern period. 10. The development of historical-comparative ideas at the end of the 19 century. 11. Main periods and paradigms in linguistic knowledge of the 19th century. Our Russian ling-t Professor Georgiev a specialist in historic.-comp. ling., introduced his classif. of hist.-comp. ling-cs. He said there are 3 periods, that characterize the development of h.-c. ling. The first period(1814-1870) The period of collecting the data & systematization of facts, because during this period the 1st ling. laws appeared: a)consonant set shift(by Grimm) b)the idea of Protolang-ge(from it all I.-E. lang-s appeared& developed).This idea was expressed by August Schleicher in 1862,1870 c)I.-E. ling. family. The description of all language belonging to it. August Schleicher made possible to introduce his own ideas, concerning correspondences in grammar ,phon-cs,vocab-ry & syntax. He influenced the development of ling-cs in the 19-20th centuries, because he made clear the conception that phonolog. changes govern gr.& vocabulary of the Lang. He made possible to describe that sounds is a most stable system in any lang-ge over cent-s than meanings of the word are. A ling-t who wants to describe a lang-ge must pay attention to the history of l-ge. d)He introduced the method of reconstruction of Protolang-ge phenomenon. These 4 results made possible to explicate the development of dif. lang-ges. Directory: study study -> And lasts until November 30 study -> Know the answers to the following statements for the completion portion of the test study -> Questions for the PowerPoint Europe and the Age of Imperialism study -> Politics in the 1920’s Conservatism, Dominance of the Republican Party Conservatism study -> Unit Test – Georgia after wwii and during the Civil Rights Movement study -> Study Activity 1 study -> Name Study Guide study -> Suhakam’s input for the office of the high commissioner for human rights (ohchr)’s study on children’s right to health – human rights council resolution 19/37 Download 201.88 Kb. Share with your friends:
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