History

The earliest known linguistic activities date to Iron Age India (around the 8th century BC) with the analysis of Sanskrit. The Pratishakhyas were a proto-linguistic ad hoc collection of observations about mutations to a given corpus particular to a given Vedic school. Systematic study of these texts gives rise to the Vedanga discipline of Vyakarana, the earliest surviving account of which is the work of Pāṇini (c. 520 – 460 BC), who looked back on what are, it is presumed, several generations of grammarians, whose opinions he occasionally refers to. Pāṇini formulates close to 4,000 rules that together form a compact generative grammar of Sanskrit. Inherent in his analytic approach are the concepts of the phoneme, the morpheme, and the root. Due to its focus on brevity, his grammar has a highly unintuitive structure.
Indian linguistics maintained a high level for several centuries; Patanjali in the 2nd century BC still actively criticizes Pāṇini. In the later centuries BC, Pāṇini's grammar came to be seen as prescriptive, and commentators came to be fully dependent on it. Bhartṛhari (c. 450 – 510) theorized the act of speech as being made up of four stages: first, conceptualization of an idea, second, its verbalization and sequencing (articulation), third, delivery of speech into atmospheric air, and fourth, the interpretation of speech by the listener, the interpreter.
In the West, linguistics begins in Classical Antiquity with grammatical speculation such as Plato's Cratylus. The first important milestone in Western linguistics was the introduction of the Phoenician alphabet to the Greeks, who modified the alphabet by adding vowels, giving rise to the ancestor of all alphabets in the West. As a result of the introduction of writing, poetry such as the Homeric poems became written and several editions were created and commented, forming the basis of philology and criticism. The sophists and Socrates introduced dialectics as a new text genre. Aristotle defined the logic of speech and the argument, and his works on rhetoric and poetics developed the understating of tragedy, poetry, and public discussions as text genres.
One of the greatest of the Greek grammarians was Apollonius Dyscolus.^[18] Apollonius wrote more than thirty treatises on questions of syntax, semantics, morphology, prosody, orthography, dialectology, and more. In the 4th c., Aelius Donatus compiled the Latin grammar Ars Grammatica that was to be the defining school text through the Middle Ages.^[19] In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante Alighieri expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day.^{[citation needed]}
In China, linguistics starts with the development of Xiaoxue (小學 "elementary studies"), which began as an aid to understanding classics in the Han dynasty (c. 3d c. BCE)^[20]. Early Chinese philologists included Yang Xiong, who studied the linguistic geography of China, Xu Shen, a lexicographer, and the phonologist Chen Di, who pioneered the study of Old Chinese.^[20] Xiaoxue came to be divided into three branches: Xungu (訓詁 "exegesis"), Wenzi (文字 "script [analysis]") and Yinyun (音韻 "[study of] sounds")^[21] and reached its golden age in the 17th. c. AD (Qing Dynasty). The advent of character glossaries and vocabularies during the Han Dynasty, including Sima Xiangru's The General Primer, Shi You's The Instant Primer, and Li Chang's The Yuanshang Primer, greatly contributed to the development of Chinese philology.^[22] The Chinese study of phonology appeared later, and was heavily influenced by Indian philology.
In the Middle East, the Persian linguist Sibawayh made a detailed and professional description of Arabic in 760, in his monumental work, Al-kitab fi al-nahw (الكتاب في النحو, The Book on Grammar), bringing many linguistic aspects of language to light. In his book, he distinguished phonetics from phonology.^{[citation needed]}
Sir William Jones noted that Sanskrit shared many common features with classical Latin and Greek, the notable ones being verb roots and grammatical structures, such as the case system. This led to the theory that all languages sprang from a common source and to the discovery of the Indo-European language family. He began the study of comparative linguistics, which would uncover more language families and branches.
In 19th-century Europe, the study of linguistics was largely from the perspective of philology (or historical linguistics). Some early-19th-century linguists were Jakob Grimm, who devised a principle of consonantal shifts in pronunciation – known as Grimm's Law – in 1822; Karl Verner, who formulated Verner's Law; August Schleicher, who created the "Stammbaumtheorie" ("family tree"); and Johannes Schmidt, who developed the "Wellentheorie" ("wave model") in 1872.
Ferdinand de Saussure was the founder of modern structural linguistics, with an emphasis on synchronic (i.e., nonhistorical) explanations for language form.
In North America, the structuralist tradition grew out of a combination of missionary linguistics (whose goal was to translate the Bible) and anthropology. While originally regarded as a sub-field of anthropology in the United States,^[23][24] linguistics is now considered a separate scientific discipline in the US, Australia, and much of Europe.
Edward Sapir, a writer in American structural linguistics, was one of the first who explored the relations between language studies and anthropology. His methodology had some influence on all his successors. Noam Chomsky's formal model of language, transformational-generative grammar, developed under the influence of his teacher Zellig Harris, who was in turn strongly influenced by Leonard Bloomfield, has been the dominant model since the 1960s.
The structural linguistics period was largely superseded in North America by generative grammar in the 1950s and 1960s. This paradigm views language as a mental object, and emphasizes the role of the formal modeling of universal, and language specific rules. Noam Chomsky remains an important but controversial linguistic figure. Generative grammar gave rise to such frameworks such as Transformational grammar, Generative Semantics, Relational Grammar, Generalized phrase structure grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), and Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG). Other linguists working in Optimality Theory state generalizations in terms of violable constraints that interact with each other, and abandon the traditional rule-based formalism first pioneered by early work in generativist linguistics.
Functionalist linguists working in functional grammar, and Cognitive Linguistics tend to stress the non-autonomy of linguistic knowledge and the non-universality of linguistic structures, thus differing significantly from the formal approaches.