History of Linguistics

Meer over het boek

The History of Linguistics, a five-volume work, offers an authoritative account of linguistic thought across various civilizations and periods, examining its development within specific social, cultural, and religious contexts. Key issues include language's role in education, variation and prestige, and approaches to lexical and grammatical description. Each chapter is authored by specialists who analyze primary sources and synthesize linguistic interests and assumptions of distinct cultures without imposing contemporary western frameworks. In the volume focusing on the nineteenth century, Anna Morpurgo Davies illustrates how linguistics emerged as an independent discipline, distinct from philosophical and literary studies, achieving intellectual and institutional success linked to the new universities' research ethos. This period marked a shift from theoretical discussions to empirical and historical methods for comparing languages and investigating their histories. A significant achievement was the demonstration of relationships among languages like Sanskrit, Latin, and English, all deriving from a reconstructed parent language. The book details the theories and findings of this era, challenging the notion that the new approach stemmed solely from German Romanticism and emphasizing continuity with the eighteenth century, alongside a deliberate break around the 1830s. By the century's end, comparative and historical linguis