“In the Sanskrit Language (1786), Sir William Jones proposed that
Sanskrit and Persian had resemblances to classical Greek, Latin, gothic and
Celtic languages. From this idea sprang the field of comparative historical
linguistics. Through the 19th century, European linguistics centered on the
comparative history of the Indo-European languages, with a concern for finding
their common roots and tracing their development.
Working from a biblical perspective some scholars believed
that all human languages were descended from the language of Adam and Eve, a language called the Adamic language. Many of these
scholars believed that the Hebrew language was, in fact, the same
as the Adamic language. In the 1820s,
Wilhelm von Humboldt
observed that human language was a rule-governed system, anticipating a theme
that was to become central in the formal work on syntax and semantics of
language in the 20th century.
Of this observation he said that it allowed language to make infinite use of
finite means (Über den Dualis 1827).
About
1880,
scholars in the United States began
to record the hundreds of native languages once found in North
America. The concern with describing languages spread throughout the
world, and thousands of languages around the world have now been analyzed to
varying degrees. As this work was developing in the early twentieth century,
mainly in America, linguists were confronted with
languages whose structures differed greatly from those of known European
languages.
Scholars
decided they needed a theory of linguistic structure and methods of analysis.
From such concerns came the field of structural linguistics. Pioneers in it
include the anthropologists Franz Boas
and Edward Sapir,
and Leonard Bloomfield.
When historical-comparative linguistics
first met unfamiliar languages, the linguist's first job was to thoroughly
describe the language. In
Europe there was a parallel development of structural linguistics, influenced
most strongly by Ferdinand de Saussure, a Swiss student of
Indo-European and general linguistics whose lectures on general linguistics,
published posthumously by his students, set the direction of European linguistic
analysis from the 1920s on; his approach has been widely adopted
in other fields under the broad term "Structuralism."
During
the second World War, Leonard Bloomfield and several of his students
and colleagues developed
teaching materials for a variety of languages whose knowledge was needed for the
war effort. This work led to an increasing prominence of the field of
linguistics, which became a recognized discipline in most American universities
only after the war. From roughly 1980 onwards, pragmatic, functional, and cognitive approaches have steadily
gained ground, both in the U.S. and in Europe." 1
Language
Translation, Inc. has been in the foreign language translation business for 17
years, providing document translation services, and other language translation
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content localization, software localization and medical translation.
Harold
Nevin
1 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_linguistics |
