Efforts to describe and explain the human language faculty have been undertaken throughout recorded history. Contemporary linguistics is the outcome of a continuous European intellectual tradition originating in Ancient Greece. India and China both produced native schools of linguistic thought; some of the achievements of Indian linguists precede equivalent Western developments by more than a thousand years. Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... Theoretical linguistics studies diverse questions: how certain languages managed to communicate, what properties all languages have in common, what knowledge a person must have to be able to use a language, and language acquisition. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word φωνή, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics closely associated with phonetics. ... Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... In linguistics, syntax is the study of the rules, or patterned relations, that govern the way the words in a sentence are arranged. ... In the main, semantics (from the Greek semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ... Lexical semantics is a field in computer science and linguistics which deals mainly with word meaning. ... Stylistics is the study of style used in literary, and verbal language and the effect the writer/speaker wishes to communicate to the reader/hearer. ... In linguistics, prescription is the laying down or prescribing of normative rules for a language. ... Pragmatics is generally the study of natural language understanding, and specifically the study of how context influences the interpretation of meanings. ... Applied linguistics is concerned with using linguistic theory to address real-world problems. ... Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. ... Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. ... Cognitive linguistics is a school of linguistics and cognitive science, which aims to provide accounts of language that mesh well with current understandings of the human mind, and is generally opposed to the more syntactocentric approaches to meaning in generative linguistics. ... Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. ... Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is actually spoken now (or how it was actually spoken in the past), by any group of people. ... Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time, by means of examining languages which are recognizably related through similarities such as vocabulary, word formation, and syntax, as well as the surviving records of ancient languages. ... In historical linguistics, etymology is the study of the origins of words. ... The following is a list of linguists, those who study linguistics. ... In the West, from antiquity up to the time of the Scientific Revolution, inquiry into the workings of the universe was known as natural philosophy, and those engaged in it were known as natural philosophers. ... In the West, from antiquity up to the time of the Scientific Revolution, inquiry into the workings of the universe was known as natural philosophy, and those engaged in it were known as natural philosophers. ... The historiography of science is the study of the history of science (often overlapping with the history of technology, history of medicine, and history of mathematics), generally in an academic context as part of the discipline of the history of science and technology (HST), history and philosophy of science (HPS... The sociology and philosophy of science, as well as the entire field of science studies, have in the 20th century been preoccupied with the question of large-scale patterns and trends in the development of science, and asking questions about how science works both in a philosophical and practical sense. ... The Ptolemaic system of celestial motion, from Harmonia Macrocosmica, 1661. ... In prehistoric times, advice and knowledge was passed from generation to generation in an oral tradition. ... The Middle Ages: Western World Map of Medieval Universities See Also: Medieval medicine, Medieval philosophy With the loss of the Western Roman Empire, much of Europe lost contact with the knowledge of the past. ... In the history of science, the scientific revolution was the period that roughly began with the discoveries of Kepler, Galileo, and others at the dawn of the 17th century, and ended with the publication of the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in 1687 by Isaac Newton. ... Astronomy is probably the oldest of the natural sciences, dating back to antiquity, with its origins in the religious practices of pre-history: vestiges of these are still found in astrology, a discipline long interwoven with astronomy, and not completely separate from it until about 1750‑1800 in the Western... The history of biology dates as far back as the rise of various civilization as classic philosophers did their own ways of biology as a system of understanding life. ... The history of chemistry may be said to begin with the distinction of chemistry from alchemy by Robert Boyle in his work The Skeptical Chymist (1661), but is often more strictly dated to Antoine Lavoisiers discovery of the law of conservation of mass, and thereby to his refutation of... Earth science (also known as geoscience, the geosciences or the Earth Sciences), is an all-embracing term for the sciences related to the planet Earth. ... The growth of physics has brought not only fundamental changes in ideas about the material world, mathematics and philosophy, but also, through technology, a transformation of society. ... The anthropologist Eric Wolf once characterized anthropology as the most scientific of the humanities, and the most humanistic of the social sciences. ... The term economics was coined around 1870 and popularized by Alfred Marshall, as a substitute for the earlier term political economy which has been used through the 18-19th centuries, with Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Karl Marx as its main thinkers and which today is frequently referred to as... Antecedents of political science While the study of politics is first found in the Western tradition in Ancient Greece, political science is a late arrival in terms of social sciences. ... The history of psychology consists of a prescientific and a scientific epoch. ... Sociology is a relatively new academic discipline among other social sciences including economics, political science, anthropology, and psychology. ... Agronomy today is very different from what it was before about 1950. ... Cognitive science is usually defined as the scientific study either of mind or of intelligence (e. ... Communication studies - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia /**/ @import /skins-1. ... Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Computer Science Open Directory Project: Computer Science Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies Belief that title science in computer science is inappropriate Categories: Computer science ... Ecology is generally spoken of as a new science, really not coming into prominence before the middle of the 20th Century. ... The History of materials science is rooted in the history of the Earth and the culture of the peoples of the Earth. ... All human societies have medical beliefs that provide explanations for, and responses to, birth, death, and disease. ... A pseudoscience is any body of knowledge purported to be scientific or supported by science but which fails to comply with the scientific method. ... The Timeline below shows the date of publication of major scientific theories. ... The timeline below shows the date of publication of major scientific experiments. ... This is a list of topics in various sciences. ...

At various stages in history, linguistics as a discipline has been in close contact with such disciplines as philosophy, anthropology and philology. In some cultures linguistic analysis has been applied in the service of religion, particularly for the determination of the religiously preferred spoken and written forms of sacred texts in Hebrew, Sanskrit and Arabic. Contemporary Western linguistics is close to philosophy and cognitive science.

Linguistics in Antiquity

Linguistics was pursued in ancient India for many centuries. The 5th century BC grammar of Pāṇini is a particularly detailed description of Sanskrit morphology evincing a high level of linguistic insight and analysis. The Indian grammatical tradition is believed to have been active for many centuries before Pāṇini, and anticipates by millennia certain developments in the West: the phoneme, generation of word forms by the successive application of morphological rules, etc. (Embarrassingly, the phoneme seems to have been discovered and forgotten several times through history.) The Vedic civilization is the Indo-Aryan culture associated with the Vedas, the earliest known records of Indian history. ... Grammar is the discovery, enunciation, and study of rules governing the use of language. ... The title given to this article is incorrect due to technical limitations. ... The Sanskrit language ( संस्कृता वाक्) is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family and is not only a classical language, but also an official language of India. ... Morphology is the following: In linguistics, morphology is the study of the structure of word forms. ...

While Indian scholars pursued grammar, Greek philosophers were debating the nature and origins of language. A subject of concern was whether language was man-made or supernatural in origin. The possibilities that the meaning of language is agreed to by consensus versus having a predetermined fixed value was also considered. An example for the Greek debates about language is available in Plato's Cratylus. It was not till relatively late that the Greeks developed a set of grammatical rules for their language. It was upon this foundation that Roman philosophers built the grammar rules for Latin. A philosopher is a person devoted to studying and producing results in philosophy. ... Statue of a philosopher, presumably Plato, in Delphi. ... Cratylus (Κρατυλος) is the name of a dialogue by Plato, dating to ca. ... Ancient Rome was a civilization that existed in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East between 753 BC and its downfall in AD 476. ... Latin is the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ...

Medieval linguistics

Medieval Europe accepted the Greek and Latin without change until the start of the Italian Renaissance. In De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), Dante expanded the scope of linguistic enquiry from the traditional languages of antiquity to include the language of the day. From this base the grammars and vocabularies of the various languages of Europe were then explored. The Middle Ages formed the middle period in a traditional schematic division of European history into three ages: the classical civilization of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and modern times, beginning with the Renaissance. ... World map showing location of Europe Europe is geologically and geographically a peninsula, forming the westernmost part of Eurasia. ... By Region: Italian Renaissance Northern Renaissance *French Renaissance *German Renaissance *English Renaissance The Italian Renaissance was the opening phase of the Renaissance, a period of great cultural change and achievement from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. ... De vulgari eloquentia is the title of an important essay by Dante Alighieri, written in Latin and initially meant to consist in four books, but aborted after the second. ... Dante in a fresco series of famous men by Andrea del Castagno, ca. ...

Modern Western linguistics

Historical linguistics

In The Sanscrit Language (1786), Sir William Jones proposed that Sanskrit and Persian had resemblances to classical Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Celtic languages. From this idea sprung the field of comparative or 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. 1786 was a common year starting on Sunday (see link for calendar). ... Sir William Jones (September 28, 1746 - April 27, 1794) was a British philologist and student of ancient India, particularly known for his discovery of the Indo-European languages family. ... The Sanskrit language ( संस्कृता वाक्) is one of the earliest attested members of the Indo-European language family and is not only a classical language, but also an official language of India. ... Persian (فارسی / پارسی), (local name in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan: ‘Fârsi’), ‘Pârsi’ (older local name, but still used by some speakers), Tajik (a Central Asian dialect) or Dari (another local name in Tajikistan and Afghanistan), is a language spoken in Iran (Persia), Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, western Pakistan, Bahrain, and elsewhere. ... Latin is the language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ... The Gothic language (*gutiska razda, *𐌲𐌿𐍄𐌹𐍃𐌺𐌰 𐍂𐌰𐌶𐌳𐌰) is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths and specifically by the Visigoths. ... Celtic languages are the languages spoken by the ancient Celts and their modern descendants, the Gaels, Welsh, Cornish and Bretons. ... Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time, by means of examining languages which are recognizably related through similarities such as vocabulary, word formation, and syntax, as well as the surviving records of ancient languages. ... Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical) (18th century — 19th century — 20th century — more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 19th century was that century which lasted from 1801-1900 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar. ... Broadly conceived, linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and a linguist is someone who engages in this study. ... Proto-Indo-European Indo-European studies The Indo-European languages include some 443 (SIL estimate) languages and dialects spoken by about three billion people, including most of the major language families of Europe and western Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. ...

Working from a biblical perspective some scholars believed that all human languages were descended from the language of Adam, a language called the Adamic language. Many of these scholars believed that the Hebrew language was, in fact, the same as the Adamic language. This article is about the biblical Adam and Eve. ... The Adamic language is a term for the hypothetical language believed by some to have been spoken by all humans from the creation of Adam until the time of the Tower of Babel (as related in the Bible). ... Hebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by 6 million people mainly in Israel, parts of the Palestinian territories, the United States and by Jewish communities around the world. ...

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). Events and Trends Nationalistic independence movements helped reshape the world during this decade: Greece declares independence from the Ottoman Empire (1821). ... Wilhelm von Humboldt Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Baron von Humboldt (June 22, 1767 - April 8, 1835), government functionary, foreign diplomat, philosopher, founder of Humboldt Universität in Berlin, friend of Goethe and especially of Schiller, is especially remembered as a German linguist who introduced a knowledge of the Basque... (19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999 in the...

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. // Events and Trends Technology Development and commercial production of electric lighting Development and commercial production of gasoline-powered automobile by Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler and Maybach First commercial production and sales of phonographs and phonograph recordings. ...

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. Anthropology (from the Greek word άνθρωπος, human) consists of the study of humankind (see genus Homo). ... Franz Boas Franz Boas (July 9, 1858 – December 22, 1942) was one of the pioneers of modern anthropology and is often called the Father of American Anthropology. Like many such pioneers, he trained in other disciplines; he received his doctorate in physics, and did post-doctoral work in geography. ... Edward Sapir. ... One or more images would improve this articles quality. ...

When historical-comparative linguistics first met unfamiliar languages, the linguist's first job was to thoroughly describe the language. Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time, by means of examining languages which are recognizably related through similarities such as vocabulary, word formation, and syntax, as well as the surviving records of ancient languages. ...

Descriptive linguistics

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." Saussure Ferdinand de Saussure (November 26, 1857 - February 22, 1913) was a Swiss linguist. ... Sometimes referred to as the Jazz Age or primarily in North America as the Roaring Twenties. // Events and trends Technology John T. Thompson invents Thompson submachine gun, also known as Tommy gun John Logie Baird invents the first working television system (1925) Charles Lindbergh becomes the first person to fly... Structuralism is general approach in various academic disciplines that seeks to explore the inter-relationships between some fundamental elements, upon which higher mental, linguistic, social, cultural etc structures are built, through which then meaning is produced within a particular person, system, culture. ...

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. One or more images would improve this articles quality. ...

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.

Generative linguistics

Other specialties

From roughly 1980 onwards, pragmatic, functional, and cognitive approaches have steadily gained ground, both in the U.S. and in Europe. // Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 60s and 70s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ... Pragmatics is generally the study of natural language understanding, and specifically the study of how context influences the interpretation of meanings. ... Systemic functional grammar (SFG) is a grammar model developed by Michael Halliday. ... Cognitive linguistics is a school of linguistics and cognitive science, which aims to provide accounts of language that mesh well with current understandings of the human mind, and is generally opposed to the more syntactocentric approaches to meaning in generative linguistics. ...

References

• Mario Pei (1965). Invitation to Linguistics. Doubleday & Company. ISBN 0385065841.
• W. P. Lehmann, editor (1967). A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Indiana University Press. ISBN 0253348404.
• Frederick J. Newmeyer (2005). The History of Linguistics. Linguistic Society of America.