The study of Language

Here I leave a few concepts about the teorical linguistics' history :D

Nineeteenth century:
historical linguistics

Before the 19th century, language in the western world was of interest mainly to philosophers. It is significant that the Greek philosophers Plato and Aristotle mademajor contributions to the study of languange. Plato, for example, is said to have been the first person to distinguish between nouns and verbs.

1786 is the year which many people regard as the birthdate of linguistics.
On the 27th of September, 1786, an Englishman, Sir William Jones, read a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcuta pointing out that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic all had strinking structural similarities. For the next hundred years, all other linguistics work was eclipsed by the general preoccupation with writing comparative grammars, grammars which first compared the different linguistic forms found in the various members  of  the Indo-European language family, and second, attempted to set up a hypothetical ancestor, Proto- Indian from whi h all these languages were descended.

Early-to mid- 20th century: descriptive linguistics

In the 20th century, the emphasis shiffted from language change to language description. Instead of looking at how a selection of items changed in a number different languages, linguistics began to concentrated on describing single languages at one particular point in time.

If  any one person can be held responsible for this change of emphasis, it was the Swiss scholar Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), who is sometimes labelled 'the father of modern linguistics' .

As noted earlier, it was de Saussure who first suggested that language was like a game of chess, a system in which each item is defined by its relationship to all the others.

The term 'structural linguistics' in this broad sense merely means the recognition that language is a patterned system composed of the interdependent elements, rather than a collection of unconnected indivudial terms.