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Early Western Linguistics: The Greeks, the Church, and Medieval Philosophy
| Panini |
|---|
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| samhitapatha |
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| padapatha |
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| Pratisakhya |
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| Katyayana |
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| bhasa |
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The earliest known linguistic studies as a structure of language are commonly stated as the fifth century B.C.E. with Panini's grammar of Sanskrit, or the third or second century B.C.E., with Krates of Mallos's and Dionysios Thrax's grammars of Greek. Jacobsen points out that the ancient Babylonians, circa 1600 B.C.E., have the first recorded attempt, with revisions appearing through about 600 or 500 B.C.E. The Babylonians were, according to Jacobsen, attempting to preserve a large body of literature that was written in Sumerian, which was a dying language in the process of being replaced by Akkadian [Thorkild Jacobsen, "Very Ancient Texts: Babylonian Grammatical Texts," in Dell Hymes, Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, 1974, 41-62]. Salient points of Jacobsen's analysis of the Babylonian Grammars include a note that the form of Sumerian was kept (words, et al.) but that the analysis broke through the form for greater understanding, much as current analysis of Latin does in schools. In effect, it made the language live even though it was out of use.
The early Indians faced a similar situation to that of the Babylonians, several centuries later (circa 1000 B.C.E.). The Indian linguistic drive is important because it has the same reasons that drove most linguistic studies until the eighteenth century: religion. Specifically, the rituals for early Hinduism called for the recitation of words in the original Vedic. Therefore, as language changed, the original form (the samhitapatha, "continuous recitation") was divided into the padapatha (the "word for word recitation"), producing a full analysis on the phonemic level of a fixed body of text. Later linguistic efforts, notably Panini, expanded the Pratisakhya Prtikhya linguistic analyses from Vedic utterances (chandas) toward the spoken language (bhasa). Panini, Katyayana, Patañjali and others realized that language was infinite and could not be described by enumeration, but only with the help of "rules and exceptions" (samanyavitesaval laksanam). Throughout the centuries, Indian linguistics has been refined and simplified, and has inspired studies of other languages in similar, rigorous ways [J. F. Staal, "The Origin and Development of Linguistics in India," in Hymes, 63-74]. In many ways, the early Indians are the forefathers of modern linguistics, even before Panini.
| samanyavitesaval laksanam |  |
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Early Western Linguistics: The Greeks, the Church, and Medieval Philosophy
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