ABSTRACT
Until the early nineteenth century, a linguist was a grammarian who studied historical changes in individual languages by looking at the letters of the alphabet, but paying scant attention to the sounds those letters represented. The rediscovery of the Vedic scriptures of India highlighted similarities between Sanskrit and the European languages, and helped to promote the development of comparative grammar. This movement led some linguists to study language as it is spoken, rather than focusing on its written form. To do so, the features of spoken language had to be described in a more thorough and accurate manner. The auditory, visual and tactile senses had to be brought to bear to describe the mechanisms of speech production, just as the Indians had done more than 2,000 years earlier.
