ABSTRACT
For the reasons given in the preceding chapter, it is sensible to begin the history of linguistic studies with the achievements of the ancient Greeks. This has to do, primarily, not with the merits of their work, which are very considerable, nor with the deficiencies in it that latter-day scholars, looking back from the privileged standpoint of those at the far end of a long tradition, may justifiably point out. It is simply that the Greek thinkers on language. and on the problems raised by linguistic investigations, initiated in Europe the studies that we can call linguistic science in its widest sense, and that this science was a continuing focus of interest from ancient Greece until the present day in an unbroken succession of scholarship, wherein each worker was conscious of and in some way reacting to the work of his predecessors.
