ABSTRACT
The history of linguistics is often thought of as a very new discipline; after all, linguistics itself has only been established in its present form for a few decades. But people have been studying language since the invention of writing, and no doubt long before that too. As in many other subjects, the use and then the study of language for practical purposes preceded the reflective process of scholarly study. In ancient India, for example, the need to keep alive the correct pronunciation of ancient religious texts led to the investigation of articulatory phonetics, while in ancient Greece the need for a technical and conceptual vocabulary to use in the logical analysis of propositions resulted in a system of parts of speech which was ultimately elaborated far beyond the immediate requirements of the philosophers who had first felt the need for such categories. Rhetorical training at Rome, the preservation of religious texts in Judaism, the spread of the new proselytising religions of Christianity and Islam, the establishment of vernacular literary traditions in the nation states of Renaissance Europe—all these are contexts in which language, at first a tool, became the focus of study. To achieve a comprehensive picture of how and why language was studied in the past, all these various traditions—and many others—should be taken into account, different as they are from our present-day notions of what is meant by ‘linguistics’. Each tradition has its own historians: Bacher on language study among Jews, Sandys on Classical philology, E.J. Dobson (1957) on early work on English pronunciation, H. Pedersen (1931) on comparative philology, and very many others. As linguistics in the post-Saussurean sense has come to be perceived as a discipline distinct from the mainstream of nineteenth-century language study — comparative and historical philology—so it too has found its historians. But whereas most earlier historians concentrated by design on individual, mostly national, traditions of language study, recent historians have defined their field more broadly. If linguistics is the study of language in all its aspects, they reason, then the history of linguistics should encompass all past approaches to the study of language, whatever the methods used or results achieved. This new assumption makes enormous demands upon the individual scholar, ideally a polyglot conversant with all branches of intellectual and cultural history as well as with all aspects of modern linguistics. In practice most scholars have concentrated on one relatively circumscribed area, a congenial doctrine or school. Recent approaches to the history of linguistics—several of them long since abandoned by other branches of intellectual history — include:
Revisionist (‘palace’ or ‘Whig’) history: the insider's view of the development and historical significance of the school to which he himself belongs. This approach offers a valuable glimpse of a participant's perception of the formation and growth of a new movement, but often overlooks or denigrates the contribution of other scholars—predecessors and contemporaries—to the development of his own school and to the subject at large. Examples include Chapter One of Bloomfield's Language (Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York, 1933), and F.J.Newmeyer's Linguistic Theory in America (Academic Press, New York, 1980).
Precursorist history: the search for forerunners, direct or indirect, of a modern theory or approach. Although it provides a salutary sense of perspective to those engaged in developing a new theory, from the historian's point of view precursorist historiography has the drawback of distorting the past, singling out some thinkers at the expense of others who were in their time perhaps more influential. It can lead to an anachronistic interpretation of past doctrines, reading into them modern ideas which were never explicitly formulated. A successful and immensely influential specimen of the genre is Chomsky's Cartesian Linguistics (Harper and Row, New York, 1966).
Disciplinary history: the investigation of the development of a particular branch of modern linguistics. Unquestionably useful in illuminating the present—in showing how a modern discipline reached its present state — disciplinary history has the disadvantage of imposing contemporary cognitive structures—categories like ‘phonetics’, ‘historical linguistics’, ‘root’, ‘phoneme’—upon the past. Scholars may be tempted to write the history of linguistics in terms of modern categories and concepts, and may fail to notice the categories in which earlier scholars thought; they may overlook the real interests of earlier linguists as a result. For instance, the modern discipline of phonetics corresponds only in part to ancient littera theory. To castigate preRenaissance scholars for failing to develop a full-blown science of phonetics, while at the same time to overlook those branches of littera theory which do not correspond to anything in the modern discipline of phonetics, results in an unbalanced picture of the past. The brief historical accounts of the development of the subject which often open textbooks are usually of this type.
Contextual history: the study of the linguistic doctrines of the past in their historical and intellectual context. The historian of linguistics with an awareness of the historical, cultural, religious and intellectual circumstances in which a particular teaching arose is in a position to understand the nature and significance of this doctrine in its own time. Aware of the priorities and assumptions of earlier writers, he is less likely to read anachronistic ideas into the past or to condemn earlier preoccupations as worthless. Such a historian should possess not only a background in some area of modern linguistics but also a firm grounding in the cultural history of his chosen epoch and in ancillary disciplines such as paleography, the history of science, and the necessary languages. Roy Andrew Miller's work (1975, 1976) on the linguistic traditions of Tibet and the Far East are outstanding examples of this genre.
