ABSTRACT
The inception of the comparative method, which is basically historical, also marked its almost absolute predominance in the field of linguistics. While diachronic research became a truly scholarly topic, reserved only for superior minds, descriptivism continued to be, throughout the nineteenth century, what it had been in earlier centuries—a practical, utilitarian subject, exemplified by the writing of grammars for purposes of learning foreign tongues or of telling the readers how properly to use their own. The finished product of an investigation would cast only an indirect and dubious light upon the historical evolution of the language, but it would yield an absolute, incontrovertible picture of the present-day stage, based on purely descriptive criteria which would contain no element of either historicism or prescriptivism. The true linguistic state of a nation, region or group would stand forth in all its stark nakedness, utterly divorced from both national standards and normative prescriptions as to what people ought to speak.
