Language, until the inception of 19th century, was related to philosophers and the theories, they presented to define its philosophy. The scientific study of language did not of course, begin in this century; but the years around 1900 happen to have marked an important turning-point in the history of modern linguistics.

1. AILYA RAZA
ROLL NO 1
HISTORICISM

2. Language, until the inception of 19th century, was
related to philosophers and the theories, they
presented to define its philosophy.
The scientific study of language did not of
course, begin in this century; but the years
around 1900 happen to have marked an
important turning-point in the history of modern
linguistics.
BACKGROUND

3. At very roughly that time independently
in Europe and America, linguistics
shifted its Orientation in such a way
that much nineteenth-century work in
the subject has become relatively
remote from the concerns of the
linguist of recent years.
LOCATION AND TIME OF
INCEPTION

4. • By the middle of the 19th Century, the term "historismus"
(from which Historicism comes) was well established in
Germany .
• Historicism recognizes the historical character of all human
existence, but views history not as an integrated system but as
a scene in which a diversity of human wills express them. It
holds that all historical knowledge is relative to the standpoint
of the historian.
• Friedrich Schlegel mentions Historicism as a “kind of
philosophy” which places the main stress on history..
FRIERDRICH SCHLEGEL

5. The historical linguistics, also known as diachronic
linguistics or philology, which had dominated
nineteenth-century linguistic research the
investigation of:
• the history of languages.
• the uncovering of their relationships.
• their construction of the lost ‘proto-languages’ from
which families of extant languages descend.
HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

6. Latin
French Italian
Proto-
Germanic
English German Norwegian
Proto-Indo-
European

7. It is true that the enormous effort
devoted to the historical study of the
Indo-European language-family was
inspired partly by personal taste, as
opposed to considerations of rational
scientific research strategy.
PROTO-INDO-EUROPEAN
LANGUAGE

8. Proto-Indo-
European.
Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit,
Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic
languages and languages of
Europe and Asia.
French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian,
Spanish, and the other Romance
languages.

9. .
COMPARATIVE METHOD
Comparative method, which
comprised a set of principles
whereby languages could be
systematically compared with respect
to their sound systems, grammatical
structure, and vocabulary.

10. The main impetus for the development of
comparative philology came toward the end of
the 18th century, when it was discovered that
Sanskrit bore a number of striking resemblances
to Greek and Latin. An English orientalist, Sir
William Jones, put forward the hypothesis, in
1786, that all three languages must have “sprung
from some common source, which perhaps no
longer exists.”.

11. Influences

12. • Rejecting the classical tradition of translating
old documents, such as Bible, fairy tales and
other stories.
• Emphasizing on indigenous ethnic and cultural
roots.
• Since race, language and culture were assumed
to be intimately related, reconstruction of the
prehistory of the Germanic and other language-
language- stocks was considered interesting.
DIACHRONIC LINGUISTICS AND
ROMANTICISM

13. It is commonly the case in the history of science
that at any given time there are a few
outstandingly successful branches of science
which are regarded as models of what a science
should-,be, so that scholars attempting to
investigate scientifically some, new field of
phenomena will almost inevitably imitate the
methods and theories of the 'model' sciences.
SCIENTIFIC INFLUENCES OF
DIACHRONIC LINGUISTICS

14. Two outstandingly influential scientific paradigms
towards diachronic linguistics:
1. Mechanistic physics: all phenomena could be
described by simple, deterministic laws of
force and motion – so that all future states of
the world could be inferred from a complete
knowledge of its present state.
2. Biological theory of evolution by natural
selection.
INFLUENCE ON DIACHRONIC
LINGUISTICS

15. Philologist took the notion of describing
the history of sound-changes occurring
in a sound- language in terms of ‘laws’
which apply uniformly to whole ranges of
examples. One of the first discoveries was
Grimm’s a Law.
THE INFLUENCE OF PHYSICS:

16. Proto-Indo-European consonants changed Proto-Indo-
in the Germanic branch in accordance with the
following rules:
1. Voiceless stops [p t k] > voiceless fricatives [f θ x]
2. Voiced stops [b d g] > voiceless stops [p t k]
3. Voiced aspirates [bh dh gh] > voiced stops [b d g]
GRIMM’S LAW

17. The term Lautgesetz, 'sound law', was first used by Franz
Bopp in 1824 (Wechssler 1900, p. 400). Bopp even offered
what he called a 'mechanical' explanation for the
Indo-European phenomenon - the alternation
between different vowels in a morphological paradigm
e.g. English strong verbs such
as sing~sang~$ung -< by invoking a 'law of gravity' in connection
with the relative 'weight' of different syllables.
• last quarter of the nineteenth century apparent
counter-examples to a sound law were permissible only if they
could be explained by a sub-law.
FRANZ BOPP

18. Linguistics was categorized as a natural science. A language must
be described objectively along with the rest of the furniture of
the natural world. Linguists regarded languages as an order
of natural organisms.
Bopp (1827) wrote: Languages must be regarded as organic
bodies, formed in accordance with definite laws; bearing within
themselves an internal principle of life, they develop and they
gradually die out….
Thus, a language is a living thing .The Old English of pre-
Conquest days developed pre- successively into Chaucer’s
English, Shakespeare’s and now the different varieties of modern
English. Groups of languages have ‘family trees’ just as groups of
biological species do.
BIOLOGICAL INFLUENCE

19. Latin
French Italian
Proto-
Germanic
English German Norwegian
Proto-Indo-
European

20. Bacteria
Proto-
feline
Cat Tiger
Proto-
ape
Man

21. Schleicher published a short treatise on Darwin's Theory and
Linguistics, in the form of an open letter to Hackel, arguing
strongly that linguistics should be regarded as one of the
natural sciences to which Darwin's theory applies. The
linguist's language-families, languages, dialects, and idiolects
correspond to the biologist's genera, species, varieties,' and
individuals. Languages and language-families, like species,
compete with one another in a 'struggle for survival' (consider,
the British Isles for instance, how English has spread at the
expense of the Celtic languages.
DARWINISM AND LINGUISTICS

22. • The family tree model failed to fit the facts
of Indo-European.
• There were many cases where some trait
was common to two language groups lying
relatively far apart on Schleicher’s tree
diagram.
REJECTION TOWARDS THE FAMILY
TREE THEORY

23. Languages are obviously not material
objects: one can infer the existence and
nature of languages, or even idiolects, only
via the behaviour of speakers,
not by direct observation as in the case of
plants or animals.
'Languages are historical creations, not
vegetables.'
REJECTION OF DARWIN’S VIEW

24. The classification of languages based on the change-directional
view change
-• Isolating languages: in which each word consisted of a single
unchanging root (i.e. Chinese and Vietnamese)
• Agglutinating languages: in which words include affixes
languages as well as root, but the division of the word into affixes
is clear (i.e. Turkish, Bahasa Indonesia)
• Inflecting languages: where a single word includes a number of
‘units of meaning’ but one cannot assign these meaning-
meaning-units to distinct proportion of the word (i.e. Sanskrit,
Greek and Latin)
CLASSIFICATION OF LANGUAGE
BY RASK

25. • By the middle of the 19th Century, the term "historismus"
(from which Historicism comes) was well established in
Germany .
• Historicism recognizes the historical character of all human
existence, but views history not as an integrated system but as
a scene in which a diversity of human wills express them. It
holds that all historical knowledge is relative to the standpoint
of the historian.
• Friedrich Schlegel mentions Historicism as a “kind of
philosophy” which places the main stress on history..
FRIERDRICH SCHLEGEL

26. Sub classification of inflecting languages(by August
Schlegel)
• Synthetic languages : inflecting in the fullest sense
• Analytic languages : including some characteristics of
the isolating type
Example: the Romance family of languages is in the
process of decay from synthetic Latin to analytic
modern languages like French.
SUB CLASSIFICATION INFLECTING
LANGUAGES BY SCHLEGEL

27. August von Schlegel does not seem to have felt that the
series isolating-agglutinating-inflecting represented a historical
Progression
The reason why he invents the notion 'analytic'
rather than saying that the Romance languages are moving away
from the inflecting towards the isolating type is presumably that
he takes it as axiomatic that membership of one of his three
principal types is part of the unchanging essence of a
language-stock, so that no descendant of Latin' could be
Isolating
and not everyone who discussed typology agreed that
inflecting languages were 'better' or 'higher' than
isolating -
SCHLEGEL

28. As previously, Comparative Analysis of different languages were being done
to trace the similarities and differences between them.
Later on, this approach was used in Language Learning as the concern was to
point out the differences and similarities in the Learner Native Language and
Second Language and how these differences and similarities in languages can
effect student acquisition and learning of the new language
Positive effect
Negative effect
• Contrastive Analysis
• Error Analysis
HISTORICISM AND APPLIED
LINGUISTICS

29. In the 20th century The emphasis shifted from
language change to language description.
Linguists began to concentrate on describing
single languages at one particular point in time, in
a static or synchronic study of a given state of
the language
PAVED ROAD FOR SYNCHRONIC
LINGUISTICS

30. • Sampson, (2007). Schools of Linguistics
• Speight, Allen, "Friedrich Schlegel", The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (Winter 2016 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL =
<https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2016/entries/schlegel/>.
• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Friedrich-von-Schlegel
REFERENCES