---
title: "History of linguistics"
chunk: 5/6
source: "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_linguistics"
category: "reference"
tags: "science, encyclopedia"
date_saved: "2026-05-05T03:59:52.500696+00:00"
instance: "kb-cron"
---

=== European vernaculars ===
The Irish Sanas Cormaic 'Cormac's Glossary' (10th century) is Europe's first etymological and encyclopedic dictionary in any non-Classical language. The Auraicept na n-Éces, compiled over the course of several centuries — possibly starting as early as in the 8th century — is a treatise on that same language and the first instance of a philosophical defence of a spoken European vernacular over Latin.
A milestone in the early history of Germanic linguistics, the First Grammatical Treatise (12th century) offers a wealth of information on Old Norse lexicon, grammar and phonology.
In the 13th century, the Modistae or "speculative grammarians" introduced the notion of universal grammar. In the treatise De vulgari eloquentia ("On the Eloquence of Vernacular"), dating to 1303-1305, the Italian poet Dante presented a theory of language and discussed the origin of languages after the confusion of tongues following the events of the Tower of Babel. By recognizing the instrinsically human nature of language, Dante first recognized that — like customs and traditions — languages are bound to evolve over time and to differentiate in space giving birth to dialects. He argued that the wave of human populations migrating westward to Europe after the confusion of tongues were already differentiated into three linguistic families: the Greek family, one that can be defined as Slavo-Germanic, and the one that is today known as Romance family. Each of these families independently underwent differentiation into several branching languages. The Romance family, in particular, appeared to Dante as split into three closely related languages, namely Old French ("langue d'oïl"), Old Occitan ("langue d'oc") and Italian ("lingua del sì"). The writer then focused on the additional subdivision of Italian into 14 dialectal varieties, whence it could be possible to extract a noble and elevated vulgar language not inferior in dignity to Latin.
The Renaissance and Baroque period saw an intensified interest in linguistics, notably for the purpose of Bible translations by the Jesuits, and also related to philosophical speculation on philosophical languages and the origin of language.
In the 1600s, Joannes Goropius Becanus was the oldest representative of Dutch linguistics. He was the first person to publish a fragment of Gothic, mainly The Lord's Prayer. Franciscus Juniuns, Lambert ten Kate from Amsterdam and George Hickes from England are considered to be the founding fathers of Germanic linguistics.

== Modern linguistics ==

Modern linguistics did not begin until the late 18th century, and the Romantic or animist theses of  Johann Gottfried Herder and Johann Christoph Adelung remained influential well into the 19th century.
In the history of American linguistics, there were hundreds of Indigenous languages that were never recorded. Many of the languages were spoken, not written, and so they are now inaccessible. Under these circumstances, linguists such as Franz Boas tried to prescribe sound methodical principles for the analysis of unfamiliar languages. Boas was an influential linguist and was followed by Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield.

=== Historical linguistics ===

During the 18th century conjectural history, based on a mix of linguistics and anthropology, on the topic of both the origin and progress of language and society was fashionable. These thinkers contributed to the construction of academic paradigms in which some languages were labelled "primitive" relative to the English language. Hugh Blair wrote that for Native Americans, certain motions and actions were found to convey meaning as much as what was said verbally. Around the same time, James Burnett authored a 6 volume treatise that delved more deeply into the matter of "savage languages". Other writers theorized that Native American languages were "nothing but the natural and instinctive cries of the animal" without grammatical structure. The thinkers within this paradigm connected themselves with the Greeks and Romans, viewed as the only civilized persons of the ancient world, a view articulated by Thomas Sheridan who compiled an important 18th century pronunciation dictionary: "It was to the care taken in the cultivation of their languages, that Greece and Rome, owed that splendor, which eclipsed all the other nations of the world".
In the 18th century James Burnett, Lord Monboddo analyzed numerous languages and deduced logical elements of the evolution of human languages.  His thinking was interleaved with his precursive concepts of biological evolution.  Some of his early concepts have been validated and are considered correct today. In his The Sanscrit Language (1786), Sir William Jones proposed that Sanskrit and Persian had resemblances to Classical Greek, Latin, Gothic, and Celtic languages. From this idea sprung the field of comparative linguistics and historical linguistics. Through the 19th century, European linguistics centered on the comparative history of the Indo-European languages, with a concern for finding their common roots and tracing their development.
In the 1820s, Wilhelm von Humboldt observed that human language was a rule-governed system, anticipating a theme that was to become central in the formal work on syntax and semantics of language in the 20th century. Of this observation he said that it allowed language to make "infinite use of finite means" (Über den Dualis, 1827). Humboldt's work is associated with the movement of Romantic linguistics, which was inspired by Naturphilosophie and Romantic science. Other notable representatives of the movement include Friedrich Schlegel and Franz Bopp.
It was only in the late 19th century that the Neogrammarian approach of Karl Brugmann and others introduced a rigid notion of sound law.
Historical linguistics also led to the emergence of the semantics and some forms of pragmatics (Nerlich, 1992; Nerlich and Clarke, 1996).
Historical linguistics continues today and linguistics have succeeded in grouping approximately 5000 languages of the world into a number of common ancestors.

=== Structuralism ===