1. The history of linguistics began thousands of years ago and has progressed through various "stations" representing different cultures and traditions, from ancient Mesopotamia to modern European and American traditions. 2. Early contributions included standardized word lists in Sumerian and Akkadian, Sanskrit grammar rules, and the first surviving grammar of a European language by the Greek scholar Thrax. These influences spread and evolved as languages and cultures interacted. 3. Major developments included the emergence of descriptive grammars in the Middle Ages, fieldwork and language documentation in the 19th century, and the structuralist and generative frameworks of the 20th century that transformed linguistics into a scientific discipline and inspired many new

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An Outline of the History of Linguistics Ahmed Qadoury Abed
It is easy to outline the history of linguistics by consulting the available references in historical
linguistics, but tracing and recognizing the characteristic burden of linguistics as a cultural phenomenon
along its history is really beyond being fully considered in any book. Bulky volumes (or Handbooks) are
needed to trace these earlier ideas and beliefs people had in the beginning second millennium B.C. till
today’s published papers. This train of linguistics had started too early , to be specific from the early
words said and recognized by the man to stop fortunately in many stations not only for further coal or
fuel (research questions, hypotheses, or theories) ,but also to let passengers(or scholars) exchange their
ideas in groups or circles. These stations are of different demography and tradition ,like Babylonian
cuneiform-clay texts in southern Mesopotamia, Hindu, Greek, Roman, Arabic, Hebrew, European ,
Russian, British , and American. The other feature of these stations is their influence on the following
ones regardless of the distance between them; such possibility was really facilitated directly by the
immigrant passengers on that train of linguistics like Roman Jacobson due to wars or by translation ,as
well.
The main findings of the long history have proved that linguistics is an activity practiced in
majority of the cultures (or stations of our train). Each culture had a particular impression or
contribution. Their contributions arose in antiquity and in response to language changes and resulting
impact on religious and legal domains . Then they moved from being standardized lists of nouns in
Sumerian and Akkadian traditions; Pȃ nini’s Sanskrit grammar rules covering phonetics and
morphology with high degree of abstraction; philosophical and theoretical questions of Plato , Socrates
,and Aristotle about the origin of language ,parts of speech ,and the related three –facet dichotomy
between language and thought, form and meaning, and convention and nature , resulting all in writing
the first surviving grammar of a European language by Thrax’s Technical Grammar (translation mine)
.These Greek efforts influenced the Roman linguist ,Varro in his multi-volume grammar with focus on
morphology of verbs and nouns and changes on the spoken language on the one hand ,and ignorance of
syntax on the other .The other Romans are Donatus and Priscan who influenced the Middle Ages. Greek
tradition was seen in Arabic interest in morphology and phonetics in the seventh century as in ad-
Du’ali’s recordings of Imam Ali’s treatise . That in turn influenced the Hebrew tradition in the ninth
century where al-Fayyumi produced the first grammar and dictionary of Hebrew. This three-legged
influence lasted nine centuries from the fourth till the thirteenth. During the Middle Ages in Europe
Latin was the language of the public and primary written language. A dramatic shift was realized by
writing pedagogical grammars and then descriptive grammars of Latin to the natives of vernacular
languages. That led Bacon to emerge , refine and develop the notion of the universal nature of
grammar.Also, spelling and phonology of Iceland appeared in 1818- The first grammatical treatise.
From the fifteenth century, colonialism influenced the European tradition by importing word lists
, grammars and texts from the languages of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific. Efforts like
Rask’s started towards typological presentations of language families; therefore, several comparative
grammars appeared (and struggled) to identify and then justify the varying degrees of success of
applying Latin grammar to understand and describe the unfamiliar categories of both the Europeans and

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the colonies. The nineteenth century witnessed the next two dramatic changes: the Russian Empire in the
fieldwork-based research yielded in grammars, dictionaries, and text collections on the one hand ,and in
conjoining the linguistic tradition with anthropological, biological, and geological studies , on the other.
Technology used to get a steamtrain with synchronic railway ,rather than diachronic. The first passenger
is the Swiss de Saussure carrying his 1916 Cours; a book little in quantity but much in quality. IPA,
Henry Sweet , de Courtenay,the notion of phoneme were also influential. Many interpretations of
Saussure led to welcome new passengers, like Bloomfield and his bulky-in-quality-and-quantity
Language (1931) to formalize the study of language as a science. And many interpretations they both
deserved. Far away from America, particularly in Czech, another train, but this time European led by the
Prague school (1926) whose primary interest was phonological theory. The two prominent figures here
are Trubetzkoy and Jakobson who really succeeded in placing the notions of phoneme and distinctive
features in the heart of linguistic theory. The influence of Prague school moved to be fascinating in
syntax, as in the works of Mathesius, Daneś, Firbas ,etc., which focused on the relationship between
word order and discourse. This European train was then developed due to the invention of electricity and
other sources of power to be called structuralism. This European structuralism really began by the works
of Firth in prosodic analysis and the contextual theory of meaning with the assistance of Malinowski.
But a complete theory of grammar was later developed by his student M.A.K. Halliday, and his
systemic functional grammar. His ideas was clearly adopted and represented in Britain, Australia,
America, Spain, China, and Japan. Another European train was seen in Denmark, specifically The
Copenhagen School headed by Hjelmselev and Uidall and their Glossematics focusing on the relations
between linguistic units, and not the units themselves.
A faster train, maybe Express, has appeared in America. The pioneers are many like Boas, Sapir,
and Bloomfield. But contributors and resultant theories are really alot to be counted. The American
tradition maintained psychological and anthropological orientations regarding language as directly
connected with its speakers’ thoughts, beliefs, and ways of life. Outstanding classifications and branches
of linguistics start to be named, like behaviourist psychology, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, etc.
Such developments are accompanied by changes in research design and methodology of data gathering
and analysis. Formal linguistics or neo-Bloomfieldian structuralism after the end of the Second World
War focused on algebraic-oriented syntax opened the door wide into a major challenge by the passenger
of TG linguistics, Noam Chomsky carrying a pike of his subsequent publications from Syntactic
Structures (1957) till Minimalsm (1995) reflecting notable changes and renovations. This tradition is a
revolution not only in its own developing frameworks (generative semantics, lexical functional
grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar), but also in inspiring other theories to be born, like
functional linguistics in Europe and Australia and cognitive grammar and construction grammar by
Langacker and Fillmore in USA, repectively. Thus, the trading and industry of linguistics are profitable.
Nowadays, the field of contemporary linguistics is richy and diversified, with scopes and
specializations not to be covered all. Such dynamic diversification requires in turn controlling the
direction of linguistic research and applications. This is beyond our poor consideration, to the extent that
linguistics is now a major in all universities and a course in all fields of study ,and not surprisingly, the
name of Chomsky is the most frequent one if a simple corpse-based study is done for any author index.