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Linguistics 101 – Part 1

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It looks at all parts of the phenomenon of language including how sounds are made, how they are processed and decoded, how words are put together and how they are used to create meaning. Language has fascinated humanity since it was invented and it is a fundamental part of the human existence.
In this series of lessons we will cover all the different aspects of linguistics to give you an expansive overview of the subject that will provide a solid foundation for future studies.


What are the different subjects in linguistics?


Phonetics
Phonology
Syntax
Morphology
Historical
Pragmatics
Semantics
Sociolinguistics


History of linguistics


At first the field was called Philology but eventually that term got replaced with the term Linguistics. The term “linguist” used to mean a student of languages, not a student of linguistics, but as the field grew the term became associated with the field and now the term “polyglot” is often used to describe those who like learning languages.
One of the very first linguists was a man called Pāṇini who lived in the northwestern part of the Indian subcontinent sometime between 600 and 400 BC. He studied Sanskrit and his theories became the basis of many modern linguistics theories. His theories of morphological analysis remained the most advanced theory on the subject as late as the 20th century.


An important early work of modern linguistics was the work done by Sir William Jones who discovered links between Sanskrit, Ancient Greek and Latin and that other languages might be in this group too. His findings would lead to the creation of modern historical linguistics and the study of Indo European languages.


Another important work that came later on was Grimm’s law which explained how sounds changed from Proto Indo European into Proto Germanic which is the ancestor of the Germanic languages. This law showed the connections between the Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch, Swedish, etc) and the other Indo European languages like Spanish and Russian.


In addition to Grimm’s law, there was a lot of work done on other Indo European languages that eventually allowed linguists to reconstruct the language of the Indo Europeans which got the name Proto Indo European.
In the 20th century linguist Ferdinand de Saussure created the structuralist approach to linguistics where examples of a language are collected and analysed so that they can be studied in detail. This allows the individual elements of the language such as phonemes and morphemes to be classified and investigated. This work was later added to by Edward Sapir and Leonard Bloomfield.


In the 1960s Noam Chomsky’s generative grammar added to the number of fields in linguistics. Sociolinguistics from William Labov and systemic functional linguistics and psycholinguistics were also added to the overall field of linguistics. The field is growing all the time as current knowledge is expanded upon and new fields are created.

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