Nineteenth Century historical linguistics

           Before nineteenth century, language was an interest mainly to philosophers . Plato and Aristotle made a huge contributions to the study of language and Plato was the first person who distinguished between verbs and nouns.

           In 1786 was considered as a birthdate of linguistics when sir William Jones gave a paper saying that  ‘’ Sanskrit’’ the old Indian language had a strong similarities with other languages such as: Latin, Greek, Celtic and Germanic. This discovery was an idea that was occurring independently to several scholars at the same time.

          This discovery of Sir William Jones led scholars to think that there is a mother language that other European languages were descended from this mother language and it was called Proto-Indo –European Language. This discovery fired the imagination of the scholar of 19th century to write ‘’ Comparative Grammar’’ . This grammar is to make comparison among different types of languages in Indo European language family and then to make hypothetical ancestor from which all these language were descended.

          Accordingly, scholars of 19th century were preoccupied with reconstructing of all the languages in Indo – European language family and making hypotheses about the way it spilt into the various modern languages. It was an idea of evolution of languages which coincided with the idea of the evolution of the human beings proposed by Darwin’s book ‘’Origin of the Species’’. So, it seems natural to see the evolution of language alongside the evolution of species.

           In the last quarter of 19th century a group of young grammarians attributed the reason for the evolution for the phonological change saying that sounds of languages were changed continuously with the passage of time and the sound change in one word will affect other words. -K- sound   was changed into –ch sound and all other words were affected by this change.  

 ا.م مناف عبد الحسين مهدي

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