HISTORICAL SURVEY SUMMARY

LINGUISTIC ACTIVITY DURING THE MEDIEVAL AND EARLY MODERN PERIOD Things to note about this period: 1. The Bible and gospel materials were translated in vernaculars for the ease of teaching the gospel in local languages instead of the classical languages. Some of these translations are: the Armenian (5th century) the Gothic (4th century), the Old Church Slavonic (9th century). These translations occasionally constitute some of our oldest records of certain languages, for example, German language. 2. A practical knowledge of diverse linguistic types gradually became available to medieval scholars and the information was made accessible by the introduction of printing with movable type and almost overnight, there appeared a spate of grammars and dictionaries most of them dealing with the vernaculars rather than the classical languages. Some of these descriptions are extremely valuable. For example, a Gothic word list compiled in the years of 1560-62. 3. From this era are also dated the early attempts to survey all the then known languages such as specimens of forty languages in 1592. Later on in the 18th century, works dealing with a comparative vocabulary of the world languages (1786-89), the study of more than eight hundred languages in 1800-1805. The last and perhaps the best known work of this kind is the Lord’s Prayer in over five hundred (500) languages and dialects. 4. Etymology was no better off than it had been under the Greeks and Romans. Scholars assumed as an article of faith the Hebrew had been man’s first language, and most etymological studies monotonously attempt to skew the fact to fit the theory. For example, a learned Frenchman in 1606 published a complex and etymological dictionary of Hebrew, Chaldiac, Spanish, Syriac, Greek, Latin, French, Italian, German, Flemish and English. Other scholars more patriotically inclined, proposed their own language as the original one. 5. The medieval and early modern era – that is, until about the end of the 18th century – witnessed a tremendous increase in the amount of information about language. Significantly, however, the method of analysis and interpretation were still those of the ancients. Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz, Johann Gottfried Von Herder and Sir William Jones are notable figures in medieval and early modern linguistics. a. Gottfried Wilhelm Von Leibniz i. He is known to the world primarily as a philosopher and mathematician, he was in fact what the Germans call a UNIVERSALGENIC. ii. He was especially interested in studying the relationship of languages and establishing a linguistic genealogy. iii. Another area of concern to him was the collecting and describing of living languages. b. Johann Gottfried Von Herder i. In 1772 he wrote a prize essay entitled “Concerning the Origin of Language”. ii. He attacked the orthodox view of his age that speech is the direct gift of God but he held rather that the genesis of language was due to an impulse like that of the embryo pressing to be born. Man, he concludes is the only creature that has the ability to single out sensations. iii. He accepted the belief that Hebrew was the original language but believed that it developed out of necessity from man’s innermost nature. The speech – impulse itself, he concludes is from God, but linguistic communication is of man. c. Sir William Jones i. Throughout the last nine (9) years of his brief life, Sir Williams, studied Sanskrit, acquiring in the course of time not only a remarkable command of the language, but also and of greater importance a profound insight into its relationship to certain other languages. ii. It is in fact customary to date the beginnings of modern comparative grammar in a general way to a statement contained in a speech which Jones delivered before the “Asiatick”. Society on February 2, 1786. iii. He arrived at the conclusion that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Celtic and maybe Old Persian may be related. This conclusion was arrived at not by intuition but by inspection of the data that these resemblances must be due to a common descent from a hypothetical earlier language “which perhaps no longer exists”.