History of Linguistics in ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient India.

1. History of Linguistics
Theme 1.
Ancient Greece. Ancient
Rome. Ancient India.
Arabic Linguistics.

2. Ancient Greece
• The most general, philosophical questions
of language, such as the origin of human
speech;
• Questions concerning structural
categories in language, including
phonetics;
• Questions concerning usage (from the
point of correctness)
• Linguistic questions connected with the
study of literary forms and rhetoric.

3. 
The central philosophical
problem of language in
ancient Greece was the
problem of the relation
between the words and
the things they signify.

4. Heraclitus (ab. 544- ab.
483 B.C.)

Language is inherent in nature
(physei)

5. Democritus (ab.460-370 B.C.)

Language is created by the
people (thesei)

6. Plato (427-347 B.C.)
Cratylus, or about the Correctness of
Names
- Usage in people’s
community

7. Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
The theory of word
classes
 The theory of
the sentence


8. Alexandria
(2 c. B.C. – 2 c. A.D.)



Aristarchus (ab.217-145 B.C.)
Dionysius Thrix (ab. 170-90 B.C.)
Apollonius Dyscolus (the 2 nd c. A.D.)

9. Alexandria
Parts of speech:
 Inflected (name, verb, particle,
article, pronoun)
 Uninflected (preposition,
adverb, conjunction)

10. Alexandria
The sentence is “a combination
of words expressing a
complete thought”

11. Alexandria
The word is “an articulate
sound with a certain
meaning out of which the
sentence is composed, and
into which it is decomposed”

12. Alexandria
phonetic structure
Speech sounds (“letters”):
 Vowels
 Semi-vowels
 Non-vowels
The principle of the classification
is the syllable-forming function
of sounds.

13. Ancient Rome
 Varro
(116-27 B. C)
 Donatus (4th century A. D.)
 Priscian (6th century A.D.)

14. Ancient Rome
Etymology
luna  lu-na,
 lucere- (shine)
 nox – (night)
Luna is a celestial body which shines at
night.
The connection between luna and lucere is
obvious but luna has nothing in common
with nox.

15. Ancient India
Factors for rise to grammatical
teaching:
 Interpretation
(“knowledge”)
Panini
of the Vedas

16. Panini
discovered the morphological
structure of the word: the root, the
stem, the suffix;
 classified the words of the language
according to formative characteristics;
 investigated all the types of
declination and conjugation.


17. Phonetics study





Organs of speech;
Description of sounds in accord
with their articulation;
Active organs of speech: (lips,
three parts of the tongue (front,
middle, and back), larynx);
Phonetic changes on the borders
of words and affixes
Division of sounds into vowels,
consonants and semi-vowels.

18. Morphology
Four parts of speech: name
(denoting substance), verb
(denoting action), particles and
prepositions.
Pronouns and adverbs are
distributed among nouns and
verbs.

19. Arabic Linguistics
Abu 'Abd Ar-Rahman Khalīl
ibn Ahmad Al Farāhīdi (More
commonly known as Al Farāhīdi)
(ab. 718–ab. 791)
Kitab al-'Ayn

20. Lexicography
Dictionaries:
 Explanatory
 thematic
 of synonyms
 of rare words
 of borrowings
 translation

21. Grammar




parts of speech (name, verb and
particles);
three-consonant roots, flexions and
affixes;
three types of sentences(nominal,
verbal and adverbial);
syntactic relations(agreement,
government and adjoinment).