Important Figures in Linguistics
We will see important figures in linguistics history and their effects on it, what they did, how they changed things, their theories, and their works on linguistics. Information about these figures won’t be too detailed as we want to highlight important parts instead of all parts to make our writings engaging and easy to read. Of course, the list goes on, but we’ll refer to the most famous linguistics as many as possible.
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Pāṇini
Pāṇini was a Sanskrit (one of the oldest documented members of the Indo-European family of languages) scholar from Ancient India. He is said to have lived in the 7th century or 6th and 4th century BCE.
His work, named as Aṣṭādhyāyī, is the most known work of him because of the extensive rules on Sanskrit grammar and linguistics. In his work, he explained the rules systematically and in a well-designed form. Thanks to that, Sanskrit is considered one of the most logical and scientific languages in the world. Aṣṭādhyāyī consists of forty pages, but there is a fact you should know. Pāṇini wrote his work using codes to keep it short but still meaningful. Today if one tries to write his work in modern Indian languages, it would take him/her to write thousands of pages. Another interesting fact is that the basis of the linguistics theories on the compounding of words regarding the modern Indian languages is Pāṇini’s analysis of noun compounds. Furthermore, he is called the “father of linguistics” His works were discovered and published by European scholars in the 19th century. Although he lived centuries ago, his theory of morphological analysis was more advanced than the 19th century’s linguists.
Aristotle
Aristotle is mostly known as a philosopher, but he has contributions to linguistics as he thought about the connection between words and their meanings. He had a method which consists of two assumptions. The first one is collecting data, and the second one is classifying the data according to the priori theory (common sense or authority). This is called Aristotle’s framework. For example, you collect data about something; then you classify it according to your parents, teacher, etc.
Moreover, he didn’t see language as something unbelievable or magical. In other words, he demythologized language. He saw language as a means of expressing and communicating thoughts, and he thought language was an object of rational inquiry.
Lastly, the semiotic triangle, which was created by Ogden and Richards, (a) language as the expression of (b) thoughts that are intentionally related with (c) elements in the world, is because of Aristotle.
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