Important Figures in Linguistics - Brothers Grimm and Ferdinand de Saussure

Brothers Grimm

    Brothers Grimm had many benefits to linguistics and linguistics history as they had worked on folk music and folk literature. They collected collections of folk literature and examined them. Working on such pieces allowed them to understand what people thought while writing those, and they had the opportunity to bridge what they knew with what they found out. They were the most important scholars of their time in Germany.

    They saw folk poetry as the most important type of poetry because it reflected joys, sorrows, hopes, and fears of humankind. Let’s get into some details about these two brothers.

    The first one is Jacob Grimm. Jacob Grimm had works in historical linguistics and Germanic philology. His most famous work is Grimm’s law. It’s important because it shows that the sound shift is not a random process, but it’s an organized and systematic one. You can think of sound shift as offspring changing genetically over time. Jacob’s works still influence linguistics studies in today's world.

    The second one is Wilhelm Grimm. As we mentioned above, they collected folk literature, and Wilhelm Grimm was able to change the form of fairy tales into a more readable form without changing their folkloric characters.

Ferdinand de Saussure

    Ferdinand de Saussure lived between 1857 and 1913. He is called the father of modern linguistics after his different approaches to the science of linguistics and structural linguistics. We should add that some think the father of modern linguistics is Noam Chomsky. However, this depends on the person you ask.

    He worked on structural linguistics and came with a new approach. He claimed that every linguistic object in a sentence contrast with another. He sees language as a two-sided thing and asserts there is a sign, a signified and a signifier. Signified is the letters to indicate what we are talking about, the signifier is the thing that comes to our mind when we hear the signified. Besides, he says that there is an arbitrary and conventional connection between signified and signifier. Also, the actual thing in the world is the referent.

    Moreover, he says parole is the actual use of language while langue is the thing shared by the community. Langue is an abstract system such as phonology in contrast to parole, which is concrete and actual.

    Furthermore, he mentions about synchrony as a point in a timeline which shows a complete language system. On the other side, diachrony shows the development of a language over time, and this is known as historical linguistics. 

    

    Lastly, he claims syntagm is the linear pattern of linguistic objects (words in a sentence or sounds in a word). On the other hand, paradigm is the form of a sentence or form of a word. “The man is sitting on the bank.” Think of this sentence as an example; we can change the word man and replace it with a dog. However, we can’t change the same word with a fish because a fish can’t sit.

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