Linguistics, for those of you who don’t know, is the study of languages, mainly in
form, meaning, and context, and like any science, has had a weird and convoluted history.
On this second episode of the 100 Years Challenge, we are going to take a look at what we knew
(and what we didn’t know) about how language works 100 years ago, oh and Emma from DSM
is going to accompany us in this video.
Now, linguistics is a vast field of study that has been around in at least a basic form
for essentially as long as people have noticed funny similarities between different languages.
This happened in Mesopotamia, China, India, Greece, and Rome, among many other places,
though most of them were mainly works describing (and often prescribing) how their language’s
grammar worked.
This is evidenced in, for example, when 4th century Roman Aelius Donatus (and many others)
wrote an outline of Latin grammar, known as the Ars grammatica, which does in fact not
actually translate to “ass grammar” (it actually means the art of grammar, but now
you probably think of it the other way).
The Ars grammatica would actually go on to become standard reading material into the
18th century, and became one of the first books to be printed.
Well, I mean, they got a bit of a head start, so I don’t know how fair that is.
There were even Roman grammar Nazis, like one of Valerius Probus’ works, the Appendix
Probi.
-- Hercules non Herculens, columna non colomna, hostiae non ostiae, verum vosmet!
“Colomna”, posteriora mea!
But that was a bit more than 100 years ago, so let’s fast forward a little bit to the
late 19th and early 20th centuries, when many advancements in the field of linguistics had
been made.
Well first, it was basically established as a field in around the 18th century (at least
modern linguistics), which originally centered around something called Indo-European studies,
noticing again that the languages of Greece, Italy and India had some interesting similarities
to each-other, and this time reconstructing a whole language out of it.
Of course, numerous advancements have been made over the past 100 years, especially considering
that Noam Chomsky, the “father of modern linguistics”, was born in 1928.
Chomsky is often argued to have made linguistics a truly scientific study, publishing numerous
works that would advocate theories from his non-empiricist theory of language, to his
theory of universal grammar, which argued that there is a built-in framework for how
human language grammar works.
So yeah, we didn’t have any of that, but there were still plenty of other big linguistic
theories floating around.
One field of linguistics that was having its debut around this time was something known
as structural linguistics.
Developed by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, structural linguistics is a branch of linguistics
that treats languages as being composed of a system of interrelated structures, such
as phonemes, morphemes, lexical categories, noun phrases, verb phrases, and sentence types.
Saussure proposed many different ideas for structural linguistics, such as signs.
Signs are made up of three main elements, the signifier (being the word used to talk
about something), the signified (the concept that comes into your head after hearing the
word or phrase), and the referent (being the actual, physical object), also talking about
how the referent can most certainly exist without the other two, although the signifier
and the signified cannot exist without each-other.
One other revolutionary invention from around this time was the International Phonetic Alphabet,
or the IPA, invented around the 1880’s and 90’s.
Before that, international linguistics was a mess, especially between English, French,
and German, where all the linguists doing this stuff mostly were.
For one example, the IPA uses the letter ʃ (“esh”) for the voiceless palato-alveolar
fricative, which is good, because it is rarely written the same way in two different languages.
Using some cities around Europe as an example-- like Sheffield, or La Rochelle, or Braunschweig,
or maybe even Niš and Eskişehir-- really shows us why a standardized alphabet for linguists
was so necessary.
So yeah, that’s 5 languages that have 5 different ways of writing the same exact sound,
you can see why there was pressure to start something like the IPA.
Now linguists could finally talk to each-other about words in different languages without
confusing each-other with their language’s weird sounds, or spelling rules, or writing
systems, or being French.
Of course, politics also played a role in this, and this being the 1910’s, things
were definitely about to get weird.
After all, this was the age of nationalism-- and not just the type that involved the word
Aryan-- throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, many different populations across Europe (or
“nations”) started declaring independence from the empires they had been a part of;
and sure enough, linguistics was used for this as well.
Many different language groups across Europe are mutually intelligible to each-other, which
would normally count them as dialects, but they’re counted as different languages.
One very good example is a language that used to be known as Serbo-Croatian, but is now
four languages, Croatian, Serbian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin.
So, even though they can be argued to be dialects of the same language, they’re considered
different languages due to the messy politics of the region.
--It’s kind of like saying the two of us are speaking different languages, just because
I’m British and KhAnubis is American.
I mean, Hindi and Urdu are sometimes lumped together as Hindustani, and Czechoslovakia
said that their official language was Czechoslovak, even though today it would be considered two
different languages, as Czechoslovakia is now two different countries.
That is true.
By the way, that was my friend Emma, from the amazing channel DSM: Wannabe Linguist.
Also, Emma, wasn’t there something else you also had to announce?
--Yes, actually!
Because this video is a collaboration, I made a video over on my channel about the history
of linguistics over the past 100 years.
Basically, all the new ideas linguists in the year 1919 didn’t have at their disposal.
So be sure to check it out after this video’s over!
Actually this video is pretty much over, so definitely check out that video if you haven’t
already.
If you have, then do also be sure to check out last week’s video, and give it the views
it also deserves.
It’s about computers, which is a little off-brand for the channel, but still pretty
cool.
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