The first series of the History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences Podcast looks at the history of modern linguistics. We begin in this episode by examining the pre-history of comparative-historical grammar.
Blog Archives
The foreign entanglements of Mandarin Chinese in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
Mårten Söderblom Saarela Academia Sinica in Taipei This blog post will discuss some transnational aspects of the history of Mandarin Chinese, what in the twentieth century became codified as the national language of China. I will first briefly discuss what…
Why women botanists outnumbered women linguists in nineteenth century Australia
Jane Simpson Australian National University 1. Introduction In colonial Australia (1788–1901), only about a dozen women are recorded as documenting Australian languages, compared with nearly 300 women contributors to herbariums (Maroske and Vaughan 2014), and with the 100 or so…
Tagged with: Aboriginal languages, women linguists
Posted in 19th century, Article, Australia, Field linguistics, Grammars, Missionary Linguistics, Uncategorized
Posted in 19th century, Article, Australia, Field linguistics, Grammars, Missionary Linguistics, Uncategorized
Speech sounds in the field: Dynamical approaches to phonology after Maxwell and Einstein
Alexander Teixeira Kalkhoff Universität Freiburg 1 The notion of field in physics The mutual interaction, i.e. attraction and repulsion, of bodies across space without direct mechanical contact, such as the movement of planets, gravity, magnetism, electricity, or light, posed a…
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, America, Article, Europe, Field linguistics, History, Linguistics
Grammaticalisation clines: a brief conceptual history
Martin Konvička Freie Universität Berlin 1 Grammaticalisation clines In this blog post, I will sketch the history of grammaticalisation clines. Hopper and Traugott (2003: 6) understand this concept as “a metaphor for the empirical observation that cross-linguistically forms tend to undergo…
Tagged with: clines, grammaticalization, typology
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, historical linguistics, Linguistics, Typology
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, historical linguistics, Linguistics, Typology
Henry Sweet, a model for John Rupert Firth?
Angela Senis Université Bordeaux Montaigne This post introduces a few of the insights developed during the Henry Sweet Society colloquium in 2017. My full research on this topic is the subject of a paper that is soon to be proposed…
Tagged with: Firth, Sweet
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics
Posted in 19th century, 20th century, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics
Towards a history of concept list compilation in historical linguistics
Johann-Mattis List Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena A large proportion of lexical data of the world’s languages is presented in the form of word lists in which a set of concepts was translated into the…
Tagged with: concept list, historical linguistics, Morris Swadesh, Swadesh list
Posted in 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, Article, historical linguistics, Lexicography, Linguistics
Posted in 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, Article, historical linguistics, Lexicography, Linguistics
Triangulating the history of science communication: Faraday, Marcet and Smart
Brigitte Nerlich University of Nottingham The 19th century was a time of monumental change in science, industry and also communication. In this blog post I shall poke around in one very small corner of all the revolutionary things that happened…
Tagged with: Benjamin Humphrey Smart, Jane Marcet, Michael Faraday, science communication
Posted in 19th century, History
Posted in 19th century, History
Typology – a new task of linguistics
James McElvenny University of Edinburgh In lieu of an introduction Below I offer an English translation of the last essay Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) personally submitted for publication, “Hypologie [Typologie] der Sprachen, eine neue Aufgabe der Linguistik”. This essay…
Tagged with: Gabelentz, typology
Posted in 19th century, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics, Typology
Posted in 19th century, Article, Europe, History, Linguistics, Typology
Discussing Disciplinary Development: The role of the First International Congress of Linguists (1928) in the formation of the discipline of general linguistics
Emma Mojet University of Amsterdam Why congresses? The organisation of an international congress of a discipline marks a noteworthy stage in the development of a discipline. Taking a broader perspective, the many first disciplinary congresses held around 1900 also mark…
History and Philosophy of the Language Sciences 