Historiographia Linguistica - Volume 44, Issue 1, 2017

Prompted by Western science in late 19th century, Chinese linguistics gradually moved to a new direction after two thousand years of philological tradition centered on rhetoric and textual exegesis. Through the intense efforts of a few scholars in the early twenti-eth century, linguistic study in China became a science and a discipline. Yuen Ren Chao (1892–1982) and Wang Li (1900–1986) were first-generation linguists who led the movement to apply the methodology of modern linguistics to the systematic study of Chinese. This paper investigates the trend setting achievements of these founders of the discipline, and it introduces their biographical and scholarly backgrounds. It also provides a brief history of philology through the lens of Wang Li who was the first historian of Chinese linguistics. Contemporary linguists need both a critical mind to understand the philological legacy of Chinese and an open mind to welcome new interdisciplinary approaches that could produce innovative theories and facilitate the growth of the discipline. Moreover, this paper expands the history of linguistics by introducing linguistic features not found in Indo-European languages, thereby making the history of linguistics more inclusive than it has previously been. Consequently, this paper contributes to a rethinking of the definition of language.

Among the scholars who tackled the topic of language origins in the 19th century, the German philosopher Ludwig Noiré (1829–1889) deserves special mention. To him, the unique sociability of humans implies cooperation and cooperation in turn involves language. Remarkably, Noiré’s theory deeply influenced the debate on language origins until the 1950s. Before offering some theoretical and historical explanations for the enduring influence of Noiré’s theory, it is necessary to describe the general features of his theory and the context in which it arose. After dealing with the German-English debate on language origins during the 19th century, a section will be especially devoted to Noiré’s theory of language origins. Finally, a comparison between Noiré’s insights and the naturalistic framework of the 19th century is provided.

Worldwide missionary activities from the 16th century onward were not limited to the New World and overseas in general, but also in East Central Europe in the wake of sectarian struggles following the Reformation. Soon after the Tridentine Council (1545–1563), the Jesuits spread their activities to all countries between the Baltic and Adriatic Seas. Not only Catholic but also Lutheran and Calvinist missionaries went to Poland-Lithuania, Hungary, Slovenia, and other countries. The first Polish grammar (Statorius 1568) was published principally for the Calvinist mission in Poland, while the first Slovenian grammar was printed in Wittenberg ( Bochorizh 1584 ) for the use of Lutheran missionaries in the predominantly Catholic Slovenia. This article examines the missionary background and the vernacular character of two further missionary grammars of the Slavic languages. The first Croatian grammar by Bartul Kašić (1575–1650) was printed in Rome for the use of Catholic Jesuit missionaries from Italy working in Illyricum ( Kašić 1604 ). Kašić’s choice of the što-dialect to be the literary norm in missionary publications substantially determined the further standardization history of the Croatian language. Almost a hundred years later H. W. Ludolf (1696) succeeded in printing the first Russian grammar for the Lutheran-Pietistic mission in Muscovy, a milestone on the way to the “refinement” of the Russian vernacular intended by Ludolf to make it the literary language of the Russian Empire. The first grammars of the Slavic vernacular languages can, therefore, be rightly called missionary grammars. This designation also applies to the first grammars of the non-Slavic languages in the Baltic States and Hungary (and, beyond Europe, in the largely Eastern Orthodox Armenia and Ethiopia). Whatever their sect, the authors of these missionary grammars were motivated by rivalry with other Christian denominations in Slavic and non-Slavic speaking countries of the Christian East.

Once the need to learn a language arises, grammatical instructional manuals evolve from descriptive grammars of that language. Language description involves the uncovering of the rules of the language from collected data, and teaching those rules is the reason grammatical manuals exist. The most comprehensive descriptive grammar of Arabic is Sībawayhi’s Kitāb (d. ca.161–94 AH/777–810 A.D.). He includes the rules of Arabic as he deduced them from the language of the Arabs. As time passed and the need to learn Arabic increased, many grammarians started to write grammatical manuals for beginners. Sībawayhi’s monumental work was too speculative and highly theoretical for this task and was never suitable for instruction. The descriptiveness of Sībawayhi’s Kitāb needed to morph into a more approachable grammar. Zağğāğī’s Ğumal (d. ca.337–340/948–951) and Ibn Bābašāḏ’s Muqaddima (d.469/1077) are two instructional manuals that are concise and more suitable for beginners. This study examines how pedagogy in Zağğāğī’s Ğumal and Ibn Bābašāḏ’s Muqaddima evolved from the descriptive rules of Sībawayhi’s Kitāb through a careful analysis of istiṯnā’ “exception” rules presented by each grammarian in this study. Although the rules are essentially the same in all three books, presentation and description or lack thereof are sufficiently different illustrating their distinct objectives.