The historical comparative method

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 468.

The relations between the languages of the Indoeuropean family were studies systematically at the beginning of the 19^th century by Franz Bopp, Rasmus Rask, Jacob Grimm and A. Vostokov. These scholars not only made comparative and historical observations of the kindred languages, but defined the fundamental conception of linguistic kinship or relationship. In fact, they created the method.

This was the time when linguistics appeared as a science. The historical and comparative study of the Indoeuropean languages became the principal line of European linguistics for many years to come. This method was further developed in the works of such scholars of the 19^th and 20^th centuries, as Buslaev, Fortunatov and Meillet and others.

The historical comparative method is used to analyze and discover relationship between the different languages and groups of languages to reconstruct prehistoric lingual elements. By means of this method scholars collected vast material for studying general laws of language development. This method … from the possibility for different languages to have been originated from the same source.

The actual process of language division is very complex. It is connected with repeated misings and redivision of tribes and nationalities throughout centuries and millennia. This process is accompanies by appearances and disappearances of some languages, it deals with dialects of a language, which may grow into different languages. There are such features of resemblence between different languages that clearly prove that they have the same origin. … to the basic word stock, to the fund of grammatical affixes, because the grammatical forms as a rule are not borrowed by one language from another. E.g. ты – toi – thou – du.

The fundamental ideas and the main schools of the 20^th century linguistics

The 19^th century method, valuable as it was for the study of languages, gave no exact definition of the object of linguistics as an independent science. Logical, psychological and sociological considerations were involved in linguistic studies, thus obscuring linguistics proper. As Lewis Hjelmslev rightly points out. the linguistics of the part has concerned itself with a physical, physiological, psychological, sociological and historical aspects of language not in the language itself.

The study of numerous languages of the world was neglected, the research being limited to the group of Indoeuropean language (the drawback of comparative method). It was mainly the historical changes of phonological and morphological units that were studied (another drawback).

All this led to atomistic approach to language. The new method was seeking to grasp linguistic events in their mutual interconnection and interdependance, to understand and describe language as a system.

The first scholars, who were Baudouin de Courtenay, academician Fortunatov (1849-1914), the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913). The work that came to be the most widely-know is Saussure's A course in general linguistics, which was postumously compiled and published from his lectures between 1906 and 1911.