A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

2 A BASIC COURSE IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS
Throughout history people have sought to unravel the riddle of language.
The impetus for establishing a “science of language,” however, can be traced
to 1786. That was the year in which the respected and highly influential English
scholar Sir William Jones (1746-1794) suggested that Sanskrit, Persian, Greek,
and Latin sprang from the same linguistic source and, thus, belonged to the
same “language family.” Shortly thereafter, the systematic study of language
families started in earnest, leading in the subsequent nineteenth century to the
emergence of linguistics as a true science. Interest in studying language as a
force shaping cultural Me also started at about the same time within the emerging
science of anthropology. Some of this interest was transferred to linguistics as
well. However, by the 1930s, the study of the language-culture interface was
largely dropped from the agenda of linguistic science, surfacing as a separate
enterprise, and becoming a branch of both linguistics and anthropology, by the
early 1950s.
The descriptive and theoretical tools used by anthropological linguists are
no different from those developed within linguistic science itself. The purpose
of this chapter, therefore, is to discuss and illustrate practically what this science
is all about.
THE SCIENTIFIC APPROACH TO LANGUAGE
The first attempt in history to describe a language scientifically can actually be
traced to the fifth century BC, when the Indian scholar Panini compiled a
grammar of the Sanskrit language of India. His sophsticated analysis is the
first ever to show how words are structures (forms, units) constructed from
smaller structures or units. For several centuries after, virtually nothmg was
written on language that survives, until the Greek scholar Dionysius Thrax,
who lived between 170 and 90 BC, wrote a comprehensive grammar of Greek
that has remained a basic model to this day, showing how the parts of speech
relate to each other in the formation of sentences.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the first surveys of the then-
known languages were attempted, in order to determine which grammatical
facts were universal and which were specific to different languages. In the
eighteenth century the surveys became increasingly more precise culminating,
as mentioned, in Sir William Jones’s assertion that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin
developed from a common source. Shortly thereafter, the German philologist
Jacob Grimm (1785-1 863) and the Danish philologist Rasmus Christian Rask
(1787-1 832) started comparing languages systematically, noticing that in some