An Encyclopaedia of Language_09 docx

of mankind at a correspondingly primitive stage of development. From these beginnings language typology emerged. The problem of the origin of language itself suffered an interesting fate: the prize offered by the Berlin Academy in 1771 for an essay on this subject attracted some 31 entries, and, despite Herder’s winning contribution (Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache), continued to prompt lively discussion to the end of the century and beyond. That the Société de Linguistique de Paris found it necessary to proscribe contributions on this subject as late as 1866 shows as clearly that popular interest in the subject was still very much alive as that the academic mainstream despaired of ever finding a solution. But in the meantime an unexpected new element was introduced: the Sanskrit language. The question of language origin was first briefly diverted into the assumption that Sanskrit was the parent language, and then forgotten as energy went into the detailed formal comparison of Sanskrit and cognate languages. A few scholars took advantage of the breadth of perspective afforded by the discovery of Sanskrit and still more exotic languages to formulate far-reaching hypotheses about the nature and role of language. Wilhelm von Humboldt, brother of the scientist and explorer Alexander and a friend of Goethe’s, viewed language as the organ of inner existence, the way to understanding—or manifesting—thoughts and feelings (Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts, 1836). The human spirit manifests itself in different forms of civilisation and culture among different peoples, and also in different languages. Each is an attempt, an approximation, a contribution to the universal need to develop a people’s intellectual and spiritual powers and to unfold their own mode of relating to the world. Far from representing phenomena directly, each language articulates that speech community’s perception of the world around it from its own distinctive point of view. Humboldt’s deep interest in the essence of individual differences between languages is found not so much in the mainstream of theoretical linguistics in the twentieth century as in anthropological linguistics, initiated by the work of E.Sapir and B.L.Whorf, and in the work of German scholars from Leo Weisgerber on. But by the time Humboldt’s great work was published (posthumously) the universal aspect of language study was being pushed aside by the newly emerging discipline of comparative philology. Although philologists of the stature of Jakob Grimm, Max Müller, H.Steinthal, and W.D.Whitney concerned themselves with problems like the ultimate origin of language, its relation to thought, and its position among the sciences, their writings on these subjects were eclipsed by the contemporary enthusiasm for historical and comparative work. Thus it was that although the ideas taught by Ferdinand de Saussure in his celebrated lecture course at Geneva (Cours de linguistique générale, published posthumously on the basis of his students’ lecture notes in 1916) were far from novel, and had been in circulation intermittently during the nineteenth century, in the changed intellectual climate of the post-Great War world they struck the scholarly community as fresh, stimulating, and above all unfamiliar. The consequence was an over-rigid interpretation of ideas presented schematically in the Cours which had once been current in subtler and more diversified guises. Such, for instance, has been the case with the doctrine of l’arbitraire du signe, the arbitrary nature of the relationship between the linguistic sign and what it denotes. Elevated into a dogma in most branches of linguistics, it contravenes the intuitive feeling of the native speaker (and the literary critic) for the affective value of certain sounds and sound-groups, a fact recognised by von Humboldt (and by Plato long before). The linguistic sign, defined as the union between a concept (signifié) and its acoustic representation (signifiant), is yet another manifestation of Aristotle’s schema, but lacking the refinement of the level of percept. Saussure’s distinction between the synchronic and the diachronic approach to language was taken as a charter for the liberation of a synchronic descriptive structural linguistics from historical linguistics, despite Saussure’s own awareness of the symbiotic relationship of the two temporal axes. Perhaps the most fruitful of Saussure’s insights has been the celebrated langue−parole dichotomy—langue that aspect of language which is a system of signs existing in the speech community independent of the will of any individual, while parole denotes the particular utterances of individual speakers; langue is the essential, parole the accidental aspect of language. Saussure’s importance lies more in his making explicit the implications of a structuralist approach to language than in the specific tenets of his doctrine, most of which have been modified by both European and American Structuralists—Bloomfield and his followers, Troubetzkoy and other linguists of the Prague School, Hjelmslev and the Copenhagen School, Martinet, Chomsky and the many offshoots of Generative Grammar—who all acknowledge some degree of indebtedness to him. But more important still are the consequences of his work for disciplines on the periphery of linguistics or quite outside it: semiotics, anthropology, history, psychology, philosophy and literary criticism. Particularly among French scholars—Lévi- Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, Derrida—Structuralism has undergone a development which takes it far beyond its original context. Within the linguistic mainstream, attention has recently returned to semantics, and the allied discipline of pragmatics, heavily influenced by logic, has sprung up. The twentieth-century development of these and other branches of Western linguistics is covered in Chapters 5 and 6 of this volume. Rather than duplicate this information, let us now shift the focus of this hitherto Eurocentric account to some equally rich but—to the Westerner—less accessible traditions. AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 445 3. NON-EUROPEAN TRADITIONS The Greco-Roman tradition out of which modern Western linguistics has grown is only one of several independent traditions of language study known to have existed in the last three millennia. But it is by no means the most ancient, nor necessarily the most varied or subtle in its understanding of language. The ancient Near East, India and China can all boast of linguistic traditions of greater antiquity, while for richness of insight and comprehensiveness of scope both India and the Arab tradition compete on equal terms with the West. Each of these traditions arose independently of the others and for the most part developed separately, drawing on the resources of the culture within which it grew. Episodes of contact and mutual influence were few but significant: the Arab tradition was repeatedly fertilised by insights derived from the works of Aristotle; Buddhist missionaries took the Indian system of phonetic classification to Tang dynasty China; and Westerners twice received a vital stimulus from alien traditions, from the Semitic tradition around 1500 and from India around 1800. But to understand how each tradition came to take its characteristic shape it is more important to consider people’s outlook and way of relating to the world as they are manifested in all areas of culture, than to go source-hunting. In any case, a borrowed piece of doctrine takes on a different significance when transplanted into a alien cultural setting, and the very act of borrowing is itself important. Although the Arab, the Indian and the Chinese linguistic traditions would each merit discussion on the same scale as the European tradition, space permits of no more than the barest outline. In the circumstances, it has seemed most useful to discuss these traditions with reference to the Western tradition, contrasting the course of their development as well as glancing at those areas of doctrine where contact has taken place. The works mentioned in the suggestions for further reading offer a more comprehensive view of these traditions, as well as ample bibliographical leads. 3.1 The Arab world Apparently arising out of nothing, no venerable Classical tradition stretching behind it, Arab grammatical writing makes its first appearance in the elaborate and detailed form given it by its most renowned exponent, Sibawayhi, a bare 150 years after the death of Muhammad. This extraordinarily rapid codification was followed by an equally speedy and prolific expansion into all areas of language study: phonetics, morphology, syntax, semantics and the philosophy of language. In the space of six centuries linguistics among the Arabs developed in a direction more akin to Western post-Renaissance linguistics than to contemporary medieval work in the West. Yet by 1400 its momentum was gone. Instead of sharing in the intellectual change of direction brought about by the new world outlook of the European Renaissance, Arab writers in all branches of scholarship, scientific as well as linguistic, continued to work out of their old traditions, which had ceased to provide fresh inspiration. By comparison with European linguistics, linguistics in the Arab world reached a technically much more ‘modern’ level in a remarkably brief space of time—but, like a prematurely blossoming flower, withered away just as its fellows were catching up. How the study of grammar developed in its very earliest stages in the Arab world is likely to remain a mystery. Two factors played into it, one internal, the other external. Within Islamic culture great importance was attached to the Qur’ān, to the preservation of the text and the exegesis of its contents. As Islam spread to non-Arabic-speaking peoples the need for formal grammatical instruction became urgent, all the more so since the script did not indicate the vowels, nor, in its earliest form, did it distinguish among several of the consonants. Without a thorough knowledge of the language there could be no question of correct oral recitation of the Qur’ān, a vital part of religious ceremony. This was the motivation attributed to the reputed inventor of Arabic grammar, Abū ’l-Aswad ad-Du’alī (who died c. 688). Many of the most noted grammarians of Arabic, starting with Siṱ bawayhi himself, were of non-Arab (often Persian) or mixed descent. Had it been simply a matter of vocalising the text, Arab linguistic scholarship need not have developed further, even as the Massoretes concentrated on the vocalisation of Hebrew and allied problems connected with recitation of the scriptures, but went no further. But the needs of converts speaking unrelated languages, notably Persian, and the possibilities presented by the lively intellectual surroundings at centres such as Nisibis, Jundishapur, and later Baghdad, contributed to the unprecedented speed with which the Arab grammatical tradition emerged. Greek was still used in parts of the Near East in the first centuries of Islam, and much Greek material, including a part of the grammar attributed to Dionysius Thrax, had been translated into Syriac, a Semitic language with widespread currency in the Near East. Although the extent of Greek influence on the foundation of the Arab grammatical tradition is still disputed, the existence of contact between the two traditions is not at issue, and details such as the choice of a model verb meaning ‘to beat’ in both traditions—ḍaraba in Arabic, túptō in Grteek—corroborate this. More problematical is the question of dependence at the systemic level. Without parallel in the other major linguistic traditions is the importance of the terminology and concepts of Islamic law in early Arabic grammar. 446 LANGUAGE AND ITS STUDENTS The earliest grammar to have come down to us from the Arab tradition is the Kitāb (‘Book’) by Siṱ bawayhi (who died in 793). Perhaps its most striking feature to the reader familiar with the Greco-Roman tradition is the minor importance of semantic issues. The introduction begins by setting out the three word classes, names (ism), operations/actions ( ) and words ‘directed towards a meaning’ which are neither names nor operations (ḥarf). Names require no explanation, and are given none; operations take various forms to specify the actions of the names, and indicated what has passed, or what will be but has not yet taken place, or that which is and has not yet finished. Much of the discussion which follows, on , broadly ‘inflection’, is form-centred to an extent unknown in the West. Instead of identifying functional, semantic or logical categories such as ‘subject’ or ‘nominative’ or ‘first person singular’, and listing the different forms by which they may be realised, Sībawayhi identifies different formal states and processes, and exemplifies each one as it manifests itself in words of different classes. Thus, ‘stabilisation’ (or ‘taking an -a(n) ending’) occurs in both the ism and the : ra’aytu Zaydan ‘I saw Zaid’ and lan ‘he will not act’; but ‘stretching’ (taking an -i(n) ending) occurs only in the ism, as in marartu bi-Zaydin ‘I passed Zaid’, and ‘amputation’ (apocope) only in the , as in lam ‘he has not done’. Had a Roman grammarian wanted to work in the same way, he would have decided not to discuss the parts of speech in turn, but instead to treat all the forms ending in the same letter together; those ending in -a, for example, would include verbs in the imperative singular, nouns, pronouns, adjectives and participles in the nominative and ablative singular, adverbs and prepositions. Although Siṱ bawayhi works with notions like number, person and gender, they are to a large extent taken for granted: the emphasis is on form. A natural consequence of a form-orientated linguistics is the handling of syntactic relations in terms of a change in form effected by an operation ( ), whether implicit or explicit. Thus, the sentence yaqūmu Zaydun ‘Zayd stands’ contains two independent elements, neither entailing a relationship of dependency, whereas in inna Zaydan lan yaqūma ‘truly Zayd will not stand’, ‘Zayd’ is made dependent by inna ‘truly’ and yaqūma ‘he will stand’ by lan ‘not’. The parallels with modern dependency grammar are more far-reaching than this simple example suggests. A further manifestation of the Arab preoccupation with linguistic form is the profound interest in articulatory phonetics apparent from the very start of the Arab tradition. Both Sībawayhi and al-Hṱ alīl (who died in 791), the compiler of a huge dictionary, provided a classification of the consonantal sounds of Arabic based on the maḥ rag̣, ‘area of emission’, a broader notion than the Sanskrit sthāna and karaṇa, involving the specification of the point in the vocal tract at which the airstream is interrupted. Sībawayhi’s list of sixteen maḥ ārig̣ was gradually reduced to five, which passed into the Hebrew and thence into the Western tradition. Recognition of nasality goes back to Siṱ bawayhi himself, who offers the time- honoured test: ‘if you hold your nose, the nasals cannot be produced.’ Ibn Sinā, known to the West as Avicenna (980–1037), included among his voluminous writings a treatise on the ḥurūf (the Arabic term ḥarf, pl. ḥurūf, functions like the Latin littera) which contained a detailed description of the anatomy and function of the larynx. The lively Islamic tradition of phonetic investigation, represented by a large number of writers from Sībawayhi on, was paralleled by a no less active interest among Hebrew grammarians. The Arab interest in form and in physical phenomena was a characteristic rooted deeply in their culture, its manifestations visible not only in linguistics but throughout their intellectual life. It was from outside Islam that the impetus came to consider language from other points of view. In the second half of the eighth and during the ninth century many Greek texts were translated into Arabic (sometimes via Syriac), including the Aristotelian corpus. Under their influence, and particularly among grammarians belonging to the Mu c tazilite sect, a more philosophical approach to grammar took root, exemplified in the works of al-Fārābī (who died in 950) and az-Zağğāğī (who died in 949 or 951). Logic and grammar were compared and their respective domains delimited, and attention was given to such matters as the correct way to frame a definition, at approximately the same time as the assimilation of Aristotelian logic was causing a preliminary reassessment of the role of grammar in the West. Thus, later grammars such as Ibn Aṱ jurrūm’s (the famous Ạ jurrūmiyya) define the utterance as having form, composite, informative and conventional: the Aristotelian elements are obvious. (A further parallel with the development of grammar in the West is the popularity in the later Middle Ages of grammars in verse such as the Alfiyya by Ibn Mālik.) AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 447 The importance attached to the formal aspects of language is a natural consequence of the reasoning that, since language mirrors the world, it must be governed by the same laws. Since all phenomena perceived by the senses could be described in quantitative terms, so too could language. Grammarians sought regularities in language, particularly through observing qiyās, ‘analogy’, while natural philosophers, most notably the Pythagorean-influenced Jābir ibn Hṱayyān, traced the proportions found in natural phenomena in language. Whereas Western pre-Renaissance linguistics stressed those aspects of language which participated in the eternal and spiritual, Islamic scholars devoted equal attention to its earthly side. And yet by the time Western scholars were ready to appreciate the Arab approach, it had lost its impetus. The awakening to form experienced by Renaissance Europeans had nothing new to offer the Arabs. Arab linguists had travelled the same path centuries before; aware of the importance of form from the very start of their tradition, they had exhausted its possibilities. The Renaissance brought them no fresh tools to use. They were the lenders rather than the borrowers, contributing a few fundamental concepts from their rich stock to the founding of the Western disciplines of phonetics and morphology. They had much more to offer, but Western scholars chose to go their own way, arriving at the same insights in their own time, using their own methods. 3.2 India The study of language in India arose out of the needs of religious ritual, and remained closely linked with religion for most of its history. At the most profound level the Vedic hymns acknowledge the mysterious nature and power of speech: ‘Speech was divided into four parts known to inspired priests. Three parts, placed in hiding, mortals do not rouse to action; the fourth part of speech they speak’ (Ṛgveda I 164.45). And yet, despite their fascination with the spiritual nature of speech, Indians concerned themselves with its physical aspect far earlier than Europeans did. The immediate impetus came from the practical needs of religious ritual. The Vedic hymns and prayers used in Brahmin rituals had been given definitive form near the start of the first millennium BC. Handed down from father to son, the text inevitably began to sound first old-fashioned, and then downright archaic, as the Sanskrit language gradually underwent change. Instead of updating the text, the Brahmins felt it imperative to maintain its traditional form as accurately as possible. To counteract the sloppy pronunciation of the younger generation—the usual response the world over to the effects of language change—they instituted formal training, supported by lists of the legitimate assimilatory features (sandhi) found in each collection of Vedic hymns, prefaced (or finished) by a summary of the theoretical notions underlying the practical instruction. Although very brief, usually only three or four pages in length, the outlines contained in these texts (called prātiśākhyas) amount to an introduction to the principles of articulatory phonetics. They centre on the Sanskrit alphabet, itself a masterpiece of phonemic analysis and articulatory systematisation: a ā i ī ū ū rṱ rṱ ṱ lṱ e ai o au k kh g gh nṱ c ch j jh ñ tṱ tṱh dṱ dṱh nṱ t th d dh n p ph b bh m y r l v ś sṱ s h This order facilitates recognition of four basic categories: vowels (subdivided into monophthongs and diphthongs), plosives +nasals (the ‘five groups of five’), glides and fricatives. These categories were described and subdivided with the aid of various subsidiary notions: articulator (karaṇa) and place of articulation (sthāna), voicing, aspiration, nasality, degree of closure. The systematic nature of Indian phonetic analysis—arrived at somewhere in the first half of the first millennium BC— provided Western scholars from about 1800 with the key to handling features such as voicing and aspiration in an orderly classificatory matrix. The same attention to the physical aspect of speech is apparent in the oldest and best-known Sanskrit grammar to come down to us, Pānṱini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī (‘Eight Books’), written in the fifth or fourth century BC. The Aṣṭādhyāyī is very different from the hierarchically-structured grammars of Greco-Roman Antiquity, or even from Varro’s more fluid characterisations. Instead of allowing the structure perceived in the language to dictate the overall shape of the work, as Donatus, for instance, does in beginning with the smallest units of speech and building up to the largest, Pānini attaches overriding importance to the presentation, the outer form, of the doctrine. Economy of expression dominates: not only does he use a large number of technical abbreviations and a telegraphic metalanguage (which has to be mastered by the student at the outset), but he also employs a dittoing procedure which enables him to avoid repeating a rule which applies to many different types of linquistic phenomena—at the expense of assembling together rules which have nothing more in common than being affected by this more powerful rule. Each rule is given equal prominence, down to those which govern a single word; the concept of ‘exception’, so 448 LANGUAGE AND ITS STUDENTS integral a part of the Western tradition, is absent. Consequently, it is very difficult to form any impression of the structure of Sanskrit from the Aṣṭādhyāyī without protracted study. Traditionally, the young child would spend eight years memorising it before being shown how to apply its doctrine, for in order to generate even the simplest verb form, rules from all parts of the work must be applied. Not surprisingly, both commentaries, like Patanṱ jali’s huge and detailed Mahābhāṣya, (c. 150 BC), and simplified and rearranged versions of the Aṣṭādhyāyī, like Śarvavarman’s Kātantra (before AD 400) and the Siddhānta Kaumudī by Bhatṱtṱoji Dīksṱita (early seventeenth century), found large numbers of readers. Underlying Pānṱini’s work, and indeed that of all Indian grammarians, is the notion of ‘root’ as an abstract entity which never—or very rarely—manifests itself in actual speech, but provides the raw material which, after the operation of various phonological changes, becomes a base to which affixes may be added, eventually culminating in the spoken word. So much a part of the linguistic tradition was this that lists of roots were compiled from Pānṱini on. Pānṱini’s treatment of morphology is therefore utterly different from that current in the ancient West. He uses no paradigms; instead, he relies on complex sequences of generative rules. To take a somewhat simplified example, to form the third person singular of the present tense of the verb ‘go’, ̣ gam, we have to follow a procedure which involves the addition of a conventional marker indicating a present tense form: laṭ. A condition for the addition of laṭ to verbs is the insertion of an infix between root and suffix. In the case of roots of the class to whicḥ gam belongs, this infix is -a Replacing the present tense marker with the third person singular ending -ti gives *gamati, not yet a Sanskrit word. One further rule, prescribing the change of roots of the ̣ gam type when followed by a laṭ suffix, remains to be applied, producing the actual Sanskrit form, gacchati. Less ponderous—once it has been mastered—than it sounds, this method provides elegant descriptions of much of the luxuriant morphology of Sanskrit. It is rather less appropriate for foreign beginners, however (and it is interesting to note that whereas those European grammarians of Sanskrit who had had the advantage of instruction from a native pandit adhered as closely as they could to the basically Paninian system, scholars based in Europe—notably Frank (1823) and the enormously influential Bopp (1824–37)— abandoned much of the apparatus of the Indian system of description, preferring to adapt the traditional framework of Greek and Latin grammar to accommodate Sanskrit.) Accompanying Pānṱini’s keen sense for the formal structure of language was a precise awareness of the separate domains of form and meaning. One feature of Indo-European languages where their relationship has repeatedly challenged grammarians is that of the nature of case: to what extent can the changes in the form of a noun as it discharges different grammatical functions in a sentence be equated with semantic or real-world categories? In the traditional Western analysis of a pre-sandhi sentence like Devadattaḥ odanam pacati, ‘Devadatta cooks rice’, Devadattaḥ is described as the subject of the active verb pacati, ‘cooks’, and therefore has the nominative, or subject, case-form; but in the corresponding passive sentence odanaḥ Devadattena pacyate, ‘rice is being cooked by Devadatta’, odanaḥ ‘rice’, is now in the nominative case, even though its relation to the act of cooking has not changed. Pānṱini circumvents the difficulty by setting up a series of categories, kārakas, which, although ultimately based on the syntactic relations through the cases, are semantic notions which can be manifested in many different ways: through a verb (active, passive, in the appropriate mood and tense), a preposition, or by word-formation, as well as by case endings. In our first example, the agent kāraka is expressed in the active verb form, pacati; the name of the actual agent therefore need not express agency (since a kāraka expressed in the verb should not be given double expression), but instead takes the umarked, or default, form, the nominative case. In the second sentence, it is the object kāraka which is expressed by the verb pacyate, ‘is being cooked’, and therefore ‘rice’, odanaḥ, is now left unmarked (i.e. nominative); the agent kāraka, on the other hand, now has to be expressed explicitly, this time through the instrumental case form, Devadattena. Although far more comprehensively elaborated, kāraka theory has much in common with the medieval Western doctrine of the modi significandi: both attempt to explain how it comes about that the same semantic content can be manifested in different lexical and syntactic structures within a given language. Parallels may be drawn too with Fillmore’s ‘deep cases’ and with Tesnière’s dependency syntax. (See Chapter 3, section 5, above). As in the Western tradition, the problem of sentence meaning was tackled largely by philosophers rather than by grammarians, although occasionally, as in the case of Patañjali and Bhartrṱhari, the two provinces coincided in one man. The Vedas again provided the focus: given that their very words were regarded as eternal and uncreated, their nature and status required investigation. The Mīmāmṱsā school (third to second century BC) sought a philosophical basis for the Vedas in which linguistic issues played a large part. Its members propounded two opposing views of sentence meaning, both of which took the word as the unit. According to the first theory, sentence meaning was linear and cumulative, based on the word, an autonomous unit of thought and sense. Sentence meaning was simply the sum of the individual word meanings. According to the second, word meaning was defined by sentence meaning. Only when the listener had grasped how ‘cow’ and ‘horse’ stood in paradigmatic relation to one another in sentences like ‘bring the cow’ and ‘bring the horse’ could he attach any meaning to the isolated words ‘cow’ and ‘horse’. These two views were in time overshadowed by the much more thorough-going work of Bhartrṱhari (c. 450–510). In his Vākyapadīya he attempted to dislodge his fellow-grammarians from their complacent preoccupation with methodological technicalities by reminding them of the fundamental role of language and of grammar: ‘just as all the universals of things depend upon the form of their words for their communication, so is this science the basis of all other sciences’ (I 15). No knowledge is possible without the organising, sequential properties of language, so closely AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 449 linked with memory. Even the child has residual traces of a knowledge of the word from its previous existence, on the basis of which both cognition and the use of the speech organs can arise—neither of them faculties which can be taught. But what is the nature of the words that one utters? ‘Just as light has two powers, that of being revealed and that of being the revealer, similarly, all words have two distinct powers’ (I 55). A particular relationship obtains between individual sounds and that which is revealed through them, the sphoṭa. The speech-essence, the source of the world of reality, goes through three stages in becoming manifest in human speech: the stage of indivisible reality or consciousness without extension in time, in which an idea occurs in a flash, complete; the intermediate stage in which the idea is set out sequentially, becoming a logically- organised linear thought capable of being verbalised (and already possessing certain features characteristic of a particular language); and the stage of producing audible words marked by the individual idiosyncrasies of the speaker. The total meaning of a sentence can no more be explained in terms of its parts than the meaning of a picture can be explained by listing the different colours used in it. ‘Just as the meaning of the word is not understood from each sound, in the same way the meaning of the sentence is not understood from each word’ (II 60). Meaning itself is indivisible: it bursts forth from the spoken utterance in a flash of intuition. Words, roots, suffixes, individual speech sounds, are an analytical convenience, a grammarian’s fiction. By viewing utterance meaning as unitary and primary, and not dependent on individual words, Bhartrṱhari provided the basis for a very powerful theory of meaning—one capable of dealing with ungrammatical utterances, with foreigners’ grotesque but nevertheless comprehended attempts to communicate, with figurative language, and indeed with the suggestive power of language. Bhartrṱhari’s successors concentrated on figurative language, applying his teachings and their own to the study of Sanskrit poetry. In the ninth century Aṱ nandavardhana developed a more comprehensive approach to the suggestive power of language in his Dhvanyāloka, studying factors such as intonation, emphasis, gesture, tone of voice, and sociocultural elements peculiar to a particular speech community. Traditional Indian semantics is now undergoing lively investigation and development by Indian scholars versed in both Indian and Western semantics. 3.3 China In one respect the ancient Chinese world-view was strikingly similar to that of the pre-modern West, and in another unexpectedly dissimilar; and in each case this is reflected in their views on language. Perhaps the most conspicuous feature of the Chinese outlook is a belief in order. The universe was an ordered system, and everything within it had its place—heaven, the gods, the planets, man, the lower orders. To maintain this highly structured, hierarchical system Chinese society had recourse to the Confucian system of ethics. This system permeated the whole of society: nothing was without its niche, everything had its own meaning and purpose. It was incumbent upon human beings to discover the meaning of the phenomena around them. The second essential trait of the Chinese outlook, one which is visible as clearly in medicine as in linguistics, is a desire to function on two levels: broad, universal principles applicable to every sphere of existence, and individual, particular phenomena. Intermediate levels—generalisations relevant to a particular class of phenomena, for instance—were not investigated. These views naturally had their consequences both in the choice of fields of study and in the way in which they were pursued. If the aim of study is to discover the meaning of a phenomenon, then it will be inappropriate to remain upon the level of the phenomena themselves. Explanations must be sought on a higher level (unless the seeker is to revert to reductionism). Hence, in China as in the medieval West, astronomy merged into astrology and biology into the teleological and moralising remarks of medieval bestiaries. Chinese thinkers observed processes on one level, the physical, but sought explanations on another. This attitude naturally had implications for the study of language. There was no notion of studying language ‘in and for itself; only those aspects were studied which were compatible with the Chinese world-view. So, for example, there are no comprehensive descriptions of Chinese grammar. Instead, language was used to fortify the ethical bases of Chinese society. For example, Confucius, when asked about the true nature of a government, replied that it was of the essence of a government (zheng) to be upright (zheng): the semantic connection reinforces the natural order of things, as in the medieval Western association of reges with recte agenda. Argumentation of this kind plays a large part in early Chinese ethics and philosophy, notably in the works of Confucius and Mencius. Essentially, the question asked was ‘what light can language shed on the world?’ That part of language most likely to illuminate the world was its meaningful aspect. Consequently, it was the word which was the focus of Chinese linguistics— the word as the bearer or embodiment of meaning. Levels below the word— morphology and phonetics—could contribute nothing (phonology was a special case which we will consider later), while the study of meaning at a higher level was carried out by literary critics. Syntax was not pursued. Where the word as a meaningful entity is the centre of attention, then linguistic study will tend to focus on word- lists: vocabularies, glossaries, thesauruses, dictionaries. Lexicography and dialect studies, also concentrating on lexis, were the most highly developed branches of linguistics in pre-modern China. The earliest dictionary, ascribed to a disciple of Confucius, Zi Xia, is the Er Ya (‘Treasury of Fine Words’, between the third and first centuries BC). It is divided into nineteen sections, most of which are semantic categories: names, idioms, 450 LANGUAGE AND ITS STUDENTS difficult words, family relationships, occupations, tools, music, sky (both the calendar and climate), land, hills, mountains, water, plants, trees, insects and reptiles, fish, birds, wild animals, domestic animals. Any semantic classification suffers from certain limitations. Many words do not lend themselves to categorisation on this basis, a problem which the Er Ya acknowledged by reserving several sections for miscellaneous terms and words used figuratively. Perhaps more to the point, what of the difficulties faced by the reader of an unfamiliar text who wants to look up a strange character? To be told to look it up in a semantically-classified work puts him a similar plight to that of the Western child who asks how to spell a word and is told to look it up in an alphabetically-ordered dictionary. A path to a solution was suggested by the most famous of all Chinese dictionaries, the Shuo Wen Jie Zi (‘The Explanation of Simple and Derived Characters’) (c. 100 AD). As its name suggests, the focus of classification has shifted from the meanings to the characters. Characters were assigned to one or another of six categories on the basis of their construction—iconic, symbolic, phonetic and phonetic loan, semantic compound, modified—and the semantic common factor, or radical, was isolated and used as the criterion of classification. The original list of 540 radicals was later reduced to 360, and finally to the list of 214 which is still in use today. Dictionaries which rely on radicals as their ordering criterion still have much in common with thesauruses, for all the characters which share the same radical will come together. Thus, all the characters with the ‘man’ radical come together, ensuring a bunch of words denoting human beings, and similarly words denoting liquids are grouped together because they have in common the ‘water’ radical, and so on. Under each radical characters are listed in order according to the number of strokes additional to the radical they have, making it possible to locate unfamiliar ones. Only in the present century, under Western influence, have Chinese lexicographers experimented with phonetic principles. The celebrated distinction between ‘full’ and ‘empty’ words, taken over into Western linguistics as a straightforward opposition between words with lexical meaning and words serving only to express grammatical relationships, was in its original context a semantic distinction between words denoting objective concepts or things, and those which were essentially subjective, expressing the feelings and responses of the individual. This category included intensifies, modal particles and also the verb ‘to be’ (which has greater assertive force in Chinese than in English). One problem which Chinese scholars grappled with from very early times was that of indicating pronunciation in a script in which each character represented an entire word. For dialect studies in particular the lack of any means of phonetic representation was a significant handicap. Early works resorted to homophony, saying that character x sounded like character y. Some time before about 600 AD a more satisfactory technique was developed. Called fanqie, it involved the analysis of the syllable into two segments, (a) the initial vowel or consonant plus (b) the rest of the syllable, including the tone. Another syllable beginning with the same initial was found to represent (a), and one finishing with the same features as (b) to represent the second half. Thus, dong could be represented by de hong. The system was further refined to permit the indication of suprasegmental phenomena such as palatalisation. The fanqie analysis was structural in nature: it works with relationships between entities rather than with the entities in their own right, a procedure also characteristic of Chinese medicine. Not until the basic tenets of Indian teaching reached China with Buddhism, from the seventh century, was a kind of articulatory phonetics elaborated. Initial consonants were divided into five categories according to place of articulation: lips, tongue (=dentals), incisors (=dental affricates), molars (=velars), throat (=laryngeals). Although degrees of voicing were recognised, palatalisation—not catered for by the Indian system—was ignored. Interestingly, although a popular version of Indian grammar was introduced at the same time, it failed to undergo further development. Only with the arrival of Western grammar at the end of the nineteenth century did Chinese scholars give serious consideration to the grammar of their own language. The celebrated product of this meeting was Ma Jian Zhong’s Ma Shi Wen Tong (1898), a grammar which sought to apply ‘universal’ (i.e. Latin) categories as closely as possible to Chinese. Only in the present century—when political vicissitudes have permitted—have scholars such as Wang Li attempted to devise a more sensitive grammatical structure for Chinese, a process in which many Western scholars, particularly in America, have joined. REFERENCES Where these are simply evaluated within particular approaches they appear in the text above. Where they are more generally useful they are listed below (with brief references in the text). GENERAL REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING Items are presented in relation to the places and eras surveyed. A reader’s further study is best guided by the titles in each section. AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 451 I. General (including works relevant to several sections) Amirova, T.A., Ol’chovikov, B.A. and V.Roždestvenskij, Ju. (1980) Abriss der Geschichte der Linguistik, transl. from the Russian (1975) by Meier, B., VEB Bibliographisches Institut, Leipzig. Arens, H. (1st ed. 1955, 2nd ed. 1969) Sprachwissenschaft: Der Gang ihrer Entwicklung von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart 2 vols., Athenäum Fischer, Frankfurt. Asher, R.E. and Henderson, E.J.A. (eds) (1981) Towards a History of Phonetics, The University Press, Edinburgh. Auroux, S. et al. (1985) La linguistique fantastique, Joseph Clims, Paris. Borst, A. (1957–63) Der Turmbau von Babel: Geschichte der Meinungen über Ursprung und Vielfalt der Sprachen und Völker 3 vols., Anton Hiersemann, Stuttgart. Bynon, T. and Palmer, F.R. (eds) (1986) Studies in the History of Western Linguistics in Honour of R.H.Robins, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Foucault, M. (1966) Les mots et les choses, Gallimard, Paris, transl. into English as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (1970), Tavistock, London. Histoire Epistémologie Langage (1979–). Historiographia Linguistica (1974–). Hymes, D. (1974) Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and Paradigms, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind. Koerner, E.F.K. (1978) Western Histories of Linguistic Thought: An Annotated Chronological Bibliography 1822−1976, Studies in the History of Linguistics 11, Benjamins, Amsterdam. Parret, H. (1976) History of Linguistic Thought and Contemporary Linguistics, Walter de Gruyter, Berlin and New York. Robins, R.H. (1st ed. 1967, 2nd ed. 1979) A Short History of Linguistics, Longman, London. Schmitter, P. (1982) Untersuchungen zur Historiographie der Linguistik: Struktur—Methodik —theoretische Fundierung, Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik 181, Gunter Narr, Tübingen. Sebeok, T.A. (1975) Current Trends in Linguistics 13: Historiography of Linguistics, 2 vols., Mouton, The Hague. Todorov, Ts. (1972) ‘Le sense des sons’, Poétique 11: 446–62. II. Greco-Roman Antiquity Allen, W.S. (1981) ‘The Greek contribution to the history of phonetics’, in Asher and Henderson (1981):115–22. Arens, H. (1984) Aristotle’s Theory of Language and its Tradition: Texts from 500 to 1750, Studies in the History of Linguistics 29, Benjamins, Amsterdam. Baratin, M. and Desbordes, F. (1981) L’analyse linguistique dans l’Antiquité classique 1. Les théories, Klincksieck, Paris. Collart, J. (1954) Varron grammairien latin, Publications de la Faculté des Lettres de l’Université de Strasbourg 121, Les Belles Lettres, Paris. Coseriu, E. (1975) Die Geschichte der Sprachphilosophie von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart: eine Übersicht, 1. Von der Antike bis Leibniz, 2nd ed., Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik 11, Gunter Narr, Tübingen. Derbolav, J. (1972) Platons Sprachphilosophie im Kratylos und in den späteren Schriften, Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt. Holtz, L. (1981) Donat et la tradition de I’enseignement grammatical: étude sur l’Ars Donati et sa diffusion (IVe-IXe siècle) et édition critique, CNRS, Paris. Householder, F.W. (1981) The Syntax of Apollonius Dyscolus translated, and with commentary, Studies in the History of Linguistics 23, Benjamins, Amsterdam. Hovdhaugen, E. (1982) Foundations of Western Linguistics: From the Beginning to the End of the First Millennium AD, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo. Keil, H. (1855–80) Grammatici Latini, 7 vols+suppl., Teubner, Leipzig, repr. 1981, Georg Olms, Hildesheim. Kemp, A. (1986) ‘The Tekhnē grammatikē of Dionysius Thrax translated into English’, Historiographia Linguistica, 13:343–63. Law, V. (1986) ‘Late Latin grammars in the early Middle Ages: a typological history’, Historiographia Linguistica, 13:365–80. McKeon, R. (1946–7) ‘Aristotle’s conception of language and the arts of language’, Classical Philology, 41:193–206 and 42:21–50. Pinborg, J. (1975) ‘Classical Greece’, in Sebeok, T.A. (1975):69–126. Schmidt, R.T. (1979) Die Grammatik der Stoiker, transl. from the Latin (1839) by Hülser, K., bibliography by Egli, U., Schriften zur Linguistik 12, Vieweg, Braunschweig and Wiesbaden. 452 LANGUAGE AND ITS STUDENTS Steinthal, H. (1st ed. 1863, 2nd ed. 1890–1) Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft bei den Griechen und Römern mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Logik, Ferdinand Dümmler, Berlin, repr. Georg Olms, Darmstadt 1961. Uhlig, G. (1883–1910) Grammatici Graeci, Teubner, B.G. Leipzig, repr. Georg Olms, Heidelberg (1979). Wouters, A. (1979) The Grammatical Papyri from Graeco-Roman Egypt: Contributions to the Study of the ‘Ars grammatica’ in Antiquity, Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Academic voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten van België, Klasse der Letteren 41. III. The Middle Ages Ahlqvist, A. (ed.) (1987) Les premières grammaires des vernaculaires européens (=Histoire Epistémologie Langage 9.1). Bursill-Hall, G.L. (1975) ‘The Middle Ages’, in Sebeok, T.A. (1975):179–230. Bursill-Hall, G.L. (1981) A Census of Medieval Latin Grammatical Manuscripts, Grammatica Speculativa 4, Frommann-Holzboog, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt. Covington, M.A. (1984) Syntactic Theory in the High Middle Ages: Modistic Models of Sentence Structure, Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 39, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Covington, M.A. (1986) ‘Grammatical theory in the Middle Ages’, in Bynon and Palmer (1986):23–42. Hunt, R.W. (1980) Collected Papers on the History of Grammar in the Middle Ages, Studies in the History of Linguistics, 5, Benjamins, Amsterdam. Law, V. (1982) The Insular Latin Grammarians, Studies in Celtic History 3, The Boydell Press, Woodbridge. Law, V. (1985) ‘Linguistics in the earlier Middle Ages: the Insular and Carolingian grammarians’, Transactions of the Philological Society: 171–93. Pinborg, J. (1967) Die Entwicklung der Sprachtheorie im Mittelalter, Aschendorff, Münster and Frost-Hansen, Copenhagen. Rosier, I. (1983) La grammaire spéculative des Modistes, Presses Universitaires de Lille, Lille. IV. Since the Renaissance Aarsleff, H. (1976, repr. with corrections 1983) The Study of Language in England, 1780− 1860 University of Minnesota, Minneapolis and Athlone, London. Aarsleff, H. (1982) From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History, Athlone, London. Alston, R.C. (1965–73) A Bibliography of the English Language from the Invention of Printing to the Year 1800, 11 vols., E.J.Arnold, Leeds and Bradford. Anthropological Linguistics 5.1. (1963): History of Linguistics. Apel, K.O. (1963) Die Idee der Sprache in der Tradition des Humanismus von Dante bis Vico, Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 8, Bouvier, Bonn. Benfey, Th. (1869) Geschichte der Sprachwissenschaft und orientalischen Philologie in Deutschland seit dem Anfange des 19. Jahrhunderts mit einem Rückblick auf die früheren Zeiten, Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Deutschland, Neuere Zeit 8, Cotta, Munich, repr. 1965. Beyer, A. (1981) Deutsche Einflüsse auf die englische Sprachwissenschaft im 19. Jahrhundert, Göppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik No. 324, Kümmerle, Göppingen. Brunot, F. (1966–) Histoire de la langue française des origines à nos jours, revised edition, Armand Colin, Paris. Carvalhâo Buescu, M. (1983) O estudo das línguas exóticas no século XVI, Biblioteca breve, Serie pensamento e ciência 71, Lisbon. Carvalhâo Buescu, M. (1983) Babel ou a ruptura do signo: a gramática e os gramáticos portugueses do século XVI, Imprensa Nacional, Lisbon. Dobson, E.J. (1st ed. 1957, 2nd ed. 1968) English Pronunciation 1500−1700 I: Survey of the Sources, Clarendon Press, Oxford. Droixhe, D. (1978) La linguistique et l’appel de l’histoire, 1600−1800: rationalisme et révolutions positivistes, Droz, Geneva. Dubois, C G. (1970) Mythe et langage au seizième siècle, Ducros, Bordeaux. Formigari, L. (1970) Linguistica ed empirismo nel Seicento inglese, Laterza, Bari. Gipper, H. and P.Schmitter (1979) Sprachwissenschaft und Sprachphilosophie im Zeitalter der Romantik: ein Beitrag zur Historiographie der Linguistik, Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik 123, Gunter Narr, Tübingen (revised version of their article in Sebeok (1975):481– 606). Hankamer, P. (1927) Die Sprache, ihr Begriff und ihre Deutung im sechzenhnten und siebzehnten Jahrhundert: ein Beitrag zur Frage der literaturhistorischen Gliederung des Zeitraums, Bonn, repr. 1965, Georg Olms, Hildesheim. AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 453 Hanzeli, V.E. (1969) Missionary Linguistics in New France: A Study of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Descriptions of American Indian Languages, Mouton, The Hague. Hymes, D. and J.Fought (1981) American Structuralism, Mouton, The Hague (revised version of their article in Sebeok (1975):903–1176). Jankowsky, K.R. (1972) The Neogrammarians: A Re-evaluation of their Place in the Development of Linguistic Science, Mouton, The Hague. Jellinek, M.H. (1913–14) Geschichte der neuhochdeutschen Grammatik von den Anfängen bis auf Adelung, 2 vols., Carl Winter, Heidelberg. Kayser, W. (1930) ‘Böhmes Natursprachenlehre und ihre Grundlagen’ Euphorion, 31: 521–62, transl. into French by J.Launay, ‘La doctrine du langage naturel chez Jacob Boehme et ses sources’, Poétique, 11 (1972):337–66. Knowlson, J. (1975) Universal Language Schemes in England and France 1600−1800, University of Toronto Press, Toronto and Buffalo. Lehmann, W.P. (1967) A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Ind. Lepschy, G. (1970) A Survey of Structural Linguistics, André Deutsch, London. Lepschy, G. (1986) ‘European Linguistics in the twentieth century’, in Bynon and Palmer (1986):189–201. Michael, I. (1970) English Grammatical Categories and the Tradition to 1800, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Muller, J C. (1986) ‘Early stages of language comparison from Sassetti to Sir William Jones (1786)’, Cratylus 31:1–31. Padley, G.A. (1976) Grammatical Theory in Western Europe 1500−1700: The Latin Tradition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Padley, G.A. (1st ed. 1985, 2nd ed. 1988) Grammatical Theory in Western Europe 1500−1700: Trends in Vernacular Grammar I and II, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Pedersen, H. (1931) The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century, transl. from the Danish (1924) by Spargo, J.W., Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., repr. 1962, Indiana University Press, Bloomington. Percival, W.K. (1975) ‘The grammatical tradition and the rise of the vernaculars’, in Sebeok, T.A. (1975):231–75. Percival, W.K. (1984) ‘The reception of Hebrew in sixteenth-century Europe: the impact of the Cabbala’, Historiographia Linguistica 11: 21–38. Ricken, U. (n.d.) Grammaire et philosophie au siècle des Lumières, Publications de l’Université de Lille III, Lille. Rousseau, J. (1984) ‘La racine arabe et son traitement par les grammairiens européens (1505–1831)’, Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 79:285–321. Salmon, V. (1979) The Study of Language in 17th-Century England, Studies in the History of Linguistics 17, Benjamins, Amsterdam. Salmon, V. (1986) ‘Effort and achievement in seventeenth-century British linguistics’, in Bynon and Palmer (1986):69–95. Stengel, E. (1976) Chronologisches Verzeichnis französischer Grammatiken vom Ende des 14. bis zum Ausgange des 18. Jahrhunderts, nebst Angabe der bisher ermittelten Fundorte derselben, new ed. with supplement by H J.Niederehe, Studies in the History of Linguistics 8, Benjamins, Amsterdam. Tavoni, M., ed. (1st ed. 1987, 2nd ed. 1988) Renaissance Linguistics Archive 1350−1700: A First (Second) Print-Out from the Secondary- Sources Data-Base, Istituto di Studi Rinascimentali, Ferrara. Trabalza, C. (1908) Storia della grammatica italiana, Ulrico Hoepli, Milan, repr. 1963, Arnaldo Ferrari, Bologna. Verburg, P.A. (1952) Taal en Functionaliteit: een historisch-critische studie over de opvattingen aangaande de functies der taal vanaf de prae-humanistische philologie van Orleans tot de rationalistische linguistiek van Bopp, H.Veenman & Zonen, Wageningen. Worth, D.S. (1983) The Origins of Russian Grammar: Notes on the State of Russian Philology before the Advent of Printed Grammars, Slavica, Columbus, Ohio. VI. Non-European Traditions Armenia Adontz, N. (1970) Denys de Thrace et les commentateurs arméniens, transl. from the Russian (1915) by R.Hotterbeex, Imprimerie Orientaliste, Louvain. Mesopotamia Black, J. (1984) Sumerian Grammar in Babylonian Theory, Studia Pohl: Series Maior 12, Biblical Institute, Rome. Persia Windfuhr, G.L. (1979) Persian Grammar: History and State of its Study, Trends in Linguistics: State-of-the-Art Reports 12, Mouton, The Hague. Judaism 454 LANGUAGE AND ITS STUDENTS [...]... missionaries often carried out language elevation and engineering almost single-handedly One of the best-known mission lingue franche of New Guinea, the Papuan Language Kõte derives many of its present-day structures from the grammatical and lexical efforts of the German missionary Pilhofer; the standard version of Central African Sango is a similar case Committees of teachers, linguists and politicians were... very widespread acceptance Pidginised forms of vernaculars have also been given official status in the case of Swahili AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 469 (Tanzania) and Sango (Central African Republic) (For explanation of the terms lingua franca, pidgin and creole see the note under the References to Chapter 26, below.) Code selection can involve more than one language Thus, a number of the new Pacific... particularly Latin and other Romance languages and, as far as we can see, all of them were conceived as closed systems rather than languages capable of change and adaptation The first artificial language actually spoken by a significant number of human beings was Volapỹk, an invention of the German priest Schleyer (1880) As already indicated, Volapỹk combined elements of both a posteriori and a priori languages... Indo-Iranian and Armenian, which are within the V group yet there is no sign of this marker in any Baltic or Slavic language in that group any more than in any other language on the k side Which (ignoring Anatolian and Albanian) leaves the unsatisfactory picture shown in Figure 44 More diagnostics, and more languages, in the tree bring further conflict and endless redrawing To decide on degrees of importance... 4.4.1) a succession of cleansings of the work of Grimm and others, and a series of discoveries leading to comprehensive explanations of the evolutionary facts of Indo-European consonants and vowels (and intermediate elements) The discoverers include Thomsen and Verner from Denmark, Ascoli from Italy, Saussure from Switzerland, as well as Brugmann himselfwith varying degrees of acceptance of the new revelation... Volapỹk, and the distinction between [l] and [r] is found in most of the AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 459 twentieth-century languages such as Esperanto, Ido, etc including Frater which is allegedly based on Chinese and Japanese as well as European languages, and complex consonant clusters are encountered in many of them Much more attention is usually paid to streamlining the writing systems of these languages... example of German where, from the late sixteenth century onwards, a number of language societies promoted first the status of German vis--vis Latin and subsequently the linguistic purity of the German language itself The recognition of a superregional German language was achieved with the publication of Schottels grammar of 1641 However, the general acceptance and spread of spoken forms of German related... controlled and regulated by some governing body such as an academy The desire to bring about a fit between language and the world underlies many literary creations Thus, to mention some recent examples, the use of Russian and quasi-Russian forms in Burgesss A Clockwork Orange has been interpreted as an index of a violent society and the use of numerous West Germanic and Scandinavian roots in Nabokovs Zemblan... picture of ad hoc decisions, inefficient and costly solutions and lack of methodology In a large number of instances, language elevation has continued to be carried out in a very haphazard fashion following the whims of politicians and pressure groups rather than the advice of such language planning experts as have established themselves in the recent past The following sketch of an ideal case of language... communication as an exchange of messages similar to that in telegraphy Language engineering for human communication (rather than interstellar, computer or angelic interlocutors) needs to cater for factors such as rule changing creativity, adaptation and accommodation, negotiation of meanings and structures and social AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 471 indexicality In other words, if language engineering . Hildesheim. AN ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LANGUAGE 453 Hanzeli, V.E. (1969) Missionary Linguistics in New France: A Study of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Descriptions of American Indian Languages,. systems rather than languages capable of change and adaptation. The first artificial language actually spoken by a significant number of human beings was Volapük, an invention of the German priest Schleyer. of Sanskrit and still more exotic languages to formulate far-reaching hypotheses about the nature and role of language. Wilhelm von Humboldt, brother of the scientist and explorer Alexander and