A Brief History of the Development of Linguistics in Ancient China

A Brief History of the Development of Linguistics in the Middle Ages

The history of the development of linguistics is part of linguistics. Linguistics as a broad concept includes the origin of linguistics and the invention of writing systems. As humans continue to learn about themselves and the objective world, they also try to understand language as a medium of communication. Legends about language are not uncommon. The earliest myths about language appear in the Bible. In ancient Greece, philosophers were so interested in language that they debated the origin of language, the relationship between words and meaning. This debate divided them into two schools of thought: the naturalists and the statists. Linguistics, like any other discipline, has its own history. The study and research of the history of linguistics helps us a lot to understand the inheritance and development of linguistic theories. The whole history of linguistics*** is divided into five parts: ancient linguistics, medieval linguistics, Renaissance linguistics, eighteenth-century linguistics and nineteenth-century linguistics. This paper will give a brief introduction to the development of ancient linguistics, the whole text *** is divided into four parts, including a brief history of the development of Indian linguistics, Chinese linguistics, Greek linguistics and Roman linguistics during the development of ancient linguistics.

I. As early as 1500 B.C., India had the Vedas and the scriptures, which were the earliest grammars

In the eighth century A.D., these two scriptures were transmitted orally in the form of Sanskrit. Indians had great respect for language and hence they studied it intensively. Thereafter due to the need of language study, Indians started compiling dictionaries and the words in such dictionaries were quite different from the languages spoken in Indo-European languages. In the fourth century A.D., Panini, a Hindi grammarian, compiled the first Sanskrit grammar book called the Eight Books. The Indians' study of language focused on the theory of language, pragmatics, phonetics, phonemic and syntax. They found that there was no inherent direct link between the form of language and its meaning, and concluded that language was arbitrary. Indian scholars also studied the relationship between the language people actually use and the language system. This research is similar to the theory of the relationship between language and speech later put forward by the linguist Saussure. The areas in which Indian scholars contributed most to the study of linguistics were philology and phonetics, where they observed and described the parts of speech and the ways in which people pronounce words. It was not until the nineteenth century that various theories of linguistics began to spring up. India is a world leader in both the theoretical and practical fields of linguistics and its findings have had a significant impact on the development of linguistics all over the world.

Second, in the fourteenth century B.C., the earliest writing system, oracle bone inscriptions, appeared in China

From the Zhou Dynasty onward, writing lessons were incorporated into classroom teaching. At that time, there was no philosophy or grammar in China, only the evaluation of ancient documents, called xinggu. Due to the lack of a morphological system, the Chinese language was not suitable for grammar learning. Beginning in the second century A.D., dictionaries began to appear in China. However, the dictionaries were full of waste words, and the meaning of some words was distorted, which undoubtedly made the study of ancient Chinese literature more difficult for the people of China. The first Chinese book explaining Chinese characters appeared in the eleventh century B.C. It included nineteen chapters and was an important leading book. Chinese dictionary compilation reveled with the late second century AD. During the Qin and Han dynasties, linguistics focused on the composition of parts of speech and the interpretation of the meaning of words. In the second hundred AD, Xu Shen wrote the first book explaining Chinese culture called Shuowen Jiezi. From the sixteenth century onwards, Chinese characters became known throughout the world and made remarkable contributions to the study of language. The first Chinese grammar book translated into a European language was published in the early eighteenth century.

The study of language in Ancient Greece began in the fifth century B.C.

Language researchers in Ancient Greece were mostly philosophers, so they paid more attention to the relationship between language and nature, and human thought, as well as between linguistic forms and logical forms. There were many famous linguists in ancient Greece, including Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the later Stoic philosophers.

Socrates did not leave behind any theory of written forms, but recorded them through the Socratic Discourse. Thyatira's contribution was mainly in grammar. Aristotle was a student of Thyatira and developed his ideas based on the theories of Thyatira. Aristotle's knowledge was so vast that his attainments in linguistics were only fragmentary, so it is not good for us to evaluate his attainments in linguistics. Aristotle believed that language is a representation of what is experienced in the human brain, and the written form is a representation of language. Written words are the written form of the words one wants to express. While language, like the written form, changes with different races, emotions are the same in the human brain. Although there are some inaccuracies in Aristotle's theory, a meta-linguistic model was established in the description and analysis of the Greek language. After Aristotle came the Stoic philosophers, whose study of language became more and more accurate. Their greatest contribution was grammatical. In 100 B.C., Dionysus compiled the first surviving book of Greek grammar, which he regarded as the practical knowledge of poets and prose writers in the application of language. Another great man in the study of Greek philology was Abrony, who wrote many books, but only a few survive. He was the first to explain the theory of syntactic usage, in the Greek language. It was not until three centuries later that he was considered an authority on grammar by the famous Greek linguist, Priscian. Ancient Greece's contribution to world linguistics was mainly in grammatical descriptions and theories of grammar.

Fourth, the Roman writing system came from Greece, and Latin had become the official language in the Western Roman Empire

From the second century B.C. onwards, Greek civilization began to spread widely to Rome. Donatus and Priscian were two pivotal men in the history of Roman philology. Priscian established the word and the grammatical modeling of the word as a yardstick, a study of the morphology of the word. Priscian systematically studied the literature of Latin antiquity, and he argued that the speech sounds and syllables of a language are the smallest units of language, and that none of the grammars he defined in his description of Latin made any sense. We can say that it is because of these Latin language researchers that we have an acceptable system of grammatical description, and it is thanks to them that the language was made complete at a later stage. They laid a solid foundation for grammar and the philosophy of language.

Currently linguistics, as an emerging discipline, is growing rapidly. The various disciplines are interrelated and mutually supportive. Currently, linguistics sociology, psychology, neurology, anthropology and other disciplines are widely intersected, forming an interdisciplinary study of sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and so on. Linguistics not only allows us to better understand the language itself, but also extends and applies in various other fields, providing us with a basis for solving problems in other fields. It can be said that the study of linguistics not only has theoretical significance, but also has a certain practical significance, is a new means of solving real problems.