The Stoics

Out of the Greeks' tireless questioning of everything around them grew the discipline of philosophia. It is hardly right to think of it as a unitary discipline, and still less to equate it with our modern philosophy, for the philosophia of the Greeks subsumed many disparate areas of knowledge. In the generations after Aristotle, countless thinkers took up the task of working through the wealth of ideas inherited from the Golden Age of Athens (box 3.1). Work of two kinds lay before them: systematisation and taking stock, and elaboration of the original often concisely expressed and sketchily developed ideas. Amongst the people who participated in this activity were the members of the most famous philosophical school in the ancient world, the Stoics. Founded by Zeno of Citium in the third century BC, and based as much in Asia Minor (modern Turkey) as in Greece, the Stoics grew in numbers and reputation, even counting a Roman emperor, Marcus Aurelius (121–180 AD), amongst their later adherents. Despite the esteem in which they were held in their own time, almost none of their writings have survived; they are known to us only from the snippets quoted by other writers, and from a sort of biographical dictionary, Lives of the Philosophers, compiled by Diogenes Laertius in the first half of the third century AD. For the historian of linguistics this is an intensely frustrating state of affairs, for, as we shall see, there is reason to suppose that the Stoics played a part in giving shape to the discipline of grammar.

Going further

So you want to go further in the history of linguistics? Good! You'll need to do a lot more reading, of course: longer surveys of the period from 1600 to the present, more detailed studies of the topics of your choice, and (last but not least) the source texts themselves. Nothing, but nothing, can replace firsthand knowledge of the original sources. You'll need to master the research techniques appropriate to the period or the topic which you wish to pursue further: paleography and textual criticism to facilitate your work with as yet unprinted medieval texts, for instance, or the bibliographical research tools that will help you to find your way through the vast literature of primary and secondary sources for any period. You'll find a guide to some of the research resources in the history of linguistics at the end of this chapter. You may need to attend specialised courses or find suitable books from which to teach yourself the necessary skills. Equally importantly, you'll need to cultivate the inner faculties a historian of linguistics needs, and think about ethics in relation to the impact of your work on others and your research methods.

Cultivating the faculties a historian needs

Right at the start of this book we thought about empathy as the fundamental attitude of mind that you need to adopt when you approach the texts of a past era. By now it will have become a habit of mind (I hope). With empathy as your fundamental attitude you can now move to cultivating the faculties which every historian of linguistics needs.

Linguistic thought in the Middle Ages

With this chapter we enter the western Middle Ages properly speaking – the millennium between Priscian and the Northern Renaissance, roughly 500 to 1500. Throughout this period scholars across Europe dedicated themselves to the twofold task of working through what they had inherited from Greco-Roman Antiquity, and of reconciling that inheritance with Christian doctrine. This long-drawn-out process took place in stages defined both by the character of the linguistic thinking of the epoch and by the classical writings on language known at the time. For by no means all the ancient writings on language that we have met in earlier chapters were known in every part of western Europe continuously from the end of Antiquity. Some monastic libraries had half-a-dozen Late Latin grammars, others a different half-dozen, and a few especially well-stocked collections had ten or more. Rarely did any two libraries own quite the same selection. Some texts were virtually unknown for hundreds of years, coming back into circulation after a lapse of several centuries. Thus, Priscian's Partitiones and in some areas his Institutiones grammaticae, and Aristotle's Categories and De interpretatione were unknown up until a little before 800; Aristotle's remaining logical writings and the Metaphysics until around 1150; and Varro's De lingua latina until 1355. For this reason alone it would be wrong to regard linguistic thought in the Middle Ages as a monolithic whole. And throughout these centuries, people's interests and priorities changed, as did their views on the best ways to teach and present linguistic doctrine.

The arrival of Christianity

With Christianity a completely new force burst upon the spiritual and intellectual life of Europe. No area of intellectual endeavour was unchanged, least of all linguistics. The language policy and transformed educational priorities of the Church, and the far-reaching programmes of education undertaken in regions previously untouched by Greco-Roman civilisation, created new external conditions for language study, while the few enigmatic mentions of language in the Bible spurred the best minds of the age to take up the challenge of reconciling new ideas with old. The centuries from late Antiquity to the central Middle Ages, from approximately 400 to 1200, are characterised by the permeation of traditional Greco-Roman ideas about language with Christian attitudes – a ‘conversion’, so to speak, of linguistics to Christianity.

Why was Christianity so important? Religion is peripheral to most people's lives in the West today, but in terms of world history, we are the odd ones out. Up until the Renaissance, people all round the world were aware of the existence of a spiritual world and took religious observances very seriously. On the wane for centuries, this awareness disappeared in Europe around the time of the Renaissance, replaced for almost everyone by tradition, and has been fading away in other parts of the world too. A second factor which gave Christianity and the Christian Church a far greater importance than they possess today was the collapse of the institutional structures of the Roman empire under the pressure of successive waves of Germanic peoples.

‘You're writing a textbook on the history of linguistics? That's impossible: only a team can do it now.’ That was the reaction of a French colleague when, back in 1990, I told her I was writing this book. On a practical level she was right. As the German scholar Peter Schmitter pointed out a year later, the history of linguistics was then growing faster than any other subdiscipline of linguistics. Even in the late 1980s, over five hundred publications were appearing annually in the history of linguistics, more than twice as many as in syntax, semantics or phonetics, its nearest competitors. No one person can claim to have read all the literature, or even a large percentage of it, much less all the primary literature – all the writings which touch upon language, whether by philosophers, theologians, grammarians, psychologists, anatomists, educationalists or indeed linguists – from every era and every corner of Europe. We are necessarily specialists. All the same, however, most historians of linguistics have to teach. When we pluck up the courage to do so, we overcome our private panic at the torrent of secondary literature and the daunting jungle of sources, in order to guide our students to the overviews from which they can get some sense of the overall shape of the subject. Naturally we linger in our own favourite spots, hurrying past those of our colleagues with scarcely a glance. What we lose by being selective, though, we gain by becoming alive to the grand themes and recurring patterns of the 2,500 years of European intellectual history.

Bibliographical resources

Annual bibliographies

These come out once a year and list articles published in a great range of journals, as well as books and monographs. To use them effectively, jot down the authors/subjects you want to look up, scan the table of contents to see how the bibliography is organised, and look your queries up in each volume, working backwards from the most recent.

• Bibliographie Linguistique. Covers all aspects of linguistics. The history of linguistics section is subdivided by period in the more recent volumes.

• L'Année Philologique. Secondary literature and new editions of Classical Greek and Latin texts, as well as sections organised by subject.

• Medioevo Latino. Medieval Latin material from 500 to 1300 (since 1995 goes up to 1500). Look under ‘Discipline: Grammatica’ and ‘Filologia e letteratura: Linguistica’ in the table of contents, and under the names of individual authors. The Fortleben (‘Survival’) section includes studies of the transmission and medieval use of ancient grammarians, listed by ancient author's name.

• MLA Bibliography. Heavily literary in orientation.

Turning-points in the history of linguistics

There are two turning-points in western intellectual history, two brief periods when people's way of looking at the world changed fundamentally. The first was the Golden Age of ancient Greece, the era of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, when people for the first time realised that they were free to use and develop the intellect, no longer constrained by the dictates of the gods. For nearly two thousand years – the span of time we know as Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages – western scholars worked through the fruits of that extraordinarily fertile epoch, recasting Greek and Roman teachings on language and accommodating them to the altered needs of a Christian world and a Latin-based culture. Whenever there was an impetus for change during this lengthy period it came from one of two sources: the rediscovery of Greek ideas or an immediate practical need. No major new ideas came to ancient or medieval western linguistics from any other source.

During the brief period we know as the Renaissance – approximately 1450 to 1600 – all this changed. As in ancient Greece, the driving force was not an external event, but rather an inner one, a shift in people's perception of and response to the world. To understand this we need to think once more about the nature of knowledge. People always try to acquire knowledge which they consider to be both true and worthwhile; that basic urge never changes.

Introduction

From the very first pages of this book we've seen how closely the history of thinking about language and the history of thinking itself are connected. We've followed people's priorities and preferences in linguistic research, and found echoes in their epistemology, education, philosophy, science – in every area of their life touched by thinking. The period of time covered, the fifth century BC to the sixteenth century AD, is bounded by two major moments of change in the history of thinking generally, and so in the history of linguistics too; and, as we've seen, there were various lesser turning-points along the way. Even in the much shorter span of time since 1600 – a mere four hundred years – further changes have taken place in thinking and outlook, reflected just as clearly in linguistics as anywhere else. In this chapter we'll recapitulate by surveying the broad trends in linguistics in the two millennia covered in this book; and then we'll glance ahead at the four hundred years that take us up to the present day. That's not to say that what happened in that relatively brief period has not been significant in its own way; of course it has, and you've probably come across writers and lecturers who have dismissed everything that happened before the Neogrammarians, or Saussure, or even Chomsky, as not worth a glance. Some of the attitudes held by these scornful contemporary practitioners – such as the tendency to despise the old because it's old – took shape during this intervening period, while others go right back to the Greeks.

What is a vernacular grammar?

To many people nowadays the word ‘vernacular’ means ‘colloquial’ or ‘informal’, smacking of street usage, graffiti, perhaps obscenity – certainly not the sort of thing you'd expect to find in a grammar. ‘Vernacular’ contrasts with ‘formal’, one's linguistic Sunday best; in contemporary English, the distinction is more a matter of register than anything else. In medieval Europe the situation was more complex. The Italian poet Dante described the vernacular in 1304 as the language which we pick up from those around us without any rules. In the Italy of Dante's day, some dialect of Italian would have been the local vernacular; across the Alps, in Germany, some form of Middle High or Low German would have fulfilled that role, while in France Old French and Occitan, and in England Middle English and Anglo-Norman French were the most widespread vernaculars. Although little by little all these languages were coming to be used in writing, they were still far from offering serious competition to Latin. Latin maintained its status as the language of serious written scholarship and of international communication to the end of the Middle Ages and well beyond. Latin, Greek and Hebrew were regarded as qualitatively very different from any vernacular; as Dante puts it, ‘We also have a secondary form of speech called grammar by the Romans … Few people succeed in mastering it, for we learn its rules and doctrine only by devoting much time and effort to it.’

From literacy to grammar

In the Cratylus Socrates refers to ‘those who are skilled in vowels and consonants’, and Aristotle mentions grammarians (grammatikoi). In any literate society there are teachers whose job it is to impart the basic skills of reading, writing and numeracy. In ancient Greece the origins of the profession are encoded in the name: grammatikos (the singular of grammatikoi) is visibly derived from gramma ‘letter’ (plural grammata). Of course, one can teach someone to read without any grammatical concepts more sophisticated than ‘letter’, ‘sound’ and ‘word’: equivalent terms are found in all literate societies, and in most, if not all, preliterate societies. In other words, the ability to read and write – and by implication to devise a writing system – does not presuppose an extensive repertoire of linguistic concepts, still less a well-developed system of grammar or theoretical linguistics. What is it that gives the impetus to move on to that stage? In ancient India the desire to preserve an older, more ‘correct’ form of pronunciation was the spur for the description of the articulatory phonetics of Sanskrit; in the medieval Arab world the need of foreign converts to Islam for instruction in Arabic, the language of the Qur'an, together with a feeling of nostalgia for the ancient language of the Beduin, lay behind the first grammars; but in the Greek world the motivation for the writing of grammars is less clear.

The notion of ‘renaissance’

Between Classical Antiquity and our own day lie a series of renaissances, so-called ‘rebirths’ of a past phase of history, or more accurately revivals of interest in an earlier period. The Italian Renaissance, the Renaissance par excellence, is the best known, but every survey of European history reveals others: the Carolingian Renaissance, the Ottonian Renaissance, the Twelfth-Century Renaissance, and then, after the Italian Renaissance, the Northern Renaissance. After that the label ‘renaissance’ disappears, and instead we talk about Neo-Classicism, the Gothic revival, the pre-Raphaelite movement. Even the late twentieth-century preoccupation with roots and heritage, with manifestations as diverse as reconstructions of Civil War battles, Anglo-Saxon villages, historical theme parks, Elizabethan feasts, and companies which will trace your family tree, is in its own way a ‘renaissance’ of the past. Although such renaissances are invariably brief, they occupy a disproportionately important place in historical surveys of all kinds, from intellectual history to the history of art and architecture. Why? Isn't a retreat into the past a form of escapism, at best antiquarianism, at worst a failure to get to grips with the present?

In fact, almost paradoxically, each such period presages the appearance of something new. Latent in them is the germ of the next phase of development. Yet how can an interest in the past lead to the future? All back-to-the-past movements have certain elements in common.

Introduction

Without the Greeks of the fifth and fourth centuries BC western civilisation as we know it today would be unimaginable. It was the Greeks who laid the foundations of virtually all the scholarly disciplines cultivated up to the Renaissance – grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy, not to mention philosophy, literary criticism and medicine – as well as of almost all the literary genres practised to this day. The Greeks were the first Europeans to study language systematically, and not only that: they identified many of the issues which have occupied linguists down to the present day – the origin of language, the nature of the linguistic sign, the relationship between language, thought, and reality, and that between sound and meaning, the causes of language change, and the analysis and description of linguistic structure. It is extraordinary that in the space of three generations a small group of people could set the agenda for much of the subsequent intellectual history of the West, and of western linguistics in particular. How did this come about? Why were the Greeks so different from their predecessors? The Greek way of looking at language follows naturally from their newly emerging world outlook, and that outlook was very different from anything that had previously existed.

What does this book cover?

This book is about the history of linguistics in the West from its beginnings in the fifth century BC up until 1600. Although linguistics in many cultures outside Europe – in India, the Judeo-Arab world and China, to name only three – is at least as complex and as developed as linguistics in Europe and its American cultural offshoot, this book concentrates on Europe alone. There are now a number of good introductions to the non-European linguistic traditions by specialists, and it is misleading to treat these rich traditions as if they were merely an appendage to Europe. As for the chronological coverage, you'll find that up to the Renaissance, the intellectual history of western Europe can be discussed as a fairly coherent whole (if only because of the perspective which our distant vantage-point lends us). The Renaissance constitutes a major turning-point in western history, a turning-point marked by a new-found awareness of the outer, material, world, and consequently of external differences between nations, races, languages, customs, artefacts and so on. The markers of national differences, once perceived, contributed to the ever sharper definition of distinct national ways of experiencing the world, as much in intellectual life as in any other sphere. So from about 1600 on it becomes increasingly difficult to survey the history of linguistics in Europe as a whole; rather, you really need to focus separately on England, France, Germany, the Low Countries, Sweden, Bohemia, Italy and Spain, and their mutual interaction.