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.