语言学流派.pptVIP

Chapter Two A Brief History of Ancient Linguistics: An Overview I. Introduction As man began to know about the world and himself, he made efforts to know about language, the vehicle of communication. Serious discussions of the origin of language in the ancient times have been recorded in both the West and the East. In ancient Greece, many philosophers debated on the origin of language, and the relationship between words and meaning. Such debates went on and on between Naturalists and Conventionalists about two oppositions: anomaly vs. analogy, and irregularity vs. regularity. That is, they were arguing whether the relations between words and their meanings are based on a natural affinity between word form and meaning or based on the result of convention and agreement. The naturalist argument focused on the weight of onomatopoeia in the vocabulary and on a more general sound symbolism in the phonological structure of some words, tracing some Greek words back to an allegedly “natural” source. The conventionalists, on the other hand, pointed out that words can be changed at will and that language is equally efficient once the change has been accepted. Ancient China enjoys special fame in her theories on the origins of language. According to Xu Shen, a Chinese linguist in the Han Dynasty (206 BC-220 AD), the earliest historical record on writing can be traced back to an ancient figure named Fuxi (or Baoxi) drawing his Bagua, the Eight Diagrams. Xu Shen also mentioned that it was Cangjie who created writing, at the order of the Yellow Emperor. A study of the history of linguistics acquaints us with not only the great advances made in the scientific investigation of language in the past decades, but also the continuity of linguistic theory from the earliest times to the present day. The earliest scholar who did real systematic studies on the system of language is Paňiňi of ancient India, in about 600 BC. Ancient Indian linguistic scholarship, in the modern eyes, is fa