The History of Linguistics in Europe: From Plato to 1600

by Vivien Law

Authoritative and wide-ranging, this book examines the history of western linguistics over a 2000-year timespan, from ancient Greece to the Renaissance. Vivien Law explores how ideas about language over the centuries have changed to reflect evolving modes of thinking. Classified bibliographies and chapters on research resources are included. A survey chapter updates the coverage to the present day.

326 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2003

Reviews

[Justpassingby]

Confession time. Early in my Latin course I developed the delusion that declensions were an invention; that the common people of Ancient Greece and Rome had used "simpler" languages much closer to the ones spoken by 20th-century (this was over four decades ago) Greeks and Italians. I was aware of the German cases, but suspected that Luther might have introduced them into his Bible artificially in an attempt to lift the German language to the rarified intellectual altitudes of Plato and Cicero.

As I got older I gradually accepted the mounting evidence against my misconception, with the final blows coming from a Hungarian phrasebook (case endings evolved from postpositions) and from Guy Deutscher's explanation of the effects of word order in The Unfolding of Language.

Vivien Law writes passionately. He does not shy away from the 2nd person or even from the occasional imperative. You want to study the history of this branch of human knowledge? What a wonderful choice, and how dangerous it is!

The history of European linguistics is rightly framed in the wider context of the history of European science, and the latter is shaped at least as much by the type of questions that our society encourages, as it is by the contingencies that lead to the discoveries of new answers. Medieval scholars paid little attention to the evolution of Latin, not because they could not see it, but because their intellectual framework of a constant world made such observations irrelevant.

The treatment is mostly chronological, with an introductory chapter on the definition of the subject and a concluding one on research. Very helpfully, the text is illuminated with numerous framed insets explaining a particular detail, a biography, or an important element from the general cultural context that can be read independently. The chapter on the Carolingian Renaissance starts with an intelligent essay on what a renaissance is (and isn't).

Although longer than my previous read on this topic, and narrower in scope, I have enjoyed it better because of the intensely didactic approach. Not a popular science book in the traditional sense, it is already more accessible to a novice like myself.

At least it turns out that my ideas about classical Latin weren't entirely delusional; mainstream linguists recognize that Cicero made conscious efforts to have Latin replace Greek as the language of choice for artistic and scholarly discourse.

[William · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a thoroughly engaging read for those new to linguistics and those who have a love for language, as it vividly contextualises the discipline of the study of language and how that study relates to the everyday practice of speaking. But more than that, Law's argument helps show the iterative cycle between language and lore through time and, at a time when language is truly celebrated (by no one more than the structuralists) but also chastised (by no one less than the post-modernists), this book readies the reader for understanding the fundamental gift of higher communication that beings often take for granted. In the spotlight is the legacy of Antiquity to ecclesiastical Christianity and Scholasticism as it looks at the historiography of the lexicon, the grammar, the style of every utterance ever made, starting from classical Greece and ending, rather than Rome, in Hebrew, where it might have begun. One of those rare reads that is as well written as it is informative.