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STAGES OF DEVELOPMENT OF LINGUISTICS AND
LINGUISTIC SCHOOLS
D.I. Inomiddinova (NamECI)
Аннотация. В работе проекта рассматривается актуальная проблема
преподавания английского языка как иностранного студентам нефилологических
вузов. Представлен вариант практической реализации основных компонентов
методической системы в учебном комплексе упражнений и заданий, позволяющий
наметить новые и эффективные методы обучения иностранным языкам. Данная
работа будет интересна и полезна учителям иностранных языков и другим
категориям специалистов, профессионально занимающихся исследованием и
применением новых методов в обучении языкам.
Аннотация. Илмий мақола филологиядан ташқари университетлар
талабалари учун инглиз тилини чет тили сифатида ўқитишнинг долзарб муаммосига
бағишланган. Чет тилларини ўқитишда янги ва самарали усулларни белгилаш
имконини берувчи машғулотлар ва топшириқлар мажмуасида услубий тизимнинг
асосий таркибий қисмларини амалий тадбиқ қилиш варианти келтирилган. Ушбу
мақола чет тили ўқитувчилари ва бошқа тоифадаги мутахассислар учун тадқиқот
ва тилларни ўқитишда янги усулларни қўллаш билан шуғулланадиган мутахассислар
учун қизиқарли ва фойдали бўлади.
In its development, linguistics went through two stages: a) pre-scientific
(approximately from the 4th century BC to the 18th century), when linguistics was not yet
recognized as an independent science and existed within the framework of philology; b) the
scientific stage that began in the 19th century, when linguistics became an independent
science, with its own subject, different from the subjects of other sciences.
1) Formation and development of philology. Philological knowledge as a separate
type of activity and professional occupation developed in the Hellenistic era, by the end of
the 4th century. BC e. By this time, the highest point of the rise of Greek culture (5th
century BC, the so-called "Greek miracle", the "golden age" of ancient Greek literature,
philosophy, art) was already behind, and new generations were forced to live mainly by the
great cultural heritage of the past. One of the most influential centers that concentrated the
collection and study of monuments of ancient Greek writing was Alexandria in Egypt. One
of the largest libraries of the ancient world was formed here, numbering up to half a million
books and manuscripts.
In the purely practical environment of working on the manuscripts of the Alexandrian
library over several generations, a rich, brilliant philological tradition was created among
the Alexandrian librarians. Many of its representatives managed to become widely famous
even during their lifetime for their enormous scholarship, the art of handling manuscripts,
and the authority of the commentary. These are the names of figures III – II centuries. BC e.
Callimachus, Zenodotus, Eratosthenes the Philologist (this is how he called himself,
wanting to emphasize his glory as an extraordinary scholar), Aristophanes the Byzantine,
Aristarchus of Samothrace, whose activity (222 – 150 BC) is the time of the highest
flowering of the Alexandrian philology, etc.
The literal Latin translation is litterae, which means letters, and hence the written
word, writing, literature. One of the definitions of grammar that has come down to us and,
apparently, widely known in its time, belongs to Dionysius the Thracian (c. 170 – 90 BC);
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he understands by "grammatical art" "awareness in most of what is said in poets and prose
writers." The very content of grammatical art, according to the same definition, consisted of
four parts or “skills”: a) reading – the ability to read a work in accordance with the rules of
prosody, expressiveness; b) correction – the ability to correct errors in the text of the work;
c) interpretation – the ability to explain everything in it that requires commentary; d)
judicium, judgment – the ability to give it a proper aesthetic assessment, of course,
according to the canons of that time. To fulfill these duties, the grammarian had the
appropriate tools -: a) knowledge of the language, b) metrics and c) realities (ie, the things
themselves, corresponding to the words used in the manuscript). As you can see, this is still
a very broad understanding of grammar, but gradually a narrower one is taking shape within
its framework, interpreting grammar as “the art of reading and writing correctly”. In the first
Alexandrian "grammars" three sections are already clearly distinguished: a) the doctrine of
"letters", or sounds (since "sound" and "letter" were not yet clearly distinguished, these were
the rules for "reading" manuscripts); b) the doctrine of words, or "parts of speech"; c) the
doctrine of the "composition of words." These three parts correspond to phonetics,
morphology and syntax in modern grammars.
These ideas from Alexandria and other Hellenistic centers were transferred to Rome
(the original planter of philology in Rome was Crates of Mallos); it subtly continued to live
during the Middle Ages in the centers of monastic culture, took on a new life after the
Renaissance, and was finally transmitted to the new time in the form of a powerful tradition
of classical philology, that is, a philology turned to the monuments of Greece and Rome.
2) In the Renaissance, the process of decomposition of philology begins. This was
due to a number of circumstances. Firstly, with the development of trade and navigation,
with the great geographical discoveries, many new languages \u200b\u200bthat differ
significantly from the classical languages \u200b\u200b(Greek and Latin) come to the
attention of Europeans; the need to study these new languages required other techniques and
skills, different from those that were formed within the framework of classical philology;
this contributed to the gradual isolation of grammar from other branches of philological
knowledge. Secondly, with the end of the era of feudal fragmentation and isolation, with the
creation of centralized states, Europeans are forming a national identity, growing interest in
their own national languages and cultures. As a result, “national philologies” arise, which
differ in some way from classical (Greco-Roman) philology both in terms of tasks and, in
part, in terms of methods. Many European languages (for example, Germanic, Slavic)
differed significantly from Latin, and therefore required different approaches to their study.
Thirdly, the stock of all kinds of materials and information, accumulated with the progress
of philology, became so large that it inevitably caused the differentiation of labor. More and
more difficult was to become the task of explaining the monument in all respects at once,
and, moreover, a monument of any character. On this basis, the division of the former type
of education, that is, education of a general encyclopedic character, into separate special
areas arose. So, some philologists dealt mainly with poetic texts, others with prose texts,
some with handwritten texts, others with inscriptions printed on a hard surface; Some
philologists specialized in processing monuments from the side of language or metrics,
others – from the side of realities, etc. And since philology has always dealt with
monuments of the past, i.e. with material of a historical nature, then next to philology, the
science of history arose, turned not so much to monuments, but directly to reality itself: for
the historian, a monument becomes not an end, but a means, a source of knowledge of the
past. All taken together was the cause of a deep crisis in the ancient philological tradition,
which had a particularly strong effect in the first half of the 19th century, but was gradually
brewing even earlier.
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3) Separation of linguistics into an independent science. However, a real revolution
in linguistics was caused by the discovery of Sanskrit (an ancient Indian language) at the
end of the 18th century. The English researcher William Jones (1746-1794), having studied
ancient Indian manuscripts, came to the conclusion that Sanskrit is related to Greek, Latin,
and other European languages. He made the assumption that all these languages go back to
one common non-preserved ancestor language, which was later called the Proto-Indo-
European language. The works of Rasmus Rask (Denmark), Franz Bopp, Jacob Gimm
(Germany), A. Kh. Vostokov (Russia) and others laid the foundation for the first scientific
method of linguistics – the comparative historical method. It turned out that the Greek and
Latin languages are, in essence, only two separate islands in the vast archipelago of the
Indo-European linguistic world, moreover, significantly inferior to Sanskrit in their
significance for the purposes of the reconstruction of the Indo-European language, which
became the main goal of the new science.
Representatives of classical philology, a new direction in the study of language, the so-
called comparative (or comparative-historical) linguistics, was met for the most part either with
hostility or with bewilderment. In turn, comparative-historical linguistics was also characterized
by the desire to start off sharply from the ancient philological tradition of studying the language,
to break completely with it, which was quite natural, since this tradition prevented the new
science from gaining an independent position. Indicative in this regard are the arguments about
the relationship between linguistics and philology, the largest representative of comparative
historical linguistics of the 19th century. August Schleicher. The object of philology, according
to Schleicher, is the spiritual life of peoples, as it is presented in the texts, and the object of
linguistics is only language. For linguistics, it does not matter how significant in spirit the
people speaking a given language are, whether the people have history, literature, or whether
they never had a written language. Literature is important for linguistics only as a convenient
auxiliary material for understanding languages, and above all because it is possible to extract
from it information about past linguistic epochs, about former linguistic forms. In linguistics,
language is an end in itself; in philology, language serves as a means. Linguist – naturalist. He
is to languages what, for example, a botanist is to plants. The botanist must consider all plant
organisms, he must study the laws of their structure, the laws of development. As for the use of
vegetation, whether these plants are of value from a practical and aesthetic point of view, or are
deprived of it, is a matter of indifference to the botanist. The most beautiful rose attracts the
attention of a botanist as much as some nondescript weed. A philologist is like a gardener. He
breeds only certain plants that are of importance to humans. For him, the practical value of the
plant, the beauty of its form, color, aroma, etc., is most important. A plant that is good for
nothing will not attract the attention of the gardener, and such plants as weeds even cause his
dislike, regardless whether they are important representatives of plant forms or not.
But the new science did not appear in place of the old one, since traditional
philological studies on the language and style of individual authors, genres of writing, etc.
with its development did not stop, and the practical need for such studies did not cease to
exist. However, over time, the “classics” were forced to take part in the new scientific
movement with their own, already linguistically proper, works on Greek and Latin.
Linguistics here owed much to Georg Curtius (1820-1885), who recognized comparative
linguistics as one of the first representatives of classical philology and provided
fundamental samples of proper linguistic work on the Greek language (cf. his speech
“Philologie und Sprachwissenschaft”, 1861). Thus, the successes of comparative linguistics
were applied with great benefit to philological work on texts.
4) Saussurianism and structuralism. At the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. in
linguistics, a number of scientific schools appear, a common feature of which is militant
anti-philologism. Particularly characteristic in this respect are the linguistic views of
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Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913), the founder of the Geneva School. In his "Course of
General Linguistics" he formulates the task of linguistics: "The only and true subject of
linguistics is language considered in and for itself." Saussure belittles the importance of
comparative historical linguistics, since, in his opinion, it does not study language as a
system, but only disparate changes. Further, he argues that for a linguist there is no need to
study the history of the people who speak the language, its literature, culture: “Generally
speaking, there is no need to know the conditions in which this or that language developed.
With regard to some dialects, such as the Avestan language (Zend) and Old Slavonic, it is
not even known exactly which peoples spoke them, but this ignorance does not in the least
prevent us from studying them from the inside. "Linguist" is again opposed to "philologist".
Saussure became the forerunner and spiritual father of a powerful trend in linguistics of the
twentieth century. – structuralism, which proclaimed the study of language as an immanent
(self-sufficient, independent) system of signs as the main goal of linguistics. Ultimately, this
approach to language led to the dehumanization of linguistics.
5) Prerequisites for a new synthesis of linguistics and philology. From the middle and
second half of the twentieth century. both linguists and literary critics have been actively
talking about the need for a new integration of sciences. It became clear that language
cannot be studied in isolation from other cultural and social phenomena: such a study will
inevitably be incomplete and distort our ideas about language. Language can and should be
studied not only in general, strictly grammatically, but also in the specific conditions of its
historical existence and development. And as soon as this question is raised about the
specific historical conditions of the life of a language, the question of the connection
between the language and the areas of culture closest to it inevitably arises. Language then
appears to the gaze of the researcher not only as an immanent system of signs serving the
needs of thinking and social communication, but as one or another set of speech acts, texts
of different genres and styles, that is, practical applications of this system that arise in a
certain human environment, in a certain time, for the sake of specific practical interests –
everyday, literary, artistic, etc. There is a need to study the language in the specific cultural
and historical conditions of its growth and development.
REFERENCES:
1.
Brown H. 2000. Principles of language learning and teaching (4th ed.). New York:
Addison-Wesley Longman, Inc
2.
Penny Ur. 1999. A course of language teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
3.
Thornbury Scott. 2006. How to Teach Grammar. England: Pearson Education
Limited.
4. Vagramova, Ya. V. Linguistic personality from the standpoint of the theory of
bilingualism / N. V. Vagramova // Formation of a bilingual personality based on a
competency-based approach / ed. G. A. Baeva. – St. Petersburg: Publishing House of St.
Petersburg. un-ta, 2012. – S. 5-20.
5. V. M. Filatov [and others]; under. ed. V. M. Filatova. – Rostov n / a : Phoenix,
2004. Methods of teaching foreign languages in elementary and basic general education
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6. https://www.bartleby.com/essay/Linguistic-Stereotypes-F3HHCFYVC
7. http://iteslj.org/Techniques/Huang-RolePlay.html
8. http: // iteslj.org/Technique/Kodotchigova-RolePlay.html
