1. Grammar in ancient time and middle ages.

In European tradition the beginning of linguistic, as a systematic study of a language goes back to ancient Greece. The primary Linguistic teaching there considered:

1. the most general philosophical questions, concerning language, such as the origin of human speech

2. they studied the structural categories in language (e.g. phonetics)

3. the usage of language (e.g. selection of words and construction from the point of view of their correctness)

4. the study of literary forms and rhetoric

There are 2 opinions on the problem of the relations between the words and the thing they signify:

Heraclidus (544 - 483) FUCEI (=be nature)

• there are natural connection between words and the things, which, they denote.

The nature of things predetermines their names, so language is given to people by nature.

Democritus THUCEI

- the connection between things and words in the result of human convention (договоренность), so language was created by people.

Aristotel was the first to put forward the explicit (подробный) grammatical:

• he stated grammatical categories in terms of logic

• he developed the theory of the sentence

• introduced the logical notions of subject and predicate

• developed the theory of word classes (notional and functional words)

Notional- noun, verb

Functional- conjunctions (copulars)

Name- the nominative case of nouns

Verb- the infinitive of verbs conjunction.

The Alexandrian Grammar

-Is called traditional. The achievements:

1) They grouped all words in 8 part of speech

-inflected (noun, verb, participle, pronoun, article)

- uninflected (prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions)

2) They described the chief grammatical categories (nominal parts of the speech: gender, number, case) (verb- number, person. tense, mood, voice).

3) They characterized the word and the sentence as a chief elements of the speech

4) They defined the sentence: a combination of words expressing a complete thought. They defined the word as articulate sound with a certain meaning, out of which the sentence is composed and in which is decomposed.

Dionedes – the Roman grammarian, who was the follower of Alexandrian school.

In spite of the fact in the middle ages the diversity of language was explained by the Bibletical language. The philosophers of that time considered the structure of Latin as a logically perfect form of speech. They understood, that all languages had the same basic structure of Latin, so they developed a theory of universal grammar, based on logical principles, whitn the same fundamental categories for all languages.

2. The Hindu grammar of Sanskrit.

Ancient Indian scholars made considerable progress in the study of language. Interpretation of all religious texts. The Vedas, Rig- veda. Gave rise to grammar teaching in India.

The language of Brahmins was taken as the model and called Sanskrit. While the common language of the people was called Prakrit.

Panini (2)

gave a detail description of sanscrit in the treatise “Eight Readings” consisted of very short grammatical rules in the form of sutra (сутра- древнеиндийское литературное, лаконическое высказывание). Panini described sanscrit as a language with strongly pronounced and widely used vowel interchange of grammatical means.

The main achievement of the auld Hindu grammar theory:

• The morphological structure of the word was discovered (root, stem, suffix)

• A detailed description of the form of the root

• The words of the language were classified according to formative characteristic

• Syntactical study was advanced, being partly combined with the study of word composition

Paninis grammar of sanskrit reached Europe in the 17^th century.

It gave the European scholars the accurate description of a language based not upon abstract peculations, but upon careful observation.

They saw, that the structure of sanskrit is very similar to Latin and Greek.

The first reaction was, that sanskrit was the source, from which all European languages had sprum. Later it was rejected, and it was understood, that sanskrit together with Greek and Latin formed part of a great family of languages. The comparative study of sanskrit and European Language gave the beginning of the historical comparative linguistics.