Amanda Braxton, age 16, of Springfield, I11., for her question:
WHAT EXACTLY IS LINGUISTICS?
Linguistics is the science of language. Experts in the field are called linguists. They try to answer questions about language including why there are different languages and why words mean what they mean.
There are two chief kinds of linguistics: comparative and structural.
Comparative linguistics studies and compares two or more languages to find similarities among them. Such similarities may help determine whether the language developed from a single parent tongue.
Structural linguistics studies languages as they are, or were, actually spoken. Comparative linguists have devoted most of their attention to the languages of Europe. But structural linguists often work with relatively unknown languages, such as those of American Indians.
In establishing relationships among languages, the comparative linguist often uses words called cognates. A cognate is a word in one language which, in both form and meaning, closely resembles a word in another language.
The resemblance usually exists because both words came from the same word in a parent language.
The comparative linguist also studies similarities in grammar and sound patterns to discover relationships among languages. Verbs in related languages such as French and Spanish follow similar grammatical rules. Dutch and German, which are also related, sound much alike.
A structural linguist, on the other hand, views each language as a structure made up of many units. He classifies each unit according to its function in the entire language structure.
Linguistics as a science started in the late 1700s. But long before that, man had tried to answer many questions about languages. Early linguistic studies centered principally on etymology, or the study of word origins, and grammar.
The ancient Greeks made the chief early contribution to the development of grammar. Aristotle, the most important Greek linguist, was the first to define the concepts of subject, predicate and parts of speech.
Greek linguists in Alexandria, Egypt, developed the grammatical rules of early Greeks. Roman translators gave many grammatical terms their present names.
Linguists who lived from about the A.D. 400s to the 1600s, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, followed the teachings of Aristotle. Linguists made little progress during these periods.
Comparative linguists started in the late 1700s. This movement marked the first stage in the development of linguistics as a science. At that time, linguistics was called comparative philology, a term sometimes still used today.
Comparative linguists, or comparativists, were the first to approach language study in a systematic manner. In the late 1700s, Englishmen living in India discovered that Hindustani, a language of India, bore an amazing resemblance to Latin and Greek.