Stacy Yakel, age 11, of Vancouver, Wash., for her question:
WHAT DOES A LINGUIST DO?
Linguistics is the science of language. An expert in linguistics is called a linguist. He tries to answer questions about language including why words mean what they mean.
Early linguistic studies centered primarily on etymology, or the study of word origins and grammar. Ancient Hebrew linguists pioneered in etymology and many passages in the Bible give the supposed origins of words and names.
Hindu linguists wrote on the grammar and sounds of their language, Sanskrit.
The ancient Greeks made the chief early contributions 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 the early Greeks. Roman translators gave many grammatical terms their present names.
Linguists who lived from about the AD 400s to the 1600s, during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, followed the teachings of Aristotle. Linguistics made little progress during these periods.
Discoveries by linguists have brought many changes to the teaching of grammar. Today, many students learn different names for the parts of speech than their parents learned.
Linguists have also helped improve methods of teaching foreign languages. As a result, students can learn other languages more thoroughly and easily than they could as recently as the 1940s.
Most modern linguists are structuralists, meaning that the structural method for describing sound and pronunciation systems is far superior to other methods. Linguists are working to improve methods of describing grammatical structures. Some hope to find a way to describe languages in mathematical terms, and do use computers to help analyze languages.
Structural linguistics started in the early 1900s. The structural movement was a revolt against the comparative method. The early structuralists believed that the comparativists overemphasized languages as written in the past, and ignored languages as spoken.
The structuralists also disagreed with the traditional method of describing languages by patterns of conjugations and declensions. They studied many non Indo European languages and found that some do not have conjugations and declensions. Thus, thes languages could not be described by the traditional method.
The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure was the first leader of the structuralists. He formulated many basic principles of structural linguistics.
A United States anthropoligist named Edward Sapir studied American Indian languages. He found the traditional grammatical method unsuitable for describing Indian tongues. He reevaluated fundamental linguistic principles.