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Unit 3: Brief History of the Growth of Modern Linguistics: Bloomfield to Chomsky

3.7 Recognition of Indian Contribution by the West Notes

‘It was in India’, says Bloomfield, ‘that arose a baby of knowledge which was destined to
revolutionize European ideas about language.’ It was the Indian grammar that ‘presented to
European eyes, for the first time, a complete and accurate description of a language, based not
upon theory but open observation.’ Indian linguistic studies are the oldest and most valuable.
Whereas the ancient Greek and Roman linguistic studies were speculative and philosophical, the
Indians were the first to have initiated descriptive and analytic studies of language based on
observation. What Bloomfield, Chomsky, Fillmore, Firth and Halliday have suggested in the
twentieth century, had been suggested by Panini, Patanjali, Katayana and Bharthari many centuries
ago in India. During 2500 years history of human thought, none have excelled the Indians in the
field of linguistic study.
Indians were the first to classify the sounds, to emphasize and establish the role of vocal organs in
the production of speech, to say that the sentence was the basic unit of language, to remark that
language without meaning was like the dry wood which needed fire to burn, and to establish and
specify linguistic universals. It were the Indians again who gave a philosophical basis to grammar,
and said that language existed in a speech community, in culture. Our theories of semantics and
our advances in the field of etymology and morphology are the best in the world, and everyone in
the east and the west owes to us something or the other in the field of phonetics. Our ancestors
established the excellent standards of economy and precision in the description of linguistic
phenomenon. As stated by Bloomfield again, we were the first in the history of human thought
who ‘worked out a systematic arrangement of grammar and lexicon.’
In a sense, modern linguistics began in 1786 with the discovery of Sanskrit by William Jones who
declared:
The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of wonderful structure, more perfect than
Greek, more copious than Latin, and more completely refined than either.
No one can deny the truth that Comparative Philology was born the day when Sanskrit was opened
to the eyes of the Western world. The enthusiasm that stirred the hearts of those first pioneers into
the realm of India’s sacred language and India’s ancient lore still throbs in the veins of their followers
today and will quicken the pulse-beat of inspired workers for generations to come.
J.R. Firth, a distinguished linguist of England, has aptly said: Without the Indian grammarians
and phoneticians whom he (Sir William Jones) introduced and recommended to us, it is difficult
to imagine our nineteenth century school of phonetics.
Similarly W. S. Allen remarks:
In their recognition of the voicing process, the Indian phoneticians make one of their greatest
single contributions.
and
Only in the latter part of the nineteenth century, under the influence of Indian teaching, does the
recognition of the voicing process make headway.
In the words of R. H. Robins,
The Indian tradition of linguistic scholarship, devoted to the Sanskrit language, was of a very high
order, and its influence on Western linguistics was profound, and is by no means over. Unlike the
Greek and Latin grammarians and their medievel successors, Indian linguists exhibited great
interest and masterly competence in the phonetic analysis and descriptions of their speech; and
the development of the phonetic and phonological levels of linguistic analysis in the last hundred
years or so owes a great deal to their work.
Robins further observes:
The work of the Indian linguistic scholars is distinguished historically by two features, the excellence
of their phonetic description of Sanskrit, both as regards its accuracy and the systematic terms in
which they stated it, and their ability to carry formal analysis below the word in terms corresponding
to the modern morpheme.

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