Linguistics.
It can be approached with the viewpoint of descriptive, historical and comparative. We are going to elaborate each one of it.
Descriptive Linguistics :
Descriptive linguistics is a discipline in which the principles of linguistics, or the scientific study of language, are presented through description of one language. Through this process, scholars seek to identify the general linguistic principles that also characterise other languages. It is a required course for many disciplines, in that it combines understanding of the technical materials of language (phonemes, morphemes, syntax, pragmatics, etc.) with critical thinking skills that are universally appreciated. Problem-solving and analysis are keys to discovering the linguistic units that all humans use in their languages. As language is a uniquely human phenomenon that many consider to be species-specific and uniform, its study can help us better understand who we are as members of the species.
Historical Linguistics :
Historical linguistics, also called diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
1. to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages
2. to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative linguistics)
3. to develop general theories about how and why language changes
4. to describe the history of speech communities
5. to study the history of words, i.e. etymology
Initially, all modern linguistics was historical in orientation. Even the study of modern dialects involved looking at their origins. Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics is fundamental to the present day organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics is defined as the study of successive synchronic stages. Saussure's clear demarcation, however, has had both defenders and critics.
In linguistics, a synchronic analysis is one that views linguistic phenomena only at a given time, usually the present, though a synchronic analysis of a historical language form is also possible. This may be distinguished from diachronic, which regards a phenomenon in terms of developments through time. Diachronic analysis is the main concern of historical linguistics; however, most other branches of linguistics are concerned with some form of synchronic analysis.
Comparative Linguistics :
Comparative linguistics, formerly Comparative Grammar, or Comparative Philology, study of the relationships or correspondences between two or more languages and the techniques used to discover whether the languages have a common ancestor. Comparative grammar was the most important branch of linguistics in the 19th century in Europe. Also called comparative philology, the study was originally stimulated by the discovery by Sir William Jones in 1786 that Sanskrit was related to Latin, Greek, and German.
An assumption important to the comparative method is the Neogrammarian principle that the laws governing sound change are regular and have no exceptions that cannot be accounted for by some other regular phenomenon of language. As an example of the method, English is seen to be related to Italian if a number of words that have the same meaning and that have not been borrowed are compared: piede and “foot,” padre and “father,” pesce and “fish.” The initial sounds, although different, correspond regularly according to the pattern discovered by Jacob Grimm and named Grimm’s law after him; the other differences can be explained by other regular sound changes. Because regular correspondences between English and Italian are far too numerous to be coincidental, it becomes apparent that English and Italian stem from the same parent language. The comparative method was developed and used successfully in the 19th century to reconstruct this parent language, Proto-Indo-European, and has since been applied to the study of other language families.
