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cognomen for the period between the 17th and early 19th centuries when classical
thoughts and theories about language were proposed, especially by philosophers such as
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René Descartes, Gottfried Leibnitz, and Immanuel Kant.
In the 21st century, the methods of language study and characterizations of linguistics
hardly resemble those of Boas and anthropologists in his era. Current scholars cannot
capture all the characteristics of language in just one definition or modality to designate
linguistics as one singular field of study. Multiple views of language and linguistics
support a richer perspective about the study of language and people than one that
identifies linguistic methods only as tools to find out about culture.
Philology in the 1800s was the ancestor to general linguistics. Those who identified
themselves as philologists were oftentimes recruits from the field of philosophy. Their
studies provided historical perspectives about languages—classifying and categorizing
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them by phonology, morphology, and syntax (but not so much by semantics and
pragmatics).
Much of the early linguistic research (i.e., up to the first half of the 20th century) was
undertaken to find out about the speech of ancient peoples. Thus, there was a reliance
on writings—as well as on the spoken word—as these survived and changed into modern
eras. Comparative linguistics enabled scientists to look for patterns in spoken languages
in order to find connections among them that might give some indication of evolution.
Those involved in comparative linguistics were close cousins to researchers in the
current subfield of sociolinguistics, which attempts to understand language use and its
social implications as well as the consequences of language and literacy development
and education among citizens of world nations and societies within them.
In the latter half of the 20th century, the pursuit of language understanding enhanced
the identity of linguistics as a field constituted of several subfields, with each involving
the study of specific human dimensions evidenced in language use. For example,
forensic linguistics provides insights into language, law, and crime; neurolinguistics
includes the relationships between language and the human nervous system. This latter
field holds much promise for understanding individuals afflicted with aphasia and other
communication disorders. It also provides answers regarding second-language learning
and multilingualism. Another linguistic subfield, computational linguistics, is one that
has supported the developments of the computer age. This field involves scholars from a
wide range of related disciplines (e.g., logicians, computer scientists, anthropologists,
cognitive scientists) in the study of natural language understanding to create models for
incorporation in technological devices and instrumentation for cross-linguistic
communication and translation. For example, the quality of voice recognition on the
telephone, as well as the complexities of voice recognition responses, was unimaginable
even in the early 1980s. Likewise, translations of written languages in computer search
engines, such as Google, require sensitivity to meaning as well as to the interpretations
of words and grammar between any two languages.

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