The London School

England is a country in which certain aspects of linguistics have an unusually long history. Linguistic descripcion becomes a matter of practical importance to a nation when it evolves a standard or 'official' language itself out of the welter of diverse and conflicting local usages normally found in any territory that has been settled for a considerable time, and it happens that this respect England was, briefly, far in advance of Europe. Elsewhere, the cultural dominance of Latin together with this supranational medieval wolrd-view made contemporary languages seem to be mere vulgar local vernaculars unworthy of serious study; both England was already developing a recognized standard language by eleventh century.
The Conquest obviously destroyed this incipient advance; and, qhen Latin lost its role and cultures began to fission along national lines in the Renascence, other countries turned to the task of standardizing their languages sooner than we. But, from the sixteenth century onwards, England was remarkable for the extent to which various aspects of 'practical linguistics' flourished here, by which term I refer to such activities as orthoepy (the codification and teaching), lexicography, invention of shorthand systems, spelling reform, and the creation of artificial ‘philosophical languages’ such as those of George Dalgarno and John Wilkins. All there pursuits require or induce in their practitioners a considerable degree of sophistication about matters linguistic.


One consequence of this tradition for the pure academic discipline of linguistics which emerged in Britain in our own time was an emphasis (as mentioned in the previous chapter) on phonetics. Phonetic study in the modern sense was pioneered by Henry Sweet (1845-1912).