Introduction

Linguistics is the study of language, sometimes called the science of language. The subject has become a very technical, splitting into separate fields: sound (phonetics and phonology), sentence structure (syntax, structuralism, deep grammar), meaning (semantics), practical psychology (psycholinguistics) and contexts of language choice (pragmatics). But originally, as practised in the nineteenth century, linguistics was philology: the history of words. Philologists tried to understand how words had changed and by what principle.