Comparative linguistics

From Citizendium
Revision as of 21:32, 9 May 2007 by imported>John Stephenson (Created a stub because this is one of the most-linked-to articles)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Comparative linguistics was once the central focus of linguistics, involving the comparison of languages to discover how related they are historically. Known as compative philology, the field was popular into the mid-twentieth century.

Though nowadays most linguists are concerned with finding out about the system of language itself, comparative linguistics remains an important branch of historical linguistics.