Turning-points in the history of linguistics

There are two turning-points in western intellectual history, two brief periods when people's way of looking at the world changed fundamentally. The first was the Golden Age of ancient Greece, the era of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, when people for the first time realised that they were free to use and develop the intellect, no longer constrained by the dictates of the gods. For nearly two thousand years – the span of time we know as Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages – western scholars worked through the fruits of that extraordinarily fertile epoch, recasting Greek and Roman teachings on language and accommodating them to the altered needs of a Christian world and a Latin-based culture. Whenever there was an impetus for change during this lengthy period it came from one of two sources: the rediscovery of Greek ideas or an immediate practical need. No major new ideas came to ancient or medieval western linguistics from any other source.

During the brief period we know as the Renaissance – approximately 1450 to 1600 – all this changed. As in ancient Greece, the driving force was not an external event, but rather an inner one, a shift in people's perception of and response to the world. To understand this we need to think once more about the nature of knowledge. People always try to acquire knowledge which they consider to be both true and worthwhile; that basic urge never changes.