This collection of essays documents the important developments of Western linguistics from Classical times onwards.

The contributors; Foreword F. R. Palmer; 1. What is the history of linguistics and to what end is it studied? A didactic approach Herbert E. Brekle; 2. Greek (and some Roman) preferences in language categories N. E. Collinge; 3. Grammatical theory in the Middle Ages Michael A. Covington; 4. Originality in the medieval normative tradition Vivien Law; 5. Renaissance linguistics: the old and the new W. Keith Percival; 6. Effort and achievement in seventeenth-century British linguistics Vivian Salmon; 7. Joseph de Maistre and Victorian thought on the origin of language and civilisation Hans Aarsleff; 8. Understanding as a process of linguistic approximation: the discussion between August Wilhelm von Schlegel, S. A. Langois, Wilhelm von Humboldt and G. W. F. Hegel on the translation of the Bhagavadgita and the concept of 'yoga' Helmut Gipper; 9. August Schleicher: Indo-Europeanist and general linguist Theodora Bynon; 10. Karl Brugmann and late nineteenth-century linguistics Anna Morpurgo Davies; 11. Nineteenth-century linguistics on itself Henry M. Hoenigswald; 12. European linguistics in the twentieth century Giulio Lepschy; 13. Edward Sapir's six-unit classification of American Indian languages: the search for the time perspective Regna Darnell and Dell Hymes; 14. Distributional syntax P. H. Matthews; Publications of R. H. Robins; Index.