Prelude: The 19th Century

The 19th century is the important turning-point of development of linguistics. There are two orientations based on the time perspectives dealing with this era, they are synchronic linguistics and diachronic linguistics.
The first one is synchronic linguistics. It deals with a particular state of a language at some given point in time. It also ignores the route by which a language arrives at its present form. Modern English is the simplest example of this orientation in which it does not learn about the history system of English.
The second one is diachronic linguistics in which its analysis is based on the history of the language to learn. Scientists go back and forth in time, watching the language with all its features change. It can be seen in the changes of old English to Modern English.
However, it is not easy to understand the language without knowing the idea existing when it was formed. Therefore, diachronic linguistics is learnt more detail than the other one as shown in the orientation of it such as; the investigation of the history, the uncovering of their relationship, and the reconstruction of the lost proto-languages from the families.
Linguistics was a German pursuit during 19th century. Enormous effort was devoted to the historical study of Indo-European language family. It was in the line with the movement of other field of study; art and intellectual of late 18th and 19th; known as romanticism. There are some characteristics of this orientation, that are, rejecting the classical tradition of translating old documents; such as Bible, fairy tales, and other stories; emphasizing on indigenous ethnic and cultural roots; and intimately related of race, language, and culture in analyzing.
In understanding of diachronic linguistics at 19th century, there are two outstandingly influential scientific paradigms; mechanistic physics and biological theory of evolution.
For mechanistic physics, all phenomena can be described by simple, deterministic laws of force and motion. Philologists take the notion of describing the history of sound-changes occurring in a language in terms of ‘law’ as Grimm’s Law.
For biological influence, Bopp, proposed that language must be regarded as organic bodies, formed in accordance with definite laws; bearing within themselves an internal principle of life, they develop and they gradually die out. Thus, the language is a living thing in which the Old English of pre-Conquest days developed successively in to Chaucer’s English, Shakespeare’s and now the different varieties of modern English. Therefore, the group of languages have ‘family tree’ just as groups of biological species do
The family tree is known as the Stammbaum theory which proposed by August, 1861. Language, like species, competes with one another in a struggle for survival. Consider, how English spread at the expense of the Celtic language: Cornish and Manx are extinct, etc.
There are three classifications of language. They are Isolating language, in which each word consisted of a single unchanging root (Chinese and Vietnamese), Agglutinating language, in which words included affixes as well as root but the division of the word into affixes is clear (Turkish), and Inflecting language, in which a single word includes a number of unit of meaning but one cannot assign these meaning-unit to distinct proportion of the word (Sanskrit).

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