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18-19 centuries, 20th century, Professor Buranov suggests 4 main periods…
18-19 centuries
Sir William Jones
proposed in 1786 that Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and other European languages shared a common origin.
Early scholars, like Bopp and Rask, compared languages to trace their historical evolution and establish language families (e.g., Indo-European)
The focus in this period was mostly on genealogical classification—showing how languages are related through common ancestry, rather than on structural similarities.
20th century
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Edward Sapir
was among the first to move beyond historical linguistics. He introduced structural approaches and viewed languages as systems that can be compared based on their structures.
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Chomsky
Chomsky's UG suggests that there is a common structural basis for all languages, despite their surface differences.
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19th century
August Schleicher
introduced the concept of a "family tree" (Stammbaum) to represent the evolutionary relationships between languages.
Neogrammarians contributed to sound laws and regularity of sound change, strengthening the historical-comparative approach.
This period didn’t emphasize typology in the modern sense but provided tools for analyzing how languages change over time and across families.
21st century
Balthasar Bickel
has introduced probabilistic methods, using statistical tools to analyze large language samples, which helps establish more nuanced cross-linguistic generalizations.
Martin Haspelmath
Martin Haspelmath has worked extensively on the comparative method and grammatical descriptions across many languages. He advocates for usage-based models, focusing on frequency and distribution patterns of linguistic features across languages.
Contemporary typology has expanded to cover more languages, especially non-Western and less-documented languages, with a strong focus on cross-linguistic patterns.