Thinkers Timeline

Pāṇini was an ancient Indian grammarian whose work on the Sanskrit language is often described as one of the greatest intellectual achievements of the ancient world. Almost nothing is known about him as a person. Scholars usually place him in the fifth or fourth century BCE, though some argue for earlier dates. He is said to have come from Shalatula, a town in the region of Gandhara, which is now in north-west Pakistan near the Afghan border. This area was on the north-western edge of the Indian cultural world and close to routes that connected India with Persia, Central Asia, and the Mediterranean. A few traditional stories about his life exist, but they are legends rather than reliable history. What survives and matters is his book. It is called the Ashtadhyayi, which means the Eight Chapters, because it is divided into eight books. The book contains around four thousand short rules called sutras. These rules together describe the grammar of the Sanskrit language of his time with extraordinary completeness and precision. The sutras are not written for beginners. They are compressed to the point of being almost impossible to understand without training. Each sutra uses only the smallest number of syllables needed to state a rule. The rules also refer to each other in complex ways — later rules assume earlier rules, some rules override others in specific conditions, abbreviations are used to save space. Reading the Ashtadhyayi properly requires first learning Pāṇini's own system of notation. Later Indian grammarians spent the next two thousand years writing commentaries that explained his work. The most important of these was by Patanjali in the second century BCE. Modern scholars have continued to study the Ashtadhyayi and have discovered that it anticipates many features of modern linguistic and computer science theory. Pāṇini's grammar is one of the oldest works in any field that still rewards close study today.

Abu Bishr Amr ibn Uthman, known as Sībawayh (c. 760-796), was a Persian-born Arab grammarian whose book Al-Kitāb is the first comprehensive description of the Arabic language and one of the most important works in the history of linguistics. He was born in Hamadan or Shiraz, in what is now Iran, into a Persian family. Arabic was not his first language. He moved to Basra, in what is now Iraq, as a young man. Basra was then one of the great centres of Islamic learning, with mosques, schools, and scholarly circles that drew students from across the expanding Muslim world. Sībawayh studied with the leading Arabic grammarians of his time, including the great al-Khalīl ibn Ahmad, who had developed systematic approaches to Arabic phonology and had produced the first Arabic dictionary. Sībawayh was especially devoted to al-Khalīl and quotes him extensively in his own work. Sībawayh's nickname in Persian means little apple, and may have come from the apple-like freshness of his complexion. He lived a short life of about thirty-six years but produced a single enormous book that remains the foundation of Arabic grammatical science. The book is simply called Al-Kitāb, which means The Book — as if it were the only book that needed saying much about. This was not arrogance but recognition by the tradition that followed: for over twelve centuries Arabic grammarians have treated Al-Kitāb as the definitive starting point for their field. Sībawayh died young, possibly around 796. The details of his death are uncertain. One traditional story holds that he died shortly after losing a famous grammatical debate in Baghdad against a rival scholar. This story may not be historically reliable. What is certain is that his book survived him and became the foundation of Arabic linguistics, studied continuously from his own time until today.

Ferdinand de Saussure (1857-1913) was a Swiss linguist whose ideas about language changed how people study not only language but many other fields as well. He was born in Geneva into a distinguished family of scientists and scholars. His father was a naturalist; several of his relatives had made important contributions to mathematics and science. Ferdinand showed an early talent for languages. As a teenager he had already studied Greek, Latin, German, English, French, and Sanskrit. He went to university first in Geneva and then in Leipzig, Germany, which was then the leading centre for the study of language. In 1878, at the age of only twenty-one, he published a book on the vowel system of ancient Indo-European languages that impressed scholars across Europe. His career then developed in an unusual way. He taught in Paris for ten years and then returned to Geneva, where he spent the rest of his working life. He published very little. He found it difficult to finish books, partly because he kept changing his mind and partly because he had a perfectionism about his ideas. Between 1907 and 1911 he gave three courses of lectures on general linguistics at the University of Geneva. These were the most important lectures he ever gave, but he did not write them up himself. When he died in 1913, at age fifty-five, few of his most radical ideas had been published. After his death, two of his students — Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye — worked from their own notes and the notes of other students to produce the Course in General Linguistics, which was published in 1916. This book contained ideas that reshaped how people study language and also influenced anthropology, literary criticism, and philosophy. The book that made Saussure famous is therefore not really his book. It was created by his students from their memories of what he had said. Later researchers have studied Saussure's own manuscripts and found that the book does not perfectly capture his views. The real Saussure is more complex than the book suggests, but the book remains one of the most influential works in the study of language.

Avram Noam Chomsky (born 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher, and political commentator whose work has changed the study of language and who has also become one of the most widely known political writers of his generation. He was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Jewish immigrant parents from Ukraine and Belarus. His father was a respected Hebrew scholar who taught his children to love language and books. Noam began writing about international affairs at the age of ten, in a school newspaper article about the rise of fascism in Spain. He entered the University of Pennsylvania at sixteen and studied linguistics, mathematics, and philosophy. His teacher Zellig Harris introduced him to structural linguistics and also to radical politics. In 1955 Chomsky joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he remained for more than fifty years. His 1957 book Syntactic Structures changed the field of linguistics almost overnight. His ideas about how the human mind makes language possible started what is now called the cognitive revolution. From the 1960s onwards, he became as well known for his political writings as for his linguistics. He was an early and persistent critic of the Vietnam War. In 1967 he published an influential essay called The Responsibility of Intellectuals, in which he argued that educated people have a duty to tell the truth about what their governments do. He has written dozens of books on language and dozens more on politics, power, and the media. He has been arrested several times for protesting against war. In 1988 he co-wrote Manufacturing Consent with Edward Herman, a book about how mainstream media serve established power. He is one of the most cited living scholars in several fields. Some colleagues treat him as a hero; others criticise his linguistic theories, his political views, or both. His productivity has continued into his nineties. He now holds a chair at the University of Arizona.

Henry Widdowson is a British linguist. A linguist is someone who studies language in a scientific way. Widdowson was born in 1935. He became one of the most important thinkers in a field called applied linguistics. Applied linguistics is the study of real-world language problems. The biggest of these problems is how people learn and teach languages. Widdowson spent his career thinking carefully about this. He studied at the University of Cambridge and later at the University of Edinburgh. He then taught at the University of London and at the University of Essex. He also worked for the British Council, an organisation that helps spread English teaching around the world. Later he worked in Vienna, Austria. Widdowson wrote many books and articles. His most famous book is 'Teaching Language as Communication', published in 1978. It changed how many people thought about language teaching. Widdowson is known for being a deep and careful thinker. He often questioned popular ideas in his field. He did not just accept new teaching methods because they were fashionable. He asked hard questions about whether they really made sense. Because of this, he is sometimes called the conscience of applied linguistics. He pushed the field to think clearly. He is still active as a writer and speaker.

David Crystal is a British linguist. A linguist is a person who studies language in a careful, scientific way. Crystal was born in 1941 in Lisburn, Northern Ireland. He spent part of his childhood in Wales, and Wales is still his home today. Crystal studied English at University College London. He then worked as a university lecturer, first at Bangor and then at Reading, where he became a professor. In 1984 he left full-time university work. Since then he has worked as an independent writer, editor, and broadcaster. Crystal is famous for one main reason. He has written or edited more than one hundred books about language. Many of these are for ordinary readers, not only for experts. He wrote two large reference books, 'The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language' and 'The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language'. He has also written about how English spread around the world, about languages that are dying out, and about how the internet changes language. Crystal often appears on radio and television. He is known for explaining difficult ideas in a clear and friendly way. He has also helped theatres perform Shakespeare's plays using the pronunciation of Shakespeare's own time. He is still active as a writer and speaker.

Deborah Tannen (born 1945) is an American linguist who has become one of the most widely read scholars of how people talk to each other. She studies what linguists call conversation analysis and sociolinguistics — fields that look at language as people actually use it in daily life. She was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a Hasidic Jewish family. Her parents had emigrated from Poland before the Second World War, and many members of her wider family died in the Holocaust. This family history would later shape some of her thinking about how people from different backgrounds understand each other. She studied English literature at Harpur College and earned a master's degree at Wayne State University. In her thirties she began studying linguistics, completing her PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1979 under the supervision of Robin Lakoff, a pioneer in research on language and gender. In 1979 she joined Georgetown University, where she has remained for her whole career, becoming one of the most respected scholars in her field. Her 1990 book You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation changed public understanding of gender and language. It stayed on the New York Times bestseller list for four years and sold millions of copies in thirty languages. It was followed by many other books written for general readers, including Talking from 9 to 5 (1994) on workplace conversation, You're Wearing That? (2006) on mothers and daughters, and You Were Always Mom's Favorite! (2009) on sisters. She has also written academic books like Conversational Style (1984) and Talking Voices (1989) for fellow scholars. This combination — serious academic work and books that millions of ordinary readers buy — is unusual and has produced some tension with colleagues. Some linguists think her popular books oversimplify. Others defend her for bringing linguistic insights to audiences who would never read an academic journal. She remains one of the very few American linguists whose name is widely known outside the field.