To appreciate the methods and assumptions of modern-day linguistics, we need to understand how people have reflected on language in the past, and what has motivated them to do so. For Aristotle, for example, analysis of grammatical categories such as gender, number and case in his Rhetoric served primarily to illuminate a wider discussion of good style. Descriptions of non-European languages were often compiled by missionaries seeking to spread what they saw as the word of God in parts of the world where European languages were not spoken. Emerging nation-states promoted national standard languages, and with them came the publication of prescriptive works, which held up the usage of a social elite as the only acceptable norm for speech and writing.

Our brief review of linguistic thinking through the ages reveals some remarkably contemporary themes. The notion of arbitrariness, which underpins modern structuralist approaches, emerges in Plato’s work; a twelfth-century treatise on Icelandic spelling reform shows a very modern approach to phonology, and debates between rationalists and empiricists over innate ideas and universal grammar find twentieth century echoes in Chomsky’s clash with the Descriptivists who preceded him.

But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’ So the Lord scattered them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel – because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.

The story of the Tower of Babel in the epigraph above is one of many such myths in which ‘confusion of tongues’ is seen as divine retribution for human hubris. Within such narratives, the natural processes of change to which all languages are subject are equated with decay, prompting the search for an original, ‘uncorrupted’ pre-Babelian tongue from which all others are held to derive.