Editing Linguistic typology (section)

== History ==
Speculations of the existence of a (logical) general or [[universal grammar]] underlying all languages were published in the Middle Ages, especially by the [[Modistae]] school. At the time, [[Latin]] was the model language of linguistics, although transcribing Irish and Icelandic into the [[Latin alphabet]] was found problematic. The cross-linguistic dimension of linguistics was established in the [[Renaissance]] period. For example, ''Grammaticae quadrilinguis partitiones'' (1544) by Johannes Drosaeus compared French and the three 'holy languages', Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The approach was expanded by the [[Port-Royal Grammar]] (1660) of [[Antoine Arnauld]] and [[Claude Lancelot]], who added Spanish, Italian, German and Arabic. [[Nicolas Beauzée]]'s 1767 book includes examples of English, Swedish, [[Sámi languages|Lappish]], Irish, [[Welsh language|Welsh]], [[Basque language|Basque]], [[Quechuan languages|Quechua]], and Chinese.<ref name="Ramat">{{Cite book |last1=Ramat |first1=Paolo |year=2010 |chapter=The (Early) History of Linguistic Typology |title= The Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Typology |pages=9–23 |publisher= Oxford University Press |doi= 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199281251.013.0002 |editor-last= Song |editor-first= Jae Jung }}</ref>

The conquest and conversion of the world by Europeans gave rise to 'missionary linguistics' producing first-hand word lists and grammatical descriptions of exotic languages. Such work is accounted for in the 'Catalogue of the Languages of the Populations We Know', 1800, by the Spanish Jesuit [[Lorenzo Hervás]]. [[Johann Christoph Adelung]] collected the first large language sample with the [[Lord's Prayer|Lord's prayer]] in almost five hundred languages (posthumous 1817).<ref name="Ramat"/>

More developed nineteenth-century comparative works include [[Franz Bopp]]'s 'Conjugation System' (1816) and [[Wilhelm von Humboldt]]'s 'On the Difference in Human Linguistic Structure and Its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind' (posthumous 1836). In 1818, [[August Wilhelm Schlegel]] made a classification of the world's languages into three types: (i) languages lacking grammatical structure, e.g. Chinese; (ii) agglutinative languages, e.g. Turkish; and (iii) inflectional languages, which can be synthetic like Latin and Ancient Greek, or analytic like French. This idea was later developed by others including [[August Schleicher]], [[Heymann Steinthal]], Franz Misteli, [[Franz Nikolaus Finck|Franz Nicolaus Finck]], and [[Max Müller]].<ref name="Pioneers"/>

The word 'typology' was proposed by [[Georg von der Gabelentz]] in his ''Sprachwissenschaft'' (1891). [[Louis Hjelmslev]] proposed typology as a large-scale empirical-analytical endeavour of comparing grammatical features to uncover the essence of language. Such a project began from the 1961 conference on language universals at [[Dobbs Ferry, New York|Dobbs Ferry]]. Speakers included [[Roman Jakobson]], [[Charles F. Hockett]], and [[Joseph Greenberg]] who proposed forty-five different types of linguistic universals based on his data sets from thirty languages. Greenberg's findings were mostly known from the nineteenth-century grammarians, but his systematic presentation of them would serve as a model for modern typology.<ref name="Pioneers"/> [[Winfred P. Lehmann]] introduced Greenbergian typological theory to [[Indo-European studies]] in the 1970s.<ref name="lehmann">{{Cite book|url=https://liberalarts.utexas.edu/lrc/resources/books/pies/1-framework|title=Proto-Indo-European Syntax|last=Lehmann|first=Winfred P.|publisher=University of Texas Press|year=1974|chapter=The Syntactic Framework|isbn=9780292733411|author-link=Winfred P. Lehmann}}{{Dead link|date=October 2022 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}</ref>

During the twentieth century, typology based on missionary linguistics became centered around [[SIL International]], which today hosts its catalogue of living languages, [[Ethnologue]], as an online database. The Greenbergian or universalist approach is accounted for by the [[World Atlas of Language Structures]], among others. Typology is also done within the frameworks of functional grammar including [[Functional discourse grammar|Functional Discourse Grammar]], [[Role and reference grammar|Role and Reference Grammar]], and [[Systemic functional linguistics|Systemic Functional Linguistics]]. During the early years of the twenty-first century, however, the existence of [[linguistic universal]]s became questioned by linguists proposing [[Evolutionary linguistics|evolutionary]] typology.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Evans |first1=Nicholas |last2=Levinson |first2=Stephen C. |year=2009 |title=The myth of language universals: Language diversity and its importance for cognitive science |journal=Behavioral and Brain Sciences |volume=32 |issue= 5|pages=420–429 |doi=10.1017/S0140525X0999094X|pmid=19857320 |doi-access=free |hdl=11858/00-001M-0000-0012-C29E-4 |hdl-access=free }}</ref>