Editing Linguistic description (section)

==History of the discipline==
{{further|History of grammar}}
{{See also|Philology}}
The earliest known descriptive linguistic work took place in a [[Sanskrit]] community in northern India; the most well-known scholar of that linguistic tradition was [[Pāṇini]], whose works are commonly dated to around the {{BCE|5th century}}.<ref name="FPencyclo" /> Philological traditions later arose around the description of [[Ancient Greek|Greek]], [[Latin]], [[Chinese language|Chinese]], [[Tamil language|Tamil]], [[Hebrew language|Hebrew]], and [[Arabic language|Arabic]]. The description of modern European languages did not begin before the [[Renaissance]] – e.g. [[Spanish language|Spanish]] in [[1492]], [[French language|French]] in [[1532]], [[English language|English]] in [[1586]]; the same period saw the first grammatical descriptions of [[Nahuatl]] ([[1547]]) or [[Quechuan languages|Quechua]] ([[1560]]) in the [[New World]], followed by numerous others.<ref name="FPencyclo" />{{rp|185}}

Even though more and more languages were discovered, the full diversity of language was not yet fully recognized. For centuries, language descriptions tended to use grammatical categories that existed for languages considered to be more prestigious, like [[Latin]].

Linguistic description as a discipline really took off at the end of the 19th century, with the [[Structural linguistics#History|Structuralist revolution]] (from [[Ferdinand de Saussure]] to [[Leonard Bloomfield]]), and the notion that every language forms a unique symbolic system, different from other languages, worthy of being described “in its own terms”.<ref name="FPencyclo" />{{rp|185}}