This book compares the historical development of ideas about language in two major traditions
of linguistic scholarship from either end of Eurasia ¿ the Graeco-Roman and the Sinitic ¿ as
well as their interaction in the modern era. It locates the emergence of language analysis in
the development of writing systems and examines the cultural and political functions fulfilled
by traditional language scholarship. Moving into the modern period and focusing specifically on
the study of ¿grammar¿ in the sense of morph syntax lexico grammar it traces the
transformation of ¿traditional¿ Latin grammar from the viewpoint of its adaptation to Chinese
and discusses the development of key concepts used to characterize and analyze grammatical
patterns.
