Some Major Works in the History of Linguistics

ling-thing:

Reblogging to add to the protolinguist tag, although in general I’d recommend that budding linguists start out with secondary sources, like textbooks, rather than primary sources. I’m reasonably fond of O'Grady’s Contemporary Linguistics (any of the past few editions), and I’ve also heard good things about Language Files.

The thing with primary sources is that they’re all in conversation with each other, and they’re trying to advance a particular argument but you don’t know how much of it people believe anymore, so if you haven’t read enough other sources or don’t have a class to help you put it into context, you may end up pretty confused. But putting various primary works into context is exactly what a textbook is aiming to do. (Spoken as someone who tried valiantly to read Chomsky in high school and didn’t get much out of it.) You may have more luck after you’d read some secondary sources though.