18th Century Europe.

Up to the eighteenth century, most of the works about language were of non-
investigative, descriptive nature.

The 18th & 19th centuries are characterised by an increasing interest in the
origins and especially evolution of human language.
Issues
Rise of the normative approach to language:
Huge increase in number of dictionaries (Johnson 1755) and grammars
(Lowth 1762).
These texts were increasingly seen as guides to good / proper usage.
Consequences of prescriptive attitudes and the process of language
codification:
Previously common features (e.g. double negatives, final prepositions) are
stigmatized.
Language use is increasingly important in terms of social status, identity and
prestige.

A well-known linguist of the eighteenth century was Eugene Aram (1704-

59), who inferred that Celtic is one of Indo-European languages, and that Latin
was not derived from Greek, as Leibniz had believed.

A new discipline was on the verge of its creation, backed up by a paper by Sir
William Jones (1746-94) who claimed that Sanskrit, Latin and Greek were
strongly connected.
The main impetus for the development of comparative philology came toward
the end of the 18th century, when it was discovered that Sanskrit bore a
number of striking resemblances to Greek and Latin.
An English orientalist, Sir William Jones, though he was not the first to observe
these resemblances, is generally given the credit for bringing them to the
attention of the scholarly world and putting forward the hypothesis, in 1786
that all three languages must have sprung from some common source, which
perhaps no longer exists.
By this time, a number of texts and glossaries of the older Germanic languages
(Gothic, Old High German, and Old Norse) had been published, and Jones
realized that Germanic as well as Old Persian and perhaps Celtic had evolved
from the same common source.

In 1786, Sir William Jones establishes a clear connection between the ancient
Indian language of Sanskrit and many of the modern (Indo-) Germanic
languages and thereby becomes responsible for the development
of comparative-historical linguistics.
 J.G. Herder: believed that language and thought are inseparable. His
teachings serve as a strong precedent to the teachings of Benjamin Whorf and
Noam Chomsky (generative grammar).

James Harris: held an Aristotelian view of grammar (i.e. he believed in

language universals); he was also aware of the differences between the world's
languages.

James Burnett (Monboddo): looked for evidence of a proto-language by

studying the languages of 'primitive' peoples.

Sir William Jones: a judge in the British Royal Court in India; in 1786, he
wrote a paper to the Royal Asiatic Society in Calcutta about the historical
connection between Sanskrit and Western European languages such as Greek,
the Romance Languages, and the Germanic Languages.
The Grimm brothers developed a whole orderly science of Germanic Linguistics,
capping their research with study of developmental traits in Folklore with the
famous Germanic folk stories. Bopp produced the first Sanskrit dictionary in the
West, and Indic studies were undertaken not only as fascinating in their own
right, but as part of a newly assumed "Western Tradition". If Grimm and Bopp
were the first generation of these Indo-Europeanist Linguists,

http://community.middlebury.edu/~harris/linguistics.html
http://studopedia.org/6-36690.html
http://www.languagebits.com/historical-linguistics/early-development/