Formation And Development Of Comparative-Historical Linguistics: Classical Foundations And Contemporary Approaches

Abstract

This article presents a comprehensive analysis of the emergence, theoretical foundations, methodological principles, and contemporary transformations of comparative-historical linguistics. The study traces the intellectual roots of the discipline from early philological traditions to its institutionalization in nineteenth-century Europe and its methodological modernization in the twenty-first century. Special attention is devoted to the comparative method, external and internal reconstruction, regular sound correspondences, morphological reconstruction, loanword stratification, and toponymic data. The article further evaluates post-2005 developments, including the integration of linguistic typology, corpus linguistics, computational phylogenetics, contact linguistics, and grammaticalization theory. The role of Turkic and Uzbek linguistics in advancing historical-comparative studies is also examined. The findings confirm that comparative-historical linguistics remains central to understanding language evolution, genealogical classification, structural change, and proto-language modeling in contemporary linguistic science.