Bloomfield, Leonard

Leonard Bloomfield, an American professor of Germanic languages, created the field of linguistics as a branch of science. In studying such non-Western languages as Tagalog, spoken in the Philippines, he realized the futility of trying to fit all languages into the format of Latin grammar in the common practice in his time. Bloomfield went on to discover the principles of language itself. His book Language (1933) integrated the field of linguistics for the first time.