Linguistics has a long tradition dating back to the Babylonian, the Hebrew and the Arabian cultures of Antiquity. In China, Japan and particularly India (with Panini as the greatest representative), language began to be studied more than 2500 years ago. But the early ‘linguists’ concerned themselves chiefly with grammar, with the sounds and the words of language, not so much with the effect language may have on the world (see the relevant chapters in Koerner and Asher eds 1995).