Language can be separated into two clearly unopposed mutually dependent differentiated areas – the naming of the things that existed, exist, or will exist, and the description of the way in which those things existed, or exist, or possibly will exist.

Philosophy likewise can be classified into two opposed endeavours, and is similarly divided into two primary areas – how things exist and why they exist. Whilst there is an essential, reciprocal correspondence between the two great dichotomies of language – there is no compatibility and even an antagonism between the two great definitional philosophical pursuits of mankind, which seek to provide a concise explanation for the simple or factive existence of which language describes the modalities.

Human language is composed of two elements and two elements only - the existentials – the things that are named - and the descriptives - the elements of language that indicate the mode of existence of those existentials.

First language proclaims or introduces the things that exist and gives them names – the names of persons, places or things, and those signifiers are known as 'nouns,' and then it describes the referential modes of existence of those nouns - with adjectives, verbs and adverbs, all of which can be said to be modes of existence.

To the degree or extent as is known, speculation about and the investigation of language has gone on in only a few societies. Chinese, Mesopotamian, and Arabic learning dealt with grammar, their treatments were so enmeshed in the particularities of those languages and so little known to the European world until recently, that they have had virtually no impact on Western linguistic tradition.

The Chinese.
Chinese linguistic and philological scholarship stretches back for more than two millennia, but the interest of those scholars was concentrated largely on phonetics, writing, and lexicography; their consideration of grammatical problems was bound up closely with the study of logic. There was certainly no awareness of the great conceptual divide in language – the dichotomy between simple existence and modal existentiality.

Panini
The grammar of Panini, of the 5th century BC is surely the most fascinating non-Western grammatical specific linguistic work of long standing, it is archetypal and independent. The linguistic investigations of India were uninfluenced by and independent of any other tradition and date back at least two and a half thousand years. As soon as Sanskrit became known to the Western learned world the unravelling of comparative Indo-European grammar ensued and the foundations were laid for the whole

19th-century edifice of comparative philology and historical linguistics. But, for this, Sanskrit was simply a part of the data; Indian grammatical learning played almost no direct part. Nineteenth-century workers, however, recognized that the native tradition of phonetics in ancient India was vastly superior to Western knowledge; and this had important consequences for the growth of the science of phonetics in the West. Thirdly, there is in the rules or definitions (sutras) of Panini a remarkably subtle and penetrating account of Sanskrit grammar. The construction of sentences, compound nouns, and the like is explained through ordered rules operating on underlying structures in a manner strikingly similar in part to modes of contemporary theory. As might be imagined, this perceptive Indian grammatical work has held great fascination for 20th-century theoretical linguists. A study of Indian logic in relation to Paninian grammar alongside Aristotelian and Western logic in relation to Greek grammar and its successors could bring illuminating insights.

Whereas in ancient Chinese learning a separate field of study that might be called grammar scarcely took root, in ancient India a sophisticated version of this discipline developed early alongside the other sciences. Even though the study of Sanskrit grammar may originally have had the practical aim of keeping the sacred Vedic texts and their commentaries pure and intact, the study of grammar in India in the 1st millennium BC had already become an intellectual end in itself.

The study of language has made tremendous progress since the early activities of the ancient grammarians, the compilers of the early dictionaries and the philologists of the nineteenth century who classified the working parts of language, traced the etymologies of individual words and compared the great language families of the world. The term structuralism has been used as a slogan and rallying cry by a number of different schools of linguistics, and it is necessary to realize that it has somewhat different implications according to the context in which it is employed. It is convenient to draw first a broad distinction between European and American structuralism and, then, to treat them separately.

Saussure's development of  synchronic linguistics.

Saussure's structuralism can be summed up in two dichotomies (which jointly cover what Humboldt referred to in terms of his own distinction of inner and outer form): (1) langue versus parole and (2) form versus substance. By langue, best translated in its technical Saussurean sense as language system, is meant the totality of regularities and patterns of formation that underlie the utterances of a language; by parole, which can be translated as language behaviour, is meant the actual utterances themselves. Just as two performances of a piece of music given by different orchestras on different occasions will differ in a variety of details and yet be identifiable as performances of the same piece, so two utterances may differ in various ways and yet be recognized as instances, in some sense, of the same utterance. What the two musical performances and the two utterances have in common is an identity of form, and this form, or structure, or pattern, is in principle independent of the substance, or "raw material," upon which it is imposed. "Structuralism," in the European sense then, refers to the view that there is an abstract relational structure that underlies and is to be distinguished from actual utterances--a system underlying actual behaviour--and that this is the primary object of study for the linguist.

Two important points arise here: first, that the structural approach is not in principle restricted to synchronic linguistics; second, that the study of meaning, as well as the study of phonology and grammar, can be structural in orientation. In both cases "structuralism" is opposed to "atomism" in the European literature. It was Saussure who drew the terminological distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics in the Cours; despite the undoubtedly structural orientation of his own early work in the historical and comparative field, he maintained that, whereas synchronic linguistics should deal with the structure of a language system at a given point in time, diachronic linguistics should be concerned with the historical development of isolated elements--it should be atomistic. Whatever the reasons that led Saussure to take this rather paradoxical view, his teaching on this point was not generally accepted, and scholars soon began to apply structural concepts to the diachronic study of languages. The most important of the various schools of structural linguistics to be found in Europe in the first half of the 20th century have included the Prague school, most notably represented by Nikolay Sergeyevich Troubetzkoy (died 1938) and Roman Jakobson (born 1896), both Russian émigrés, and the Copenhagen (or glossematic) school, centred around Louis Hjelmslev (died 1965). John Rupert Firth (died 1960) and his followers, sometimes referred to as the London school, were less Saussurean in their approach, but, in a general sense of the term, their approach may also be described appropriately as structural linguistics.

Structural linguistics in America.

American and European structuralism shared a number of features. In insisting upon the necessity of treating each language as a more or less coherent and integrated system, both European and American linguists of this period tended to emphasize, if not to exaggerate, the structural uniqueness of individual languages. There was especially good reason to take this point of view given the conditions in which American linguistics developed from the end of the 19th century. There were hundreds of indigenous American Indian languages that had never been previously described. Many of these were spoken by only a handful of speakers and, if they were not recorded before they became extinct, would be permanently inaccessible. Under these circumstances, such linguists as Franz Boas (died 1942) were less concerned with the construction of a general theory of the structure of human language than they were with prescribing sound methodological principles for the analysis of unfamiliar languages. They were also fearful that the description of these languages would be distorted by analysing them in terms of categories derived from the analysis of the more familiar Indo-European languages.

After Boas, the two most influential American linguists were Edward Sapir (died 1939) and Leonard Bloomfield (died 1949). Like his teacher Boas, Sapir was equally at home in anthropology and linguistics, the alliance of which disciplines has endured to the present day in many American universities. Boas and Sapir were both attracted by the Humboldtian view of the relationship between language and thought, but it was left to one of Sapir's pupils, Benjamin Lee Whorf, to present it in a sufficiently challenging form to attract widespread scholarly attention. Since the republication of Whorf's more important papers in 1956, the thesis that language determines perception and thought has come to be known as the Whorfian hypothesis.

Sapir
Sapir's work has always held an attraction for the more anthropologically inclined American linguists. But it was Bloomfield who prepared the way for the later phase of what is now thought of as the most distinctive manifestation of American "structuralism." When he published his first book in 1914, Bloomfield was strongly influenced by Wundt's psychology of language. In 1933, however, he published a drastically revised and expanded version with the new title Language; this book dominated the field for the next 30 years. In it Bloomfield explicitly adopted a behaviouristic approach to the study of language, eschewing in the name of scientific objectivity all reference to mental or conceptual categories. Of particular consequence was his adoption of the behaviouristic theory of semantics according to which meaning is simply the relationship between a stimulus and a verbal response. Because science was still a long way from being able to give a comprehensive account of most stimuli, no significant or interesting results could be expected from the study of meaning for some considerable time, and it was preferable, as far as possible, to avoid basing the grammatical analysis of a language on semantic considerations. Bloomfield's followers pushed even further the attempt to develop methods of linguistic analysis that were not based on meaning. One of the most characteristic features of "post-Bloomfieldian" American structuralism, then, was its almost complete neglect of semantics. (See also Index: stimulus-response theory)

Another characteristic feature, one that was to be much criticized by Chomsky, was its attempt to formulate a set of "discovery procedures"--procedures that could be applied more or less mechanically to texts and could be guaranteed to yield an appropriate phonological and grammatical description of the language of the texts. Structuralism, in this narrower sense of the term, is represented, with differences of emphasis or detail, in the major American textbooks published during the 1950s

Chomsky
In the twentieth century we have seen the emergence of figures such as Chomsky and others who have unbolted the working parts of the descriptive language – the part of language that deals with the description of the modalities of existence of the existents – lain them out on semantic work-benches and identified the role of each component and how it relates to the other parts of speech. In all this great progress however one vital understanding of the nature of language has been overlooked – a missing link if you like which has led to complication and a certain amount of obscurantism and needless over complication, and that is the recognition that there is only one word for existence and that is existence. The way that humans think about the world and the way we describe the world is marred and complicated by the lack of recognition that the verb 'to be' and its constellate of forms is not a verb proclaiming the pure existence – the simple presence of an entity – a person, place or thing in the cosmos, but a mechanism – just like all the other modal descriptors in human language - which helps to describe the way or manner in which that material or immaterial entity exists for the human consciousness.