Historical Linguistics/Printable version

Historical Linguistics

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Sound Change

If you have ever studied a language related to one you already known well, you might that certain sounds seem to consistently appear in one language where others appear in the other. For example, if you have studied Latin as well as English, you might observe that words which begin with a "p" in Latin often have equivalents in English beginning in "f". For example:

English	Latin
father	pater
foot	pes, pedis
fish	pisces
felt	pellis

This pattern is not coincidental. English and Latin are both descended from an ancient language of an unknown name, which linguists today call Proto-Indo-European, often abbreviated to PIE. The Germanic descendants of PIE all underwent a sound change called Grimm's Law in which [p] became [f] in a process known as Grimm's law. Latin is not a Germanic language, and consequently maintains the [p] sound in many words where it was changed to [f] in English.

We can write this change in the following notation: p > f

Historical linguistics is heavily concerned with these sound changes, as they can reveal a lot of information about what languages were like in the past.

The Neogrammarian Hypothesis

A critical feature of sound change is that it is almost always uniform across a language. Sound changes, critically, do not occur slowly on a word by word basis, but rather seem to occur to every word matching the conditioning environment of the change in a period of one or two generations. Apparent exceptions are often words introduced to the language after the sound change has occured, preventing them from being affected.

Conditioning Environments

Not all sound changes occur to every appearance of a particular sound. Instead, they can occur to every sound in a particular environment. For example, between Very Old Latin (a term actually used by linguists) and Classical latin, [s] became [r] between vowels. We note a change occurred in a particular environment with the character '/'. The above example might thus be notated: s > r / V_V. The part after the '/' indicated the conditioning environment. The underscore '_' represents the sound undergoing the change, whereas the Vs represent vowels.

Relative Chronology

Sound changes are historical events: they happen at a point in time, and in a specific order. The order is often extremely important, as different rule ordering can produce different results. For example, in addition to the above rule (s>r / V_V), Very Old Latin also underwent another change, ss>s / _Vː (long Ss become short before long vowels). Consequently, there exist words in Classical Latin which seem to violate the first rule, such as "causa" (cause). However, at the time the change occurred, the word was caussaː, meaning that the original rule, which only applied to short Ss, did not apply at the point in history in which it happened.

Subgrouping and Linguistic Classification

As a language changes, given time and distance or isolation, its speakers will no longer be able to understand each other, creating separate languages. For instance, you are probably familiar with the fact that Spanish, French, Italian, and Romanian are all descended from Latin, which is descended from Proto-Indo-European. As such, we call the Romance languages, however, these languages are not special in that regard; we can classify most languages into groups, subgroups, and supergroups based on the various changes they share.

We can often reasonably construct language groups among related languages purely by comparing data from the languages, without knowing any of the historical background behind subgroupings. This is done by comparing shared innovations from whatever we reconstruct or have attested in the protolanguage. The more shared innovations and the less likely they would be to occur independently, the stronger the evidence for a subgrouping. It should be noted that shared conservation of older forms are not evidence for a group: it is expected that languages will have features from their parent languages.

Remember that sound changes are often crucially ordered. This restriction often makes some proposed shared innovations incompatible with one another.

Language Families

All of known natural languages can be grouped into approximately 420 different families, including isolates and dead languages.

The Indo-European language family, including all those languages descended from Proto-Indo-European, is the largest language group in the world by number of speakers (by number of languages, the Niger-Congo family, including languages found predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa, is the largest). The common descent of Indo-European languages has been known longer than any other major language family, and consequently the historical research in this family is extremely robust.

Language Isolates

Some languages, known as isolates. have no known related languages. Well-known examples might include include Basque, Ainu, and Burushaski. It is unlikely that there have never been divergences in their language families, but instead it is probable that all other members of the families simply no longer exist. For example, the Siberia language Ket is known to belong to the Yeniseian family, which includes several known dead-languages, but no other living languages. There are also known cases of languages once thought to be isolates for which related languages have been discovered.

Some languages are not well-known enough to be classified, including extinct languages with few attestations, and modern languages which have been scarcely studied. These languages are considered distinct from isolates, as if more information were available, they might potentially be classifiable as members of an existing language group. An example would include Pictish, the language spoken in today's Scotland in the Early Middle Ages.

Semantic Change

Just as the pronunciation of words change over a language history, so do their meanings and connotations. Unlike sound changes and other highly regular processes, semantic change is entirely unsystematic: the change of any one word is independent and generally unaffected by the changes of other words.

Common Types of Semantic Change

Influences of Phonetic Similarity

Words which sound similar will converge or become more similar in meaning.

• eg. Obnoxious once meant "exposed to injury," but now means "annoying, offensive, or objectionable" - a change motivated by the words resemblance to "noxious"
• eg. Some speakers use "bemused" and "amused" interchangeably.

Widening

A word comes to refer to a more general set of things than its earlier use.

Leeched Diminutives

A word frequently used as a diminutive changes to refer to the thing it describes generally

• A subset of widening
• eg. New High German Mädchen 'girl' was originally a diminutive of Magd 'girl'

Narrowing

A broad category comes to refer to a specific element

• eg. corn, meaning grain, shifted to refer specifically to maize.
• eg. meat, meaning food, shifted to refer specifically to food made from animal flesh.

Pejorization amd Meliorization

Respectively, when a word comes to refer to positive or negative instances of its base meaning.

• eg. dom, meaning judgement, became doom, meaning peril, a pejorization.

Semantic Bleaching

An intensifier becomes weaker in meaning.

• eg. terribly once meant "so extreme as to be terrifying" whereas now one might say "I terribly glad to see you."

Euphemism

Taboo terms are replaced with other existing words.