FFA 222 Lecture 4 PDF

Historical Linguistics: how Languages change? Lecture 4 language change is an inherent aspect of all languages, and historical linguistics seeks to describe and explain the processes and causes of these changes. It encompasses various types of language change and employs techniques to...

Historical Linguistics: how Languages change? Lecture 4 language change is an inherent aspect of all languages, and historical linguistics seeks to describe and explain the processes and causes of these changes. It encompasses various types of language change and employs techniques to reconstruct the linguistic past while also shedding light on language acquisition and universal linguistic principles.  Figuring out whether two languages are related. But what does this mean? Something like: Once upon a time there was a speech community sharing a fairly uniform grammar that we can call the proto-language that was the ancestor of modern languages X and Y. Historical change produced dialects of the protolanguage. These dialects themselves produced dialects, the process iterating until we reach a period where X and Y are two of the dialects that can trace their ancestry to the protolanguage.  Language change causes Language learning Language contact Socialinguistic factors Language variation Semantic shift Assimilation Language policy  Indo European Case in point: a large group of languages spoken in Europe and Central Asia are related, The discovery of Indo-European - Sir William Jones (1746-1794) "The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely re ned than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger a nity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very di erent idiom, had the same origin with the Sanskrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of Persia." SIR WILLIAM JONES THE THIRD ANNIVERSARY DISCOURSE, ON THE HINDUS Delivered 2 February, 1786, to the Royal Asiatick Society ff ffi fi Which languages are related Numerals William Jones' observation was informal, and we can make a similar observation for ourselves, just by eyeballing relevant data. For example, the words for the rst ten numbers strongly suggest that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Gothic, Old Irish, Lithuanian, and Old Church Slavonic share a common ancestor — but Basque, Hungarian and Turkish do not share that common ancestor. fi  Cognate: a word in a language X that is hypothesized to share a common So Sanskrit dvaú 'two' and Greek dúo: 'two' are cognates. But simple identi cation of words that look similar (what I was calling "eyeballing") is not enough to establish that two languages are related according to this scenario: Jacob Grimm formulates "Grimm's Law", which describes a regular correspondance between the stop consonants of Latin, Greek and Sanskrit and consonants in Germanic languages. Pay particular attention to p>f, t>θ and k>h (the most famous cases — nal exam fodder): fi fi  Reality check: Do regular sound correspondences result from historical change? Look for cases where we know the languages are related. We do indeed see the regular sound correspondences that we expect to find: Causes of Language Change  Fun Facts about the Indo-Europeans They had domesticated animals. Evidence: cognate words for dog *kwon, horse *ekwo, cow *gwow and pig *suH. [asterisk = hypothesized form in Proto-Indo-European] They had grain. Evidence - cognate words *yewo They had the wheel: *kwekwlo (cf. Greek kuklos, from which cycle is borrowed) They had bee-keeping, since they have cognate words for honey: *melit Numbers up to 100, but not 1000. Most experts think: the parent language split well before 2000 BC. Possible homesite: "Kurgan culture" east of the Dniepr river, modern-day Ukraine. But there is hot debate about this. See, for example, a long series of blog postings in reply to an article in Nature here: http://geocurrents.info/cultural-geography/linguistic-geography/mismodeling-indo- european-origin-and- expansion-bouckaert-atkinson-wade-and-the-assault-on- historical-linguistics Spread west around 4000-3500 BC; in Northern Iran 3500-3000BC; entered Greece, Italy, Western Europe 3500 BC. [speculation: do not memorize] Good and Bad methods in historical linguistics All languages change, and change is found in all branches of language: lexicon: new words, borrowing phonology: new rules, loss of old rules morphology: new morphemes syntax: changes in parameter settings, kinds of movement, etc.s Relatedness is best established on the basis of the lexicon, not syntax: o Because there are an unbounded number of possible words, nding the same sets of words in multiple languages is low-probability. o There is a substantially smaller number of possible syntactic systems, so nding the same syntax in multiple languages is higher-probability. But we should be careful. Processes like borrowing complicate the picture: fi fi  Example (5) shows a rule "l→j / C_V" entering, then leaving the language. Some words (biancho, schiavo) were borrowed from other languages (Germanic and Slavic [via Greek], respectively) while this rule was active. Others ( orido, placare) were borrowed once the rule had left the language. The rule left the language once its e ects were no longer transparent to a language- learning child. ff fl  History of English Watch the History of English in 10 minutes Old English: 450-1100 AD Languages spoken in present-day England were very much Germanic in appearance. SOV, verb-second, case-marked noun phrases [see overheads] Middle English: 1100-1500 [1066 - Norman invasion of England, England under French domination] Loss of verb-second, case-marking, V-to-I French in uence on lexicon: [blue = skipped this in class, alas] pork, beef, veal, mutton, venison (French) vs. swine/sow, cow, calf, sheep, deer (Germanic) [see textbook, p. 270, table 7.32] -able (from French) Loss of some words: wer 'man' (cf. Latin vir as in English virile) - still found in werewolf rice 'domain' (cf. bishopric, German Reich -- related to reach) Meaning change: hund 'dog' > hound docga 'mastiff' > dog Sound change: 1. Loss of [x] (right, night) 2. Very late in ME period: Great Vowel Shift [book, pp. 258-259] Order of loss of [x] w.r.t. GVS: [x] was lost when GVS was still active, vowel lengthened, then GVS applied. Thus: /rixt/ > /ri:t/ > /rajt/. Syntactic change: V2 > SVO with V-movement to I (see overheads) Modern English: 1500-present Loss of V-to-I. De nitive loss of case. fi fl  Seminar questions: Ful l the mind map with new information Analyze (compare/contrast) English and your second foreign language See the history of Kazakh Language Introduction to Linguistics, Read pages 147-167 (Historical Linguistics: Language change) fi