Mid-term test - Linguistics

Historical Linguistics ppt

SLIDE 2 - Definition
Historical linguistics is defined as “The branch of linguistics concerned with the study of
phonological, grammatical, and semantic changes, the reconstruction of earlier stages of
languages, and the discovery and application of the methods by which genetic relationships among
languages can be demonstrated.”

Historical linguists map the world’s languages, and attempt to classify them by their relationships,
determining their patterns of linguistic distribution. It is also interested in how and why languages
are moulded and modificated through time.
Historical linguistics, therefore, has a vast field of research and it is considered as the oldest
subfield of modern linguistics. This subfield of linguistics had a great success in the nineteenth
century, which helped develop synchronic linguistics in the following century.

SLIDE 3 - Sub Fields

Within historical linguistics, there are different subfields, such as:
● comparative philology: it compares cross-linguistic features to demonstrate how
languages are related within each other.
● etymology: it studies the history of words. In order to achieve its aim, this field tries to
answer why a certain word enter into the target language, the place where it comes from
and how that word have changed over time in orthographic, phonological and semantic
terms.
● dialectology: it is based on the historical study of dialects. It discuss the features such as
grammatical variations of two different dialects and the phonological changes that a
dialect has over time.
● phonology: it is the study of the systems of the sound which pertain to a particular
language.
● morphology/syntax: examines how the different means of expression of a certain language
developed through time. Its focus is usually put on grammatical structures, inflectional
systems and word order.

SLIDE 4 - Socio-temporal settings (Origins)

The first studies in historical linguistic in the West can be traced to the ancient Greeks, like Plato,
they approached the subject philosophically and speculated about the nature of their language.
They were interested in etymology and discussed about the names of things and whether they
were due to their natural attributes to conventions. They also discussed about the nature of
language, considering its patterns and the parts of speech. Their concepts and knowledge were
taken by the Romans, who used them in their linguistic studies about Latin. Romans and Greeks
were aware of word changes regarding form and meaning but didn’t make significant findings
about etymology. Latin and Greek grammar were studied throughout the Middle Ages primarily from
a pedagogical point of view.

SLIDE 5 - Socio-temporal settings (Renaissance, 18th century)

● During the Renaissance, language studies changed. New lands were discovered as well as
exotic languages. Vernacular languages had begun to gain importance so the world now
recognized the diversity in linguistic structures. Language studies now presented ideas
like the universal grammar expressed, for example, by the Port-Royal grammarians of the
seventeenth century. During this century, it also started the comparison and classification
of languages considering their similitudes. The study of etymology also gained importance
during this period, but there wasn’t a clear organization or principles in these studies.
● At the beginning of the eighteenth century, comparative and historical linguistics gained
more consistency by the increasing efforts to compare and classify languages in
accordance with their origins. This can be seen in the work of Jhon Ludolf regarding
affinities between languages and the considerations of a proto-speech and language
classification of Leibnitz. Also, Hobbes, Rousseau, Burnett (Lord Monboddo), Condillac and
Herder had interest on the origin of language, in relation to supposed universals of
language.
● And in the latter part of the eighteenth century, an important achievement occurred,
Sanskrit, a language of ancient India was discovered to be related to the languages of
Europe, Latin and Greek.

SLIDE 6 - Socio-temporal settings (19th century)

Sanskrit linguistic studies began in Germany with W. von Schlegel. He started comparing it with
the languages of Europe, forming the first period in the growth of historical linguistics and
comparative linguistics.
Ancient Indian grammarians, whose more renown scholar is Pãnini, had studies in language dated
from the second half of the first millenium BC. Panini was a linguist, whose works in Sanskrit’s
grammar, morphology, phonetics and phonology were brilliant in theory and practice. Indian
Phonetics descriptions had just began to be paired in the West by the 17th century.
The introduction of Sanskrit’s studies in Europe stimulated the development of
comparative-historical linguistics. From that time, many scholars began to study the relationships
between languages and their historical developments.
The nineteenth century is the period where most linguists concentrated their studies in this field,
and the ones leading the investigations were, mostly, German scholars.
During the beginnings of the nineteenth century, Rasmus Rask, and the Germans, Franz Bopp and
Jacob Grimm started their comparative-historical linguistic studies about Indo-European
languages.
In the mid-nineteenth century, August Schleicher (1821–68), an influential linguist, continued
developing theories regarding a proto-language from were the European ones were derived. In the
second half of the century scholars from other countries began their studies and investigations
about linguistic matters but Germany maintained its place as the main representative in the field.
In 1863, Hermann Grassmann, Karl Vener and Graziado Ascioli formulated phonetic laws after
observations and comparisons. This laws and the works of Wilhelm Scherer led to important
theories in historical linguistic proposed by the Neogrammarians, a movement that became
dominant in linguistic investigations by that time.

SLIDE 7 - Socio-temporal settings (20th century and nowadays)

During the first decade of the twentieth century, the German domination of linguistic science
changed its place with the work of Ferdinand de Saussure (1857–1913) of the University of
Geneva. He is considered one of the founders of structural linguistics. He proposed that language
was a system of arbitrary signs in opposition to one another, and introduced the separation of
historical linguistics and descriptive linguistics into two defined areas.
From this moment, descriptive linguistics gained importance and historical linguistics and
comparative studies lost preponderance as the main embodiment of the discipline. Nowadays,
comparative historical linguistics is one more branch of the wide linguistic fields of investigations.

SLIDE 8 - Representatives of the field:

18th century
- John Ludolf determined that affinities among languages should be based on
grammatical resemblances.
- Gottfried Leibnitz proposed that languages must be derived from a proto-language and
intended to establish language classifications.
19th Century
- Rasmus Rask published a comparative grammar about Scandinavian Languages and their
relationships, observing regularities of change.
- Franz Bopp published a work comparing verbal conjugations of Sanskrit and the Indo-
European family of languages as he called them.
- Jacob Grimm studied the Germanic family, specially Gothic, and was able to identify the
systemic nature of sound change, becoming this finding the first linguistic law or the
GRIMM’S LAW.
- J.H. Bredsdorff explained the causes of language change, considering factors such as
misunderstandings, imperfections of speech organs, tendency towards analogy, necessity
to express new ideas, etc and influences from foreign languages.
- August Schleicher intended to reconstruct a hypothetical parent language to most
European languages, a proto language, and also considered a genealogical family tree
model of the Indo European languages. He introduced the concepts of considering language
as a natural organism that evolves following the Darwinian ideas, and that language
depends on the physiology and minds of the people. He presented a biological approach to
language study.
- Herman Grassmann, establish an exception to GRIMM’S LAW, his LAW OF THE ASPIRATES,
- Karl Verner, proposed another phonetic law.
 - Graziado Ascoli made certain discoveries also related to phonetics using the comparative
method.

SLIDE 9 - Representatives of the field: Neogrammarians

It is a movement inspired by the contributions of Wilhelm Scherer in 1868 which dominated
linguistic enquiry. The main representatives of this movement are Brugmann, Osthoff, Delbrück,
Wackernagel, Paul and Leskien, who esteemed that phonetic laws were similar to nature ones of
physical science by the consistency of their operation. In the University of Leipzig,
Neogrammarians observed that the application of laws of mechanical nature to sound change in
opposition to the speakers’ psychological process towards regularization of forms. As a result,
sound changes were analogically irregular.

SLIDE 10 - Representatives of the field

Ferdinand de Saussure distinguished between language and speech and also demarcated the
concepts of synchronic and diachronic linguistics, this is the separation of descriptive linguistics
from historical linguistic, becoming the founder of structuralism. He explained that synchronic
linguistics should study the structure of a language system at a particular moment in time and
diachronic linguistics should be concerned with the historical development of isolated elements of
the language. Despite this he had applied structural concepts in his early work in a reconstruction
of the Indo-European vowel system.
Scholars after Saussure started to apply structural concepts to the diachronic study of language.

SLIDE 11 - Principles
Certain principles of historical linguistics’ study are:
❏ All languages are in a incessant process of change.
❏ All languages are matter to the same type of modifying influences.
❏ Language change is regular and systematic, which allows speakers to have an
noncontrolled communication.
❏ Language change is associated with linguistic and social factors.
❏ Language systems tend toward unestablished states of economy and redundancy.

SLIDE 12 - Objectives
Practitioners of historical linguistics have different objectives. Some of them can be:
❏ Study changes in phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics that occur gradually by
time in order to understand the mechanisms bearing the modifications and explain them
❏ Rebuild and compare languages to reach to the historical relationships which indicate
common origins of language, which permit the linguist to group them into families.

SLIDE 13 - Objectives
❏ Examine sociological aspects of language change which embrace interrogatives of dialect,
style, taboos, prestige, changes in social behaviour, technology and the difference between
individual needs.
 ❏ When the central language of a document is known, e.g. Latin, the linguist have to try to
determine the orthoepic features of the language into knowledge of the writing system
that is employed by rhyme or the pronunciation of the descendent languages.
❏ When the language is unknown, the linguist should decode the texts to acquire a clear
view of the underlying linguistic structure.

SLIDE 14 - Methodology
During 19th century, when the studies of Indo-European unfolded like as a free-standing science,
many methods and techniques were developed in order to aid the linguist to achieve valid facts
concerned with the earlier stages of a language. Some of the methods and techniques used by
historical linguists are:

1) COMPARATIVE METHOD: It consists of comparing two or more languages in order to find out
their similarities.

2) INTERNAL RECONSTRUCTION: The underlying principle is that evidence from a specific language
is used in order to obtain knowledge of a previous stages of a language. This evidence is obtained
in the remnants of the processes that were active in a certain moment,

3) CONSISTENCY OF ORTHOGRAPHY: The orthography of older languages gives us proof of the

pronunciation and the sounds systems used previously.

4) RHYME MATERIAL AND REVERSE SPELLING: When a word is created in order to rhyme with
another whose pronunciation is known, both words share the same sound value. Reverse spelling
occurs when a writer does not use the conventional spelling for a sound A, but he uses it for
another sound B.

SLIDE 15 - Changes in Language

As we see, languages can undergo many changes, which ended up in creating new languages.
These changes can be of many types:
❏ Phonetic and phonological: depending on the environmental conditions, a phone can
develop variants, as a result of influences in the phonetic processes like assimilation. The
sounds of a specific language are affected by the passing of time by regular and
systematic modifications; that changes are likely to apply to all relevant environments in
the same way. Besides, these change mechanisms that lead to phonological modifications
affect features of sounds or the addition, lose or movement of sound segments.
❏ Morphological and syntactical: The effects of phonological changes can also have effects
on morphology
 ❏ Lexical and semantic: there are alterations in the meaning and in the quantity of words of
vocabulary.
❏ Changes in social and psychological aspects: language changes can occur by social
phenomena of metaphor, taboos and folk etymologies.
❏ Linguistic borrowing: it occurs when linguistic elements are integrated from another
language, which can also embody cultural ideas related to it. Generally, linguistic borrowing
happens in order to conform the sound patterns of the borrowing language.

SLIDE 16 - Genetic Classification of Languages

Genetic classification of languages resulted from the investigations of historical and comparative
linguistics, which made different groups and subgroups where the languages of the world were
classified according to their linguistic relationship. This genetical classification shows that the
languages that pertain to a specific group shares a common descendant from a previous
proto-language.
The most known families of language are:
❏ Indo-European: It extended from Europe to India, and lately it has spread over many parts of
the world, such as North America, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. It descends
from the Proto-Indo-European, a hypothetical parent language, which is believed to have
been spoken during the third millennium. Some languages we can find in this family are:
German, English, Welsh, Spanish, Latin, Greek, Russian, Albanian, Hindi
❏ Uralic: this family expanded across the northern latitudes from Norway to Siberia. The
earliest texts pertained to a Hungarian funeral oration on the twelfth century. Within this
family we can see two major branches: Samoyedic, which is spoken in the USSR, and the
Finno-Ugric, in which there are many languages such as Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian and
Lappish.
❏ Caucasian: they are languages spoken in the region of the Caucasus mountains. There are
two independent groups in which the thirty five languages are located: North Caucasian
and South Caucasian. The first texts found are written in Georgian, a language belonging to
the second group, and dates from the fifth century.
❏ Isolate: in this family, there are languages which have not been related to any other
language and cannot be allocated to a family. For example, Ainu (spoken in northern
Japan), Basque (spoken in northeastern Spain and southwestern France), and languages
known only from inscriptional material like Tartessian.