Comparative

Linguistics
By:Nermine Naboulsi
 Outline…
Thesis : Comparative linguistics is a study of how languages
are close together, so here are the steps to explain about it.
1. Definition of language
A. The old testament story of Babel
B. Historical overview of the myth
2. Definition of comparative linguistics
A. Comparative methods
B. William Jones the former of comparative linguistics and
examples of his methods.
3. Similarities in other comparative methods
4. Definition of families of languages
5. Conclusion.
 Language…
 Language is the mirror of our humanity, and only by
studying its many reflections will we ever fully know
ourselves.

 There are more than five thousand languages spoken

across the face of the earth.

 Could all these languages ever be traced back to a

common starting point? ? ?

 Was there a time when the people of the world spoke one
tongue? ? ?
 The Old Testament story of Babel.
 This notion is vividly brought to life in
the Old Testament story of Babel, When
people use to talk one language;
According to biblical legend, the people
of Babylon started to build a tower
reaching up to heaven.
 Their ambition so offended God that he
shattered the unity of their language,
creating a confusion of incomprehensible
tongues.

 Forever after, the tower was called

Babel, from the Hebrew word "balbail,"
meaning "to confuse."
 From a Myth came
questions than theories…

 Like many myths, perhaps, there is a germ of

truth in the Babel story.

 Did a mother tongue ever exist? Can we find it?

 Clues can be found by studying the world's great

language families, such as Indo-European, the
family that includes English.

 From this; concepts and questions emerged what

we call Comparative linguistics.
 What is Comparative Linguistics?

 Comparative linguistics is study of the relationships or

correspondences between two or more languages and the
techniques used to discover whether the languages have a
common ancestor.

 The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is the

Comparative method, which aims to compare phonological
systems, morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon .

 Using this comparative method, linguists have been able to

establish the connections among a group of languages
 Comparative Methods…

It aims to prove that two or more

languages are descended from a single
proto-language by comparing lists of
cognate terms.
The comparative method itself developed
out of the attempts to reconstruct the
proto-language which Jones had
hypothesized about, known as Proto-Indo-
European (PIE).
 Jones?? Who is he? What did he do?

 In 1786 Sir William Jones, a British scholar, One

of the former who demonstrated one of the
comparative methods:
 He asserted that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were
related to one another and had descended from a
common source.
 He based this assertion on observations of
similarities in sounds and meanings among the
three languages.
 For Example:
 the English word “brother” resembles:
the Sanskrit word bhratar
the Latin word frater
the Greek word phrater,
Which all have the same meaning “Brother”
 The initial sounds, although different, correspond regularly according to
the pattern discovered by Jacob Grimm and named Grimm’s Law

Labial and Dental Stops in the Indo-European Languages

Greek Latin Gothic Sanskrit Salvic
p p f p p
b b p b b
Ph phrater f/b frater b bh “bhratar” b
t t e t t
d d t d d
 Other Comparative Methods…

 Comparative linguists also look for similarities in the way

words are formed in different languages.

 Latin and English, for example, change the form of a

word to express different meanings,

 as when the English verb go changes to went and gone to

express a past action.

 Chinese, on the other hand, has no such inflected forms;

the verb remains the same while other words indicate the
time (as in “go store tomorrow”)
 Certain similarities are striking.
 Take the numbers ,for example. Here are two and three in
English, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit.
English Latin Greek Sanskrit

Two duo dúo dva

Three Tres treîs tráyas

 But linguists are interested in discovering regular patterns, not

isolated resemblances. So here, "t" in English often appears as "d"
in the other languages.

 By finding patterns like these, different languages can be grouped

together as members of a language family as the Indo-European, the
family that includes English
 Families of language...
 How can you tell that the languages you're looking at reflect a
single original language, and therefore, form a family???
 The only way you can do that is by finding systematic similarities
between these languages in every area of their grammar,
similarities in their sounds, in their inflections, in the syntax of the
language, and so forth.
 Two languages are genetically related if they are descended from
the same ancestor language. Thus, for example, Spanish and
French are both descended from Latin. Therefore, French and
Spanish are considered to belong to the same family of languages,
the Romance Languages .
 In brief….
There are so many other language families:
 we can imagine a tree; The branches of this tree can
represent different language families.
 The leaves on the branches, would represent different
languages.
 And by tracing these branches back, one can arrive at larger
branches, such as Indo-European, and by tracing the Indo-
European branch back, one arrives at even larger branches.
 Eventually, we believe that you arrive at the main trunk of
this tree into which all of the language or from which all of
the language families have derived.
 Conclusion…
 It's very nice to think about the days before Babel,
when everybody spoke exactly the same way. But, it's a
dream. It's a belief. It's not scientifically testable, one way or
the other.
 Gazing upon these silently evocative images from the past,
it's only natural to want to know more about these artists
and their message. New clues to the past continually emerge
as we compare the world's languages and trace their
relationships back in time.
 Language is the mirror of our humanity, and
only by studying its many reflections will we ever
fully know ourselves.
 The End.
Thank You…
By: Nermine Naboulsi
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