NationMaster - Encyclopedia: Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics (also diachronic linguistics or comparative linguistics) is primarily the study of the ways in which languages change over time. It is opposed to synchronic linguistics, which studies the state of a language at a certain point. Linguistics is the scientific study of human language, and someone who engages in this study is called a linguist or linguistician. ... Theoretical linguistics studies diverse questions: how certain languages managed to communicate, what properties all languages have in common, what knowledge a person must have to be able to use a language, and language acquisition. ... Phonetics (from the Greek word Ï†Ï‰Î½Î®, phone = sound/voice) is the study of sounds (voice). ... Phonology (Greek phone = voice/sound and logos = word/speech), is a subfield of linguistics closely associated with phonetics. ... Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... Syntax, originating from the Greek words ÏƒÏ…Î½ (syn, meaning co- or together) and Ï„Î¬Î¾Î¹Ï‚ (tÃ¡xis, meaning sequence, order, arrangement), can in linguistics be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... In the main, semantics (from the Greek and in greek letters ÏƒÎ·Î¼Î±Î½Ï„Î¹ÎºÏŒÏ‚ or in latin letters semantikos, or significant meaning, derived from sema, sign) is the study of meaning, in some sense of that term. ... Lexical semantics is a field in computer science and linguistics which deals mainly with word meaning. ... The Prototype is what a Stereotype is called in cognitive linguitics. ... Stylistics is the study of style used in literary, and verbal language and the effect the writer/speaker wishes to communicate to the reader/hearer. ... In linguistics, prescription is the laying down or prescribing of normative rules for a language. ... Pragmatics is generally the study of natural language understanding, and specifically the study of how context influences the interpretation of meanings. ... Applied linguistics is concerned with using linguistic theory to address real-world problems. ... Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the psychological and neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, and understand language. ... Sociolinguistics is the study of the effect of any and all aspects of society, including cultural norms, expectations, and context, on the way language is used. ... Generative linguistics is a school of thought within linguistics that makes use of the concept of a generative grammar. ... In linguistics and cognitive science, cognitive linguistics (CL) refers to the currently dominant school of linguistics that views the important essence of language as innately based in evolutionarily-developed and speciated faculties, and seeks explanations that advance or fit well into the current understandings of the human mind. ... Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical and logical modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. ... Descriptive linguistics is the work of analyzing and describing how language is actually spoken now (or how it was actually spoken in the past), by any group of people. ... Etymology is the study of the origins of words. ... The following is a list of linguists, those who study linguistics. ... Synchronic linguistics deals with a language at a specific point in time; it is opposed to diachronic linguistics (also called historical linguistics), which deals with how languages change over time. ...

The main tools of historical linguistics are the analysis of historical records, and the comparison of internal features — vocabulary, word formation, and syntax — of current and extinct languages. The goal is to trace the development and genetic affiliations of the world languages, and understand the process of language evolution. A classification of all languages into family trees is both a major result and a necessary tool of this effort. A vocabulary is a set of words known to a person or other entity, or that are part of a specific language. ... Morphology is a subdiscipline of linguistics that studies word structure. ... Syntax, originating from the Greek words ÏƒÏ…Î½ (syn, meaning co- or together) and Ï„Î¬Î¾Î¹Ï‚ (tÃ¡xis, meaning sequence, order, arrangement), can in linguistics be described as the study of the rules, or patterned relations that govern the way the words in a sentence come together. ... Current distribution of Human Language Families Most languages are known to belong to language families. ...

Modern historical linguistics grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents. In its early years, historical linguistics focused on the well-known Indo-European languages; but since then, significant comparative linguistic work has been done on the Uralic languages, Austronesian languages and various families of Native American languages, among many others. Philology is the study of ancient texts and languages. ... The Indo-European languages are a group of several hundred languages and dialects (specifically 443 according to the SIL estimate), including most of the major language families of Europe, as well as many languages of Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. ... Geographical distribution of Samoyedic, Finnic, Ugric and Yukaghir languages The Uralic languages form a language family of about 30 languages spoken by approximately 20 million people. ... The Austronesian languages are a language family widely dispersed throughout the islands of Southeast Asia and the Pacific, with a few members spoken on continental Asia. ... Native American languages are the indigenous languages of the Americas, spoken by Native Americans from the southern tip of South America to Alaska and Greenland. ...

Language evolution and the comparative method

Languages change over time. What were once dialects of the same language may eventually diverge enough that they are no longer mutually intelligible and can be considered separate languages.

One method to illustrate the relationship between such divergent yet related languages is to construct family trees, an idea pioneered by the 19th century historical linguist August Schleicher. The basis for the trees is the comparative method: languages presumed to be related are compared with one another, and linguists look for regular sound correspondences based on what is generally known about how languages can change, and use them to reconstruct the best hypothesis about the nature of the common ancestor language from which the attested languages are descended. August Schleicher August Schleicher (February 19, 1821 - December 6, 1868) was a German linguist. ... The comparative method (in linguistics) is a method used to detect genetic relationships between languages and to establish a consistent relationship hypothesis by reconstructing: the common ancestor of the languages in question, a plausible sequence of regular changes by which the historically known languages can be derived from that common...

Use of the comparative method is validated by its application to languages whose common ancestor is known. Thus, when the method is applied to the Romance languages (which include French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, and Romanian), the reconstructed common ancestor language comes out rather similar to Latin — not the classical Latin of Horace and Cicero, but Vulgar Latin, the colloquial Latin spoken in various dialects in the late Roman Empire. The Romance languages, also called Romanic languages or New Latin languages, are a subset of the Italic languages, specifically the descendants of the Latin dialects spoken by the common people in what is known as Latin Europe (Italian/Portuguese/Spanish Europa latina, Catalan Europa llatina, French Europe latine, Romanian Europa... Latin is an ancient Indo-European language originally spoken in the region around Rome called Latium. ... Vulgar Latin, as in this political engraving at Pompeii, was the language of the ordinary people of the Roman Empire, distinct from the Classical Latin of literature. ... For other uses, see Roman Empire (disambiguation). ...

The comparative method can be used to reconstruct languages for which no written records exist, either because none have been preserved or because the speakers were illiterate. Thus, the Germanic languages (which include German, Dutch, English, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Faroese, Icelandic, Yiddish, and the extinct Gothic) can be compared to reconstruct Proto-Germanic, a language that was probably contemporaneous with Latin and for which no records are preserved. The Germanic languages form one of the branches of the Indo-European (IE) language family. ... The English language is a West Germanic language that originates in England. ... Yiddish (Yid. ... The Gothic language (*gutiska razda, *ðŒ²ðŒ¿ð„ðŒ¹ðƒðŒºðŒ° ð‚ðŒ°ðŒ¶ðŒ³ðŒ°) is an extinct Germanic language that was spoken by the Goths and specifically by the Visigoths. ...

Germanic and Latin (more precisely, Proto-Italic, the ancestor of Latin and a few of its neighbors) are themselves related, being both descended from Proto-Indo-European, spoken perhaps 5000 years ago. Scholars have reconstructed a Proto-Indo-European languae on the basis of data from its nine surviving daughter branches, which are: Germanic, Italic, Celtic, Greek, Baltic, Slavic, Albanian, Armenian, Indo-Iranian, and from the two dead branches Tocharian and Anatolian. The Italic subfamily is a member of the Centum branch of the Indo-European language family. ... The Indo-European languages are a group of several hundred languages and dialects (specifically 443 according to the SIL estimate), including most of the major language families of Europe, as well as many languages of Asia, which belong to a single superfamily. ... The Celtic languages are the languages descended from Proto-Celtic, or Common Celtic, spoken by ancient and modern Celts alike. ... The Baltic languages are a group of related languages belonging to the Indo-European language family and spoken mainly in areas extending east and southeast of the Baltic Sea in Northern Europe. ... The Slavic languages (also called Slavonic languages), a group of closely related languages of the Slavic peoples and a subgroup of Indo-European languages, have speakers in most of Eastern Europe, in much of the Balkans, in parts of Central Europe, and in the northern part of Asia. ... The Indo-Iranian languages are the language links between India and Iran. ... Tocharian is one of the most obscure branches of the Indo-European language group. ... The Anatolian languages are a group of extinct languages, either Indo-European or (in some classifications) closely related to Indo-European, which were spoken in Asia Minor, including Hittite. ...

The comparative method aims to distinguish so-called genetic linguistic descent — that is, the passing of a language from parents to children, down through the generations — from resemblances that are due to cultural contact between contemporary languages.

For example, about 30% of the vocabulary of Persian is taken from Arabic, as a result of the Arab conquest of Iran in the 8th century and much subsequent cultural contact. Yet Persian is considered to be a member of the Indo-European language family — because of its core vocabulary, which generally has Indo-European cognates (as in mâdar = "mother"), and of many characteristically Indo-European features of its grammar (as in bûd = "was", formed from a root related to English "be" and a suffix related to the English past tense ending "-ed".) Persian (known variously as: ÙØ§Ø±Ø³ÛŒ FÃ¢rsi, local name in Iran, Afghanistan and Tajikistan, Ù¾Ø§Ø±Ø³ÛŒ PÃ¢rsi, older, local name still used by some speakers, Tajik, a Central Asian dialect, or Dari, another local name in Tajikistan and Afghanistan) is a language spoken in Iran, Tajikistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan, Bahrain, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Armenia... Arabic (; , less formally, ) is the largest member of the Semitic branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family (classification: South Central Semitic) and is closely related to Hebrew and Aramaic. ... This article does not cite its references or sources. ...

Once the various changes in the daughter branches have been worked out, and a fair amount of the core vocabulary and grammar of the protolanguage are understood, then scholars will quite generally agree that a relationship of genetic relatedness has been proven.

Non-comparative method theories

Much more controversial are hypotheses about relatedness which are not supported by application of the comparative method. Scholars who attempt to probe deeper than the comparative method supports (for example, by tabulating similarities found by mass lexical comparison without setting up sound correspondences) are often accused of scholarly wishful thinking. The problem is that any two languages have a huge number of opportunities to resemble one another just by accident, so merely pointing out isolated resemblances has little evidentiary value. A famous example is the Persian word for "bad", which is pronounced (more or less) just like English "bad". It can be shown that the resemblance between these two words is completely accidental, and has nothing to do with the (rather remote) genetic connection between English and Persian. For further examples, see False cognate. The idea is that this linguistic "noise" may be reduced by comparing large amounts of words, which is exactly the point of mass lexical comparison. However, by ignoring known historical changes in the languages, mass lexical comparison incorporates known randomness, and therefore its conclusions are inherently inaccurate to an extent that is impossible to assess. Mass lexical comparison or mass comparison is a highly controversial method developed by the well-known linguist Joseph Greenberg to find genetic relationships among languages in the remote past, beyond the limits of the traditional comparative method, or in situations where there are too many languages to practically apply the... A pair of false cognates consists of two words in different languages that appear to be or are sometimes considered cognates (words in different languages with a common root) when they are in fact not. ...

Since supporting distant genetic relationships is so difficult, and the method for finding and proving such relationships is not well established (in the way that the comparative method is), the field of locating remote relationships is riven with scholarly controversy. Nevertheless, the temptation to pursue remote relationships remains a powerful lure to many scholars-- after all, Proto-Indo-European must have seemed a rather wild hypothesis to many when it was first proposed.

This uncertainty also relates to estimates of how long it would take for languages to diverge completely. One commonly cited opinion is that if a group of people were sent to a distant galaxy, after 10,000 years they would be speaking a language that would be no more similar to their native language than any other language selected at random. This figure is based on glottochronology, using a simplified assumption of a constant 14% loss rate each millennium and a chance similarity rate of 5%. However, other work by Isidore Dyen[1] and Sergei Starostin indicates that in fact words have wildly differing expected life spans; thus, for instance, a specialized word like "goshawk" might on average last a mere millennium or two, whereas extremely common words like "I" and "you" often last so long that it is not possible to even estimate their life span without reconstructions going further back in time than those that are universally accepted. Glottochronology was a linguistics method used to estimate the time of divergence of two related languages. ... Dr. Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin (b. ... Binomial name Accipiter gentilis (Linnaeus, 1758) The Goshawk (Accipiter gentilis; from OE. gÃ³shafuc goose-hawk) is a medium large bird of prey in the family Accipitridae which also includes many other diurnal raptors such as eagles, buzzards and harriers. ...

The ultimate in remote reconstruction is the recovery of a Proto-World language. Not all scholars believe that such a language even necessarily existed, since some models of human evolution may allow the independent appearance of human speech in several parts of the world, resulting in several linguistic families with no common ancestral language. Nevertheless, Joseph Greenberg suggested that Proto-World was the language of people coming out of northeast Africa around 50,000 BC. On the other hand, according to current archaeological evidence, the native languages of South America must have been isolated from those of the Old World for 10,000 years or more; and those of Australia may have split off from the putative world language tree even earlier than that. Therefore, if one accepts the estimate that no relationships would be recognizable after 10,000 years, then we stand little chance of demonstrating a common origin for all the world languages — unless, against current expectations, they all had a common ancestor within that time span. The term Proto-World language refers to the hypothetical latest common ancestor of all the worlds languages, an ancient language from which all modern languages and language families â€“ and usually including all known dead languages â€“ derive. ... Joseph Harold Greenberg (May 28, 1915â€“May 7, 2001) was a prominent and controversial linguist, known for his work in both language classification and typology. ...

Dené-Caucasian has also been postulated to include Na-Dené (North America), Sino-Tibetan, Ket (Siberia), Burushaski (Pakistan), North-East Caucasian (Chechen and the Dagestan languages), and Basque. This language family is extremely hypothetical. The Dene-Caucasian (or Sino-Caucasian) language family is a conjectural macrofamily containing the Sino-Tibetan, North Caucasian, Yeniseian and Na-Dene languages. ... Na-Dené or Na-Dene is a Native American language family which includes the Athabaskan languages, Eyak, and Tlingit. ... Sino-Tibetan languages form a language family of about 250 languages of East Asia, second only to Indo-European in terms of the number of speakers. ... Burushaski (Other names are Burushaski, Brushas, Brushias) is a language isolate spoken by some 50,000_60,000 people in the Hunza, Nagir, Yasin, and some parts of Gilgit valleys in northern Pakistan. ... Basque (in Basque: Euskara) is the language spoken by the Basque people who inhabit the Pyrenees in North-Central Spain and the adjoining region of South-Western France. ...

The Nostratic hypothesis was proposed by a Dane named Holger Pedersen, in 1903. The hypothesis claims that the Nostratic grouping includes such widely ranging language families as Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Uralic, Altaic, Sumerian, Elamo-Dravidian, and Kartvelian. Others claim other sets of languages. Some have speculated that the Nostratics were refugees from a Black Sea Flood of around 5600 BC, and some think this is the origin of Noah's Flood from the Bible. However, linguists have reached no firm conclusion about the validity of the Nostratic hypothesis. Its proponents, unlike Greenberg, use the traditional comparative method; however, their comparisons are often accused of being far-fetched or involving too many semantic shifts, while some also accuse them of simply grouping together the language families most familiar to them and neglecting to compare each of them to language families further afield. Nostratic is a highly controversial language super-family that putatively links many Eurasian language families. ... Holger Pedersen (April 7, 1867 - October 25, 1953) was a Danish linguist who made significant contributions to language science and wrote about 30 authoritative works concerning several languages. ... 1903 (MCMIII) was a common year starting on Thursday (see link for calendar). ... The Black Sea deluge is a hypothesized prehistoric flood that occurred when the Black Sea rapidly filled, possibly forming the basis for some Great Flood myths. ... The Bible (Hebrew ×ª× ×´×š [tanakh], Greek Î· Î’Î¯Î²Î»Î¿Ï‚ [he biblos] ) (sometimes The Holy Bible, The Book, Good Book, Word of God, The Word, or Scripture), from Greek (Ï„Î±) Î²Î¹Î²Î»Î¹Î±, (ta) biblia, (the) books, is the classical name for the Hebrew Bible of Judaism or the combination of the Old Testament and New Testament of Christianity... The comparative method (in linguistics) is a method used to detect genetic relationships between languages and to establish a consistent relationship hypothesis by reconstructing: the common ancestor of the languages in question, a plausible sequence of regular changes by which the historically known languages can be derived from that common...

Encyclopedia > Historical linguistics

Contents

Language evolution and the comparative method

Non-comparative method theories

See also

Bibliography