Historical Linguistics: an overview
Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum,
si þin nama gehalgod.
Tobecume þin rice.
The Lord’s Prayer (circa 1000; Yule 2010)
The above quote from Lord’s Prayer is almost non-recognizable and
unintelligible if we try and compare this ‘Englisc’ with the present
‘English’ that we read, write and speak.
Thus, the investigation or exploration of the features of older languages,
and the way they are related to, and got developed into modern
languages demands us to take up the study of language change and
development and trace the history of a language.
The study of language change and language development were the
main goals a discipline called ‘Philology’.
The simplest way to define the discipline ‘Philology’ in just one line
would say that ‘it is the branch of knowledge that deals with the
structure, historical development, and relationships of a language or
languages’.
If you follow the one-line definition of ‘philology’, you would know as
to what was the main concern, focus and finally the procedure of the
‘philologists’ who were doing research on the languages of the world.
In 19th century, ‘philology’ as a branch of knowledge had great
dominance on the study of language.
The result of this dominance was realized as the creation of ‘languagetree’.
This language tree, which was changed later by the philologists as
‘language family tree’ (LFT hereafter), was considered as a big
achievement for/by them.
This is so because they could show by sheer comparison and
demonstration as to how the languages were related and could form very
close affinity.
In fact, this creation of the ‘LFT’ worked as the motivating factor to let
the scholars think that a variety of languages spoken in different parts of
the world might be the member of the same family.
In fact scholars wanted to float the notion that all the languages of the
world must have one mother language.
This notion infused a great amount of enthusiasm in them.
Searching for the aboriginal tongue
• Using some conventional techniques, linguists seek to
find out the more elusive prehistoric tongues
• Nostratic—ancestral speech of the Middle East 12,000
to 20,000 years ago
– It is said to be a language that serves as an ancestral
language to nine modern language families
– With a lot of hard work and effort, a 500-word
dictionary has been compiled
• There were some contemporary languages to
Nostratic and they are some of the ancient tongues
including Dene-Caucasian(=kaukasia ).
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Nostratic
• Nostratic is a proposed language family that includes
many of the indigenous language families.
• This includes languages of Eurasia, including the IndoEuropean, Uralic and Altaic as well as Kartvelian
languages.
• It also includes the Afro-asiatic languages native to
Northern Africa and the Arabian Peninsula, and the
Dravidian languages of the Indian Subcontinent .
• The exact composition and structure of the family varies
among proponents.
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Searching for the aboriginal tongue
• Dene-Caucasian reputedly gave rise to Sino-Tibetan, Basque,
and one form of early Native-American called Na-Dene
• Scholars are attempting to find the original linguistic source
area from which all modern languages have derived
• It is believed the original language arose in Africa perhaps
250,000 years ago and diffused from there to the rest of the
world.
• And Nostratic is mentioned by many researchers in Philology
as the oldest language.
• One does not have to believe this, but we must remember
that something of this kind has been mentioned.
• And until any new fact is reported this serves as the reference
point.
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Before we gear up for difficult steps to do actual historical
linguistics stuff, it is not bad to concretize the basics.
Let us reiterate and clarify and simplify what we talked about
in earlier slides.
we want to investigate the features of older languages.
We want to understand how the languages got developed from
old to modern ones.
We must study the history of languages and changes that took
place in those languages.
We would need to use the tools that are developed by the
‘Philologists’ to do so.
If we do the above, there will be an outcome and that will give
us a ‘tree’ shaped structure to which the languages will be
connected showing some branches and sub-branches marking
the past to present of any/many languages.
Philologists in 19th century were doing this with their own interests
and doing it with great rigor.
The demand of the time was to find out ‘family’ for different
languages.
It was also desired to discover that a variety of languages spoken in
different parts of the world were actually member of the same
family or ONE ancient language.
All these attempts were greatly strengthened by the claim made by
a British government official in India, Sir William Jones about
Sanskrit in 1786.
The claim reads as :
• ‘The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a
wonderful structure;
• More perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and
more delicately refined than either,
• yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots
of verbs
• and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been
produced by accident.
This observation by William Jones about Sanskrit brought a
revolution in the field of ‘Philology’ at that time.
They opined that a number of languages from very different
geographical areas must have some common ancestor.
It was clear, however, that this common ancestor could not be
described from any existing records.
They had to be hypothesized on the basis of similar features
existing in records of languages that were believed to be the offspring of this ancestor.
During this golden era of ‘Philology’ in 19th Century, a great term
came in existence i.e. ‘Proto’.
This term roughly meant ‘the original/beginning form of a
language.
This term came into use to describe that common ancestor.
It also incorporated the notion that this was the original form
(Proto) of a language that was the source of modern languages.
The modern languages for which an ancestor (Proto) had to be
found came majorly from Indian subcontinent (Indo) and from
Europe (European).
This incessant drive of the ‘Philologists’ made it possible to
evolve the great term in the 19th Century ‘Proto-Indo-European’.
Once this PIE is established as a “great-great grandmother,”
scholars set out to identify the branches of the Indo-European
family tree, tracing the lineage of many modern languages.
The family tree diagram in the next slide is a small and fleeting
view of Indo-European languages in their family branches.
It is true that Indo-European is the language family with the
largest population and distribution in the world, but it isn’t the
only one.
There are about 420 (about 100 of them are what is called
‘language isolates’) such language families containing more than
6,912 different individual languages.
.
According to Ethnologue , there are about 6,912 languages in the
world.
Many of these languages are in danger of extinction while a few
are expanding.
In terms of number of speakers, Chinese has the most widespread
native speakers (about 1.4 billion), while English has about 350
million native speaker, but it is more widely used in different parts
of the world (1.8 billion).
Language Family connection
Looking at the Indo-European family tree, we might
wonder as to how these diverse languages are related.
After all, two modern languages such as Italian and Hindi
would seem to have nothing in common.
One way to get a clearer picture of how they are related is
to look through the records of an older generation.
In this regard, we can look at the data of Latin and
Sanskrit (also others) from which the modern languages
evolved.
For example, if we use familiar IPA to write out the words
for father and brother in Sanskrit, Latin and Ancient
Greek, some common features become apparent.
While these forms have rather clear similarities, it is
extremely unlikely that exactly the same word will be
found throughout the languages.
However, it is a fact that close similarities do occur in
the pronunciations of the words in different
languages.
It is a good evidence for proposing a family
connection.
This is the first step and a successful venture by the
Philologist.
Cognates
The process that we just saw for a possible family connection between
different languages by looking at what is called the “cognate-word”.
Within groups of related languages, we can often find close similarities
in particular sets of words.
A cognate is a word in a language (English) that has a similar form with
another language (e.g. German) and is or was used with a similar
meaning.
The English words mother, father and friend are cognates of the
German words Mutter, Vater and Freund.
On the basis of these cognates, we would imagine that Modern English
and Modern German probably have a common ancestor in what has been
labelled as the Germanic branch of Indo-European.
By the same process, we can look at similar sets in Spanish (madre,
padre, amigo) and Italian (madre, padre, amico) and conclude that
these cognates are good evidence of a common ancestor in the Italic
branch of Indo-European.
Comparative reconstruction
The majority Principle or The most natural
development principle
The direction of change described in each case (1)–(4)
has been commonly observed, but the reverse has
not.
• (1) Final vowels often disappear (vino → vin)
• (2) Voiceless sounds become voiced, typically
between vowels (muta → muda/muba)
• (3) Stops become fricatives (ripa → riva/rifa)
• (4) Consonants become voiceless at the end of
words (rizu → ris)
.
PS: Students must come prepared and answer the questions being
asked to them in the class regarding the data in two different
tables.
Data and solution in HCL
 Since the written forms can often be misleading, we check that the
initial sounds of the words in languages A and B are all [k] sounds, while
in language C the initial sounds are all [ʃ] sounds.
 On the evidence presented, the majority principle would suggest that
the initial sound [k] in languages A and B is older than the [ʃ] sound in
language C.
 Moreover, the [k] sound is a stop consonant and the [ʃ] sound is a
fricative. According to one part of the ‘most natural development
principle’, change tends to occur in the direction of stops becoming
fricatives, so the [k] sound is more likely to have been the original.
 Through this type of procedure we have started on the comparative
reconstruction of the common origins of some words in Italian (A),
Spanish (B) and French (C).
 In this case, we have a way of checking our reconstruction because the
common origin for these three languages is known to be Latin.
 When we check the Latin cognates of the words listed, we find cantare,
catena, carus and caballus, confirming that [k] was the initial sound.
Using the majority principle, we can suggest that the older forms will
most likely be based on language 2 or language 3.
If this is correct, then the consonant changes must have been [p]→[b],
[t]→[d] and [k]→[g] in order to produce the later forms in language 1.
There is a pattern in these changes that follows one part of the ‘most
natural development principle’, i.e. voiceless sounds become voiced
between vowels.
So, the words in languages 2 and 3 must be older forms than those in
language 1.
Which of the two lists, 2 or 3, contains the older forms? Remembering
one other ‘most natural development’ type of sound change (i.e. final
vowels often disappear), we can propose that the words in language 3
have consistently lost the final vowels still present in the words of
language 2.
Our best guess, then, is that the forms listed for language 2 are closest
to what must have been the original proto-forms.