Language Change: Historical Linguistics II

LING001

• Historical linguistics
• 4-8-2009

Change in Time

• The rate of change varies, but they build up until the "mother tongue" becomes arbitrarily distant and different (cf. difficulty in understanding some Brits or even Appalachians)
• After a thousand years, the original and new languages will not be mutually intelligible (cf. English and German and Dutch, and even more distantly English and Pashto (language of Afghanistan))
• After ten thousand years, the relationship will be essentially indistinguishable from chance relationships between historically unrelated languages.
• Some changes take place in one generation (recall the cot-caught merger last time), some take over hundreds of years (word order change in Classic Chinese)

Historical Reconstruction

• When considering whether languages are related, we look for systematic correspondences between vocabulary items in different languages
• Since the relationship between sound and meaning is arbitrary (dog-chein-gou), these differences aren’t expected accidentally

A Note of Caution

• Chance resemblance is possible, just not common
• English bad, Persian bad “bad”
• Dutch elkaar “each other”, Basque elkar “each other”
• Examination of the rest of the vocabulary of these languages reveal that these are accidental

Another Note of Caution

• Borrowing
• We need to consider if the word is a new addition to the language or if it is vocabulary that is native to the language
• e.g. we don’t want to conclude that English and Mandarin are related based on:
• English: /kɑfi/ “coffee, Mandarin: /kɑfe/ “coffee”
• Btw, the English term came from Arabic, by way of Turkish and then Dutch

Classifying Languages

• These systematic correspondences (we’ll look at them more in a moment) are used to classify languages according to their origins.
• Languages are put into families (and sub-families)
• the relationships between languages are described using female terms: most often daughter (and mother)