Language Change: Historical Linguistics II

Indo-European (IE)

• An early sketch from the late 1800s, more or less accurate even today

Italic

• The Romance languages descended from Latin are the only Italic languages spoken today
• Ibero-Romance: Portuguese, Spanish
• Gallo-Romance: French, Catalan, Romansch
• Italo-Romance: Italian, Sardinian
• Balkano-Romance: Romanian

Germanic

• English is part of the Germanic family.

Clear Cognates

• English Dutch Danish
• one een en
• two twee to
• three drie tre
• four vier fire
• five vijf fem
• six zes seks
• seven zeven syv
• eight acht otte
• nine negen ni
• ten tien ti

Classifying Languages: Indo-European

• We also notice that there are similarities between Latin (Romance), English / German (Germanic) and yet other languages: Greek and Sanskrit, for example.
• Sir William Jones, in the 1780s, was the first to notice them.

More Distant Relatives

• English Lithuanian Greek
• one vienas heis
• two du duo
• three trys treis
• four keturi tettares
• five penki pente
• six sheshi heks
• seven septyni hepta
• eight ashtuoni oktô
• nine devyni ennea
• ten deshimt deka

Classifying Languages: Indo-European

Language Classification: How?

• We rely on two things:
• the Uniformitarian Principle
• The regularity of sound-change

The Uniformitarian Principle

• ‘knowledge of processes that operated in the past can be inferred by observing ongoing processes in the present’
• or, for language:
• ‘Language must work now in the same way as it ever did’

Regularity of Sound-Change

• Most of historical linguistics relies on the assumption that
• sound-change is regular and exceptionless
• That is, any sound-change will affect all the words that contain that (combination of) sound(s).