Lesson 3: the comparative method

On Teaching the Native Language
(1844), the 
methodological significance of which lies in the fact that Buslaev here emphasized, for 
the first time in Russian linguistics the close relations between the history of the 
Russian language and the history of the Russian people who used it. Buslaev wrote: 
"Language expresses the life of the people. The language we speak now is the result of 
historical movement and of many changes over many thousands of years; language 
may be defined only in a genetic way, which necessitates historical research."
He studied Russian dialects very thoroughly but his weakness in this field was 
that he considered that the phonetics of these dialects reflected the phonetic processes 
of the recorded Indo-European languages. This fault may be explained by his 
ignorance of the prolonged historical formation of individual Indo-European 
languages.
These Russian linguists contributed a great deal to the advance of the 
comparative method in the early 19th century. They applied this method to varying 
degrees, but they perfected it and managed to solve some important problems 
connected with the comparative grammar of the Slavonic languages.
We must explain that the comparative method tries to reconstruct certain 
features of the language spoken by the original single language community, on the 
basis of resemblances in the descendent languages. The purpose of this reconstruction 
is to find out the general laws governing the development of these languages, from 
their common source onwards. If two languages have one common feature, this
is more likely to have been inherited from the common ancestor of both languages than 
to have arisen independently in each of the two descendent languages, unless they are 
known to have been subjected to some common influence.
Now we must become acquainted with the concept of 
cognates
which is a term 
used in comparative linguistics. The word means "born together", and it refers 
specifically to words which nave survived in various languages from a common 
original language. There are dozens of examples, but let us take the word 
mother
.

---

This word certainly existed in Indo-European, probably in a form something like 
*
mater
(the asterisk before "
mater
" is intended to indicate that this form is 
reconstructed). Latin has preserved it intact. The Greek 
meter
is not much different or 
Old Irish
mathir
or the Slavonis
mali
. The Proto-Germanic form must have been 
something like *
modor
, judging from the appearance of the word in Old High 
German and Old Norse; the German 
Mutter
and the English 
mother
have developed 
from the Old High German
muother
and the Anglo-Saxon
modor
respectively.
So modern equivalents of "mother", like the French 
mere
, the German 
Mutter
and the 
Spanish 
madre
are cognates.
While dealing with the reconstruction of the Proto (Common) Indo-uropean
language (Proto- applies only to the ancestral language as econstructed by
the comparative method) we can rely only on those cognates from the related languages 
whose origin from this language is supported by sound laws and general tendencies in 
the development of their meaning, and the possibility of chance can be ruled out.
One plain example of chance is the English 
bad
and the Persian 
bad
, both of 
which have the same meaning, though the words are not related in origin. With a slight 
shift of sound, we have the Italian 
donna
and the Japanese 
onna
, both of which mean 
"
woman
", or the Russian 
khoroshiy
and the Japanese 
yoroshii
, both of which mean 
"good".
Vocabulary is therefore a very shaky criterion on which to base language 
kinship, though it may be observed that there are certain basic words, like names of 
family relationships and numerals, which are hardly ever borrowed. Numerals are 
especially reliable in obtaining information about the close genetic kinship of certain 
languages within a linguistic group. This may be seen from the following scheme: