Archives for “Intro to historical linguistics”
Earlier I made mention of the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this belief, which was in turn the catalyst for the existence of the discipline of historical linguistics, was the product of the work of two men, the first of whom was a German named Jakob Grimm (one of the Brothers Grimm who compiled the German folktales) in 1820.
Grimm, like others, recognized that the Germanic languages (among which are German, Dutch, Gothic, the Scandinavian languages, and English) share a common ancestor with Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, based on a large number of vocabulary words whose phonetic similarities are too similar to be coincidental. Grimm’s important insight was that, in almost every word that appears to be related among Greek, Latin, Sanskrit, and the Germanic languages, words that had the consonants p, t, or k in the non-Germanic languages showed up in Germanic with the consonants f, þ (the “th” in think) or χ (as in German Bach) instead. He also noted that Gk/Lat/Skt b, d, g generally corresponded with Gmc p, t, k. The Gk, Lat, and Skt consonants that we now know come from Indo-European *bh, *dh, *gh he saw as corresponding with Gmc b, d, g (simplified here from a close phonetic variant). All three correspondences make up what we now call Grimm’s Law: in other words, he saw a method to the madness and was able to accurately predict the sorts of sounds that made Germanic the odd man out where Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit agreed with one another. Here’s an example.
- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Tools of the Trade My last post dealt with the anthropological side of my discipline. Most of what we know about the history of the Indo-European people groups comes not from historical records per...
- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Indo-Europeans Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline. Once upon a time, in an area...
- Genetics and linguistics play well together A recent study in Nature News that I just read about is of interest to my field of graduate study, Indo-European linguistics. Of special interest to me, it ties in...
My last post dealt with the anthropological side of my discipline. Most of what we know about the history of the Indo-European people groups comes not from historical records per se, but from analysis and comparison of the languages in which those historical records were composed. Philology (“love of words”) is an old term used to describe those who read literature for appreciation of the language. Naturally, most philologists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were multilingual and well-read. It was this familiarity with multiple languages that led some to recognize similarities between the languages they were reading in, and as curiosity was given room, many of these philologists set out to figure out exactly the relationships between them. In so doing, they became intimately familiar with the language itself, not as it exists in practice, but in shared tendencies and similarities that must be chalked up to the innate nature of human language. Thus began the modern science of linguistics.
Because of ground-breaking work done in the 19th century, scholars discovered that sound change in language is a remarkably thoroughgoing, exceedingly systematic, and almost exceptionless process. These linguists realized that if they could determine what sound changes occurred in a given language, they would be able to reverse engineer the process and uncover an earlier state of the language. That principle of reconstruction is what historical linguistics is all about.
Systematic sound changes and changes in other aspects of language (such as in syntax, semantics, or morphology) are referred to as “laws”. For instance, a sound law that happened fairly recently in the transition from Middle to Modern English (c. 15th century) is known as the Great Vowel Shift, which was a drastic change in all the long vowels of Middle English and was responsible for the major differences between the way we pronounce and write our vowels and the way Spanish or other European languages do.
What historical linguists do is reconstruct language based on known laws using a combination of the comparative method and internal reconstruction.
Related posts:- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Birth of Historical Linguistics Earlier I made mention of the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this...
- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Indo-Europeans Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline. Once upon a time, in an area...
- Education: the Christian’s Contribution to Society King Alfred the Great of England (r. 871-899) was truly one of the most remarkable men in history. The fifth son of the previous king of England, he was a...
Germanic and Indo-European studies. What the heck is that? Well, let me start with a summary of the anthropological side of the discipline.
Once upon a time, in an area hypothesized to be along the steppes of Russia, on the north side of the Black Sea, lived a people called the Indo-Europeans. They spoke a language we refer to as Proto-Indo-European (PIE). Gradually over the period of 3000-2000 BC, tribes within that culture began to migrate to other areas, taking their particular dialects of late PIE with them. Eventually, this culture ended up splintered into several groups that spanned from Europe in the west to India and the Xinjiang region of northwest China. As time passed and isolation from other tribes increased, each of these dialects became their own distinct languages and evolved as languages always do so that by the time of recorded history there was little real mutual intelligibility between the non-contiguous tribal dialects; these dialects became the branches, or language families, of Indo-European.
Related posts:- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Birth of Historical Linguistics Earlier I made mention of the consistency of sound changes, what the nineteenth-century German grammarians called the Ausnahmslosigkeit der Lautgesetze (the “exceptionlessness of sound change”) . The catalyst for this...
- Mysteries of my field of study revealed: the Tools of the Trade My last post dealt with the anthropological side of my discipline. Most of what we know about the history of the Indo-European people groups comes not from historical records per...
- Genetic map of Europe Click to enlarge The New York Times has published an article on the results of a genetic study that sought to show the genetic interrelationships of the peoples of...