Historical Linguistics in Detail
Historical Linguistics in Detail
Historical Linguistics in Detail
GENERAL LINGUISTICS
Branches of linguistics
The study of linguistics is divided into
numerous branches. Two of it most
contrastive branches are
• Historical linguistics
• Descriptive linguistics
These are named by Saussure as
• Diachronic Linguistics
• Synchronic Linguistics
Historical and descriptive
linguistics
• Historical linguistics studies how languages change
or maintain their structure during the course of
time. Diachronic literally means, “History calling”.
That is why this field of linguistics has been named
as diachronic linguistics. While descriptive
linguistics investigates and attributes to the
linguistic data a uniform status of linguistic
simultancity without any regard for time factor.
Synchronic means at a given time not necessarily
present. That is why this approach of studying
languages has been named as synchronic
linguistics.
Domain of historic linguistics
• Historical linguistics is that branch of linguistics
which
• 1-Focuses on the interconnections between different
languages in the world
• 2-Studies their historical developments
• 3-Investigate how languages evolve and changes
through time
• 4-How multiple offspring languages can arise from
one past parent language
• 5-How cultural contact between speakers of
different languages can influence language
development and evolution.
Definition
Brian D. Joseph( ) defines historical
linguistics as
Historical linguistics is the branch of linguistics
that is concerned with language change in general
and with specific changes in languages, and in
particular
• With describing them
• With cataloging them
• And ultimately with explaining them
Interdependency of diachronic
and synchronic linguistics
The strict division between these two branches of
linguistics is based on a misunderstanding of the
relationship between these two aspects of the study
of language. The unstable state of a language at a
given point of time is the consequence of historical
processes, and its very instability is the evidence
that these processes continue to operate in the
present. There is also a close interrelationship
between synchronic linguistic variations and
diachronic linguistic change. Diachronic linguistics
as well needs the synchronic data of the language at
different times.
LANGUAGE CHANGE
• Morphological change
• Phonemes provides information on the grammatical
relations between words in a sentence.
• For example
• Teach +es
• Teach is the free lexical morpheme and es is the bond
inflectional Grammatical change can be understood by
morphological and syntactic change.
• Morphological morpheme.
• It expresses complex meaning ‘3rd person singular present
tense’.
Language Typology; isolating,
agglutinating, and inflecting
– Isolating : A language in which words generally
consist of single and clearly distinguishable
morpheme. Like Chinese
– Agglutinating: A language in which words consist
of morphemes which are formally neatly separable
and each have a single meaning , such as Turkish
and Japanese.
– Inflecting: Language in which grammatical
relationships like number, tense etc. are
predominantly expressed by grammatical affixes.
Like Latin and Greek
• Languages tend to change their
morphological type in a kind of cycle
• Isolating languages became agglutinating,
these in turn gradually become
agglutinating , these in turn gradually
becoming inflecting , only to end up as
isolating again.
• Changes from isolating structures to
agglutinating have been observed in pidgin
and Creole languages.
Syntactic Change
• Difference between the structure of sentences in old
and modern English involve “word order”
• For example:
• The subject can follow the verb, as in Ferde he (he
travelled)
• Object can be placed before verb, as Hine geseah (he
saw him)
• Or at the beginning of the sentence him man
ne sealed, (no man gave to him)
• A double negative construction was also
possible with both “not” and never.
• (and) (not) (gave) (you) (me) (never) (a)
(book)
• Change in tense form; for example Old English knew
two tenses present and past whereas modern
opposition in ‘progressive’ forms as in ‘I read’ vs. I am
reading etc.
• Reanalysis; The re interpretation of a sequence of
morphemes or a syntactic construction by reassigning
them a new function or internal structure.
• To_ the_ king pleased (the) pears.’
• O V S
• The king liked the pears
• Grammaticalization: The process whereby an
independent lexical word gradually acquires a
grammatical function.
• For example: development from main to auxiliary
verbs
• Will want
• Development of progressive form, he is hunting, he is
a hunting, he is on hunting.
Sound change
• sounds of a language are affected over the course of
time by modifications that tend to be regular and
systematic. The study of sound change is the best
researched area of historical linguistics, with the
longest tradition. The speech sounds we hear are
realizations or ‘allophones’ of underlying abstract
distinctive sound units, the phonemes.
• Sound change or phonological change may happen
both on the concrete level of speech production
(phonetic change) and on the abstract level of
phonemes (phonemic change).
How Sounds are produced?
• We can only understand phonetic change if we know
the basic principles of how speech sounds are
produced.
• In the production of vowel and consonant, the speaker
modifies the airflow from the lungs through different
positions and movements of the speech organs, i.e. the
vocal folds, larynx, oral and nasal cavities, tongue,
jaws, teeth and lips.
• The involvement of speech organs, as well as acoustic
criteria, provide the basis for a classification of sounds.
Vowels
• All vowels are voiced sounds, i.e the passing airflow is
modified by the vibrating vocal folds or cords. The
quality of vowels results from the shape of the oral
cavity, which depends mainly on the position of the
tongue, though lips and jaws also play some role. A
rather low tongue produces the ‘open’ or ‘low’ Vowel
[2], while the tongue is raised for the closed’ or ‘high’
vowels [i,u].
• With ‘front’ or ‘palatal’ vowels the front part of the
tongue is raised.
• With back or velar ones its back part.
• With central vowel being in the middle.
Consonants
• Chain Shift
• A series of interrelated unconditioned sound changes in
which the phonetic realization of certain phonemes changes
systematically with one charge initiating another as the
change of indo – European.
• ∕p, t, k∕ > ∕ f, o, x∕ ; ∕b, d, g∕ > ∕p, t, k∕
• ; ∕bh, dh, gh/ > /b, d, g/.
•
CONCLUSION
This focuses on the wide scope and changing
emphasis of historical linguistics. Language
is the most human property we have and
with other historical disciplines, the study
of language change can fundamentally
contribute to our understanding of our past
history as well as of our present condition
as human beings endowed with language.