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Historical linguistics: History
Abstract
This chapter provides details about history of historical linguistics. Comparing languages usually results in accepting that some are simply different stages of the same thing. Then attention moves to establishing the sets of changes that represent the history of the various lines of descent and to elaborating the general theorems that control such evolution and genetic relation. In 1878, Saussure in his famous Memoire on the Indo-European vowels laid the foundations for a theory of lost “coefficients” that gave a unified account of: (a) alternations of length and “color” of extant vowels; and (b) alternating syllable shapes, plus types of nasal insertion that made sense of the nasal classes of the present stem of the Sanskrit verb. Another set of general rulings is causal in aim and functional in scope. In the early 19th century, change had been seen as the outward aspect of a natural movement toward ever improved and more sophisticated forms of speech.
... In contrast, the German word fleisch, which is comparable to 'meat', has historically retained a relatively specific reference to animal meat, indicating a lesser semantic shift compared to its English equivalent. This highlights the variations in how languages undergo semantic changes, with some words experiencing minimal shifts in meaning (Collinge, 1995). ...
This research examines the mechanisms of semantic change in English and German, focusing on comparing and contrasting these processes across the two languages and investigating the influence of major historical events and societal shifts. By utilizing digital text corpora, libraries, archives, and modern digital media, the study conducts qualitative analyses, including case studies and discourse analysis, to explore semantic evolution. Thematic analysis was employed to thoroughly examine and interpret the data, allowing for the identification of recurring patterns, themes, and significant insights. The results showed that both English and German undergo significant semantic shifts driven by a metaphorical extension (i.e., narrowing or broadening of meanings, pejoration and amelioration, frequency and pathway of change, cultural and historical influences) and historical events and societal shifts that influence semantic change (i.e., wars and conflicts, industrialization, technological advancement, globalization, and cultural exchange, societal movements, and ideological shifts). The role of metaphorical extension is seen in adapting language to technological advancements while highlighting linguistic evolution through narrowing and broadening meanings influenced by cultural, historical, and linguistic factors. Additionally, pejoration and amelioration reflect societal changes and attitudes. Historical events and societal shifts, such as wars, industrialization, technological advancements, globalization, and social movements, significantly impact semantic changes in both English and German. These external influences catalyze language use and meaning shifts, illustrating the interaction between language and human experience.
... ic" counterpart s "t igh t syntax" which include subject, passivization, relative clauses and subordination respectively. He adduces as support for his characterization of diachronic (syntactic) themes in such terms, comparable processes in other (related) spheres: the processual relation- 3hips between early pragmatic mode» later syntactic mode in language acquisition see (Ochs 1979 ); non-grammar >)grammar in pidgins/cr_eoles;._ and unplanned-informal .. speech-». planned-formal speech marking the opposite ends of a register (stylistic) continuum (or the difference between spoken and written language). ...
These remarks concern a theory of change which has one particular change-type at its centre: grammaticalization. This concept is defined by Meillet (1912:131) as ~le passage d'un mot autonome au role d'element grammatical". The definition's very breadth has led to the incorporation of "grammaticalization" into various theories of syntactic change in different guises. Contrast, for instance, the catastrophic character that Lightfoot (1979) attributes to this type of change as category change, with the regulatory role assigned to it by Givan (1979:ch. 5) in his attempt to justify the hypothesis that certain types of diachronic change embody a "syntacticizationl ' process. Note too, its functional role in Traugott's (1980) theory of grammaticalization chains as semantic-pragmatic shifts, and its specific manifestation as category change by lexical and speaker-to-speaker diffusion in Romaine's (1981) socia-historical linguistics.
Lan honen helburua hizkuntzalaritzaren eta psikologiaren arteko harremanak aztertzea da, jakintza arlo zientifiko independente gisako izatearen hastapenetan. Ikerketak xix. mendearen azken laurdena eta xx. mendearen lehen urteak hartzen ditu, bereziki, 1875etik 1920rakoa. Urte horiek aukeratzearen arrazoia da Wilhelm Wundt psikologia esperimentalaren sortzailea Leipzigera 1875ean iritsi zela eta han egon zela 1920ra arte, hil zen arte. Wundten ideiek eragin handia zuten psikologiaren garapenean ez ezik, hizkuntzalaritzaren garapenean ere. Bere hutsuneak gorabehera, eta agian haiengatik, psikologoen eta hizkuntzalarien arteko eztabaida eta harremanak piztu zituen, eta bere lanak ikerketa eta lan asko ekarri zituen. Horregatik deitu izan zaio aldi horri “Wundten garaia”.
This study aims to understand the history and fields of science in linguistics. Until the Renaissance, the languages studied were Greek and Latin. Latin had an important role at that time because it was used as a tool in the world of education, administration, and international diplomacy in Western Europe. During the Renaissance, language research began to develop into Romance languages (French, Spanish, and Italian) which were considered to have Latin roots, as well as non-Roman languages such as English, German, Dutch, Swedish, and Danish.
Spanish is spoken as a first language by almost 400 million people in approximately 60 countries, and has been the subject of numerous political processes and debates since it began to spread globally from Iberia in the thirteenth century. A Political History of Spanish brings together a team of experts to analyze the metalinguistic origins of Spanish and evaluate it as a discursively constructed artefact; that is to say, as a language which contains traces of the society in which it is produced, and of the discursive traditions that are often involved and invoked in its creation. This is a comprehensive and provocative new work which takes a fresh look at Spanish from specific political and historical perspectives, combining the traditional chronological organization of linguistic history and spatial categories such as Iberia, Latin America and the US, whilst simultaneously identifying the limits of these organizational principles.
Spanish is spoken as a first language by almost 400 million people in approximately 60 countries, and has been the subject of numerous political processes and debates since it began to spread globally from Iberia in the thirteenth century. A Political History of Spanish brings together a team of experts to analyze the metalinguistic origins of Spanish and evaluate it as a discursively constructed artefact; that is to say, as a language which contains traces of the society in which it is produced, and of the discursive traditions that are often involved and invoked in its creation. This is a comprehensive and provocative new work which takes a fresh look at Spanish from specific political and historical perspectives, combining the traditional chronological organization of linguistic history and spatial categories such as Iberia, Latin America and the US, whilst simultaneously identifying the limits of these organizational principles.
The relationship between “language change” and “language evolution” has recently become subject to some debate regarding the scope of both concepts. It has been claimed that while the latter used to refer to the language origins in the first place, both terms can now, to a certain extent, be used synonymously. In this paper, I argue that this can partly be explained by parallel developments both in historical linguistics and in the field of language evolution research that have led to a considerable amount of convergence between both fields. Both have adopted usage-based approaches and data-driven methods, which entails similar research questions and similar perspectives on the phenomena under investigation. This has ramifications for current models and theories of language change (or evolution). Two approaches in particular, the concept of complex adaptive systems and construction grammar, have been combined in integrated approaches that seek to explain both language emergence and language change over historical time. I discuss the potential and limitations of this integrated approach, and I argue that there is still some unexplored potential for cross-fertilization.
This article first relates the discovery and formulation of the language family, explaining the nature and conventions of comparative and internal reconstruction; also, various controls on theorizing are mentioned. Second, it lists some later revisions of Indo-European phonology, together with more recent disturbing or helpful ideas on the nature of language change. Some notions are yet to be judged. Third, problems still unanswered are reviewed (details of the family tree, the roles of typology, archaeology, and nostraticism, and the motivation of change). Finally, the terms IE, PIE, and PPIE are explained.
Historical sound change has been modeled in Optimality Theory as a change in the ranking of constraints. In the simplest case, the surface effects of a constraint reranking can be stated in terms of a single traditional rewrite rule. However, there are also rerankings whose corresponding surface effects are diverse and complex, and cannot be stated as a single rule. It is this consequence of OT which I explore in this dissertation, examining conspiracies of historical sound changes in early Greek (the elimination of *j), in West Germanic (the near elimination of voiced fricatives), and in Slavic (the elimination of syllable codas).
August Schleicher’s genealogical tree (Stammbaum) and Johannes Schmidt’s wave metaphor (Welle) are very well known linguistic concepts. At the same time there has been a widespread misunderstanding about their original meaning and the questions they were intended to deal with. Both were originally classificatory concepts, not models of language change. Schleicher, on the one hand, introduced the Stammbaum by transforming hierarchical classes of Indo-European languages into successive historical stages. Schmidt, on the other hand, rejected the idea of subgrouping Indo-European languages as required by Schleicher’s Stammbaum. Instead, he assumed an original continuum of languages. He described this continuum metaphorically in terms of concentric ‘waves’. The interpretation of the wave image as a metaphor for the geographical spread of linguistic innovations (as has become common) is the result of later adaptations in dialectology.
Herodotus recounts the attempt of the pharaoh Psammetichus I to determine which among the peoples of the earth was the oldest. He isolated two children at birth, assuming that their spontaneous speech would reveal the identity of a primordial human language. Although Psammetichus' inquiry was not explicitly designed to address linguistic issues, it has long been passed down in western reflection on language. This article reviews some of the most significant roles that the story of Psammetichus has played. The story was abundantly cited in 16th-century literature that conceptualized a first human language. It has also contributed to debate about the origin of language, especially during the mid-19th century. Moreover, the story of Psammetichus' inquiry has been retold in discussion of language acquisition as has taken place since the 1970s. In this context, it is represented as the "ultimate language-learning experiment" (Gleitman & Newport 1995), which constitutes "an incisive bit of scientific prescience" (Rymer 1993). Enlarging on the third, most recent, context for re-telling the story, this article shows how some scholars assimilate it into modern linguistic research, while conceding that it is flawed on ethical grounds. In doing so, they often seem to make the past both inappropriately familiar (therefore less threatening), and inappropriately strange (therefore less valuable). As a result, contemporary citations of this anecdote from the distant past have the paradoxical effect of contributing to fashionable ahistoricity.
The paper traces how the American linguist William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894) and his intellectual descendants anticipated, and in part influenced, modern-day discussions of 'lexical diffusion', the piecemeal spread of phonological changes both through an individual speaker's word-inventory and speaker-to-speaker through an entire community. Whitney regarded these two processes as inextricably linked; he also stressed comparison between different speech communities in search of locally distinct diffusionary patterns that challenged the Neogrammarian regularity hypothesis. Recent discussions of these and other aspects of lexical diffusion suggest that comparative-local studies, such as Whitney pioneered, remain essential for working out the explanatory nexus between lexical diffusion's internally-phonological and social contexts.
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