Chapter 13: Historical Linguistics

Language Change over Time

NoTES: About exercising: it keeps you healthy: physically &

mentally. We won’t cover the entire chapter here.

Read pp 420-436. Skim the rest.

Language Change Major Types of Change

Phonological Semantic Grammatical

(Review the meaning of these vocab words…)

Phonological

Semantic Starve (steorfan)

Meant “die“ in 1000 AD

Wicked Meant “mean” or “bad” in 1980 AD

Grammatical Goes the king hence today? Is the king leaving today?

I might could do that. He be jammin’

Dialect Language Can happen if speakers are isolated

Mountains oceans, (great) lakes, (uncrossable)

rivers Social or political differences

Tribe Religion Ethnic National

You Tell Me: English seems most like:

French German Greek Hindi

Which is really the closest relation?

Latin Persian Russian Spanish

Language Families

Adapted from: http://www.alphadictionary.com/articles/ling007.html

Relative Distance Why do Hindi, Persian & Greek

seem so much more different?

Borrowing (enabled by)

Geography Politics Culture

Proto-Indo-European Theorized in 1786

Sir Williams Jones Recognized similarities between

• Greek • Latin• Sanskrit • Persian• Gothic • Celtic

“inferred” or “theorized” language No direct evidence exists…

Working Assumption “A feature that occurs widely in

daughter languages and cannot be explained by language typology, language universals or borrowing is likely to have been inherited from the parent language”

pp. 423-424

How Does It Work? Look for similarities and difference with “cognate” words

/o/ = same in all 5 languages

* o Proto-Polynesian

o o o o o Sister Languages

Other Vowels in Proto-Poly’n?

What about /m/?

* Proto-Polynesian

Sister Languages

What about /k/?

* Proto-Polynesian

Sister Languages

Always assume the LEAST possible change…

Always Check the Big Picture

What’s special about “axe”, “louse”, and “lizard”?

Exceptions Exist

* t Proto-Polynesian

t t t t k Sister Languages

Comparative Reconstruction

Goal - Understand dead “mother” language Method - Examine related living languages

Assume least possible change Look for groups & subgroups

Change - Merge (two phonemes one) - Split (one phoneme two)

Beware - Non-conforming changes Like *t > k in Hawaiian

Recall - Proto-language is “theorized” - Exceptions happen

Now You Try It

What other “correspondence set” can you see here? What is the variation between sister languages? What phoneme would you propose for Proto-Polynesian?

World Languages Thousands of languages Only 5 with > 200 million speakers

Chinese 1.2 billion English 325 million Spanish 325 million Hindi-Urdu 240 million Arabic 205 million

Dying Languages: Homework Research a dying language of interest to you

In 3-5 minutes or less tell us about it Geographic location How many speakers remain? What (if anything) is being done to save,

record, or otherwise preserve it? Let us hear an audio clip if possible Show us a writing sample if it has an orthography

You may want to start at one of these sites http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp http://www.omniglot.com/index.htm

Recommended Exercises

Textbook Exercises 1a 2 5 – not covered in class, use logical thinking 6 – enough to be confident 7 & 8 – valuable whether you plan to teach

or not