Download - 19th Centurylo
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Establishing relationships among
languages, and
the original source
Archeology from modern and ancient
languages. Not histories of words, but histories of
sounds and a focus on grammatical
elements.
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Rasmus Rask (1787-1832):
experience demonstrates that agreement in
words is extremely uncertain. Through the
intercourse of different peoples, an
incredible number of words may pass from
one language to another, however differentthe two may be in origin and type.
Grammatical agreement is a much more
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Certain indication of kinship or of original
identity, because a language which is mixed
with another seldom or never takes over
morphological changes or inflections from
it.this kind of agreement, which is the most
important and the most certain, hasnevertheless been almost entirely overlooked
hitherto in the derivation of languages, and this
oversight is the principal error in most previousdiscussions of this subject; for this reason
earlier work is so uncertain and of so little
scientific value. (c.1811)
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One family
Sanskrit
Greek
Latin
Germanic
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Consonants in Germanic
Rask still (I'm missing symbols): p > f: Gr patr (L. pater) Old Norsk fadhir
t > th: Gr treis (L. tres) ON thrr
k> h: L. cornu, O.N. horn d>t: Gr. damo I tameL. domo, ON tamr
g>k: Gr. gyn, O.N. kona woman
Gr. gnos, ON kyn family
Gr agr-s (L. ager) ON akr field
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A great leap:
regular sound change In Grimms first edition (1819), he didnt
see it; in the second (1822), he did.
It is one thing to see relations between sounds
in two families (Latin qu- words (quis?
who? etc.) correspond to Germanic hw (now
English wh, German w);But quite another to see that the sound
changes are regular, and subject tosound
law (regular sound change).
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Schleicher: 1837
Not just comparisons among languages, but
reconstructions of what the words were in
the proto-language, like
Indo-European *ekwo-s horse -- not the
same as Latin equus, Grhppo-s, Sanskrit
asva-s, OEnglish eoh, etc.
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2nd half of 19th century
Verner, de Saussure, Brugmann
A vast and complex field of facts from the
12 branches of IndoEuropean was studied,
and regular patterns of development from
proto-forms were established;
Regular patterns ofablautin the proto-language (sing,sang,sung) were established.
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Pride in laws:
The Young Grammarians
Junggrammatiker
Shift from No rule without its
exception to No exception without its rule!
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When we compare languages, do
we compare sounds,
or sound categories?
Spelling systems -- orthographies -- contain within
the seed of a theory: that a language has just asmall number of sounds that can organized (in a
linear fashion).
So while languages change, it is theircategories ofsounds that change. Languages dont have residues
ofold sounds. Speakers at all times keep just a
limited set of sounds.
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Sound changes can be small, taken one at a
time, but these small, gradual changes build
up to great changes over long periods.
What does that sound like?
Evolution
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Charles Darwin
(1809-1882) Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace: theory
of evolution by random change/ indefinite
variability and natural selection. Faced the same issues as the linguists with regard
to whether the ancestor was extant today.
Combined ideas about the evolution of language,
and the economic ideas ofAdam Smith, who
worked out the concept of the free market, the
interaction of local economic agents (The Wealth
of Nations).
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Summing up
19th century linguistics was a spectacular
success on its own terms, and set a high
standard for other fields to seek.
It served as a paradigm for a rigorous and
systematic way to explore humanitys past
and the structure of a part of human culture,language.
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Past Europes history?
There was some uncertainty in the field
around the turn of the 20th century as to
whether other language families could beexplored using the same methods.
The anthropologists insisted they could, and
they were proven right.
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Linguistics of this sort became part of the
universalization of mankind, part of the
movement to underscore the similarities thatall humans share.
But linguistics underwent a radical shift in
the early 20th century as well, one whichwent hand in hand with the emergence of
the notion of the phoneme.
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The phonemeBegan as a hazy conception among linguists,
as the thought-category corresponding to
the sounds of language. Languages are very
restrictive with regard to what sounds and
sound combinations they permit.
A language permits a small number of target
sounds which speakers try to say and
hearers expect to hear. These are thephonemes, it was thought.
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And it was the category of the phoneme that
shifted over time, then. So the subject of
study of historical linguistics could be takento be the shift in the psychologically real
sound-targets speakers adopted.
This led to the synchronic study of soundsystems: from diachrony to synchrony as
the center stage of linguistics.