Historical Linguistics 98-348: Lecture A Goal for today: understand - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

Historical Linguistics

98-348: Lecture A

Goal for today: understand this

How does a language emerge?

• Did we just start speaking English starting at some point in history???
• Obviously, no
• The same applies to OI: Something → OI → Something else
• Although this person (kind of) claims the opposite

Does language change?

How soon hath Time the suttle theef of youth Stoln on his wing my three and twentith year! My hasting dayes flie on with full career, But my late spring no bud or blossom shew’th. – John Milton, Sonnet VII

• Try and find evidence for:
• Phonological change: change in sound?
• Morphological change: change in forms of words?
• Syntactic change? Semantic change?

Languages do change

• But does each language change in isolation?
• Could different languages be related to each other in some way?

Here’s some data

English French Italian Spanish Portuguese dear cher caro caro caro field champ campo campo campo candle chandelle candela candela candeia house chez casa casa casa What do you notice?

This

French Italian Spanish Portuguese ch /ʃ/ c /k/ c /k/ c /k/

English French Italian Spanish Portuguese dear cher caro caro caro field champ campo campo campo candle chandelle candela candela candeia house chez casa casa casa

Evidence for genealogical relationships between languages

• Certain languages are similar, or systematically different
• This is true especially wrt to sound (phonology):

Systematic correspondences between sounds across languages

• These languages must have once shared a common ancestor!

They then took on different sound changes and diverged into different languages. French Italian Spanish Portuguese ch /ʃ/ c /k/ c /k/ c /k/

Comparative method

• We look at correspondence sets

like this and determine how the languages diverged.

• Two things to figure out:
• How do the trees branch?

i.e. in what order did the languages branch out?

• What does each node look like?

i.e. what sounds did the languages at each node have?

French Italian Spanish Portuguese cher caro caro caro champ campo campo campo chandelle candela candela candeia chez casa casa casa

Choosing trees

Fr. It. Sp. Po.

ch /ʃ/ c /k/ c /k/ c /k/

1 2 3

Choosing what each node looks like

• How do we know if there’s a /ʃ/
• r a /k/ in the ancestor?
• Hint: what language could this

ancestor be?

/ʃ/ /k/ ?

Latin is a good choice

• We know that Latin candela

has a /k/ sound

• So the Latin /k/ was preserved in

Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, but changed into /ʃ/ in French

Now this diagram makes much more sense!

(…or does it?) What are these “proto-languages”? We know what’s going on here

Konungr in the Scandinavian languages

Proto-languages: when the ancestor is unattested

• We need to construct a proto-language and a proto-form
• Example: British vs. American medial t:
• atom ([atəm] vs. [æɾəm]), bitter, little…
• Evidence for Proto-English *t?
• Counterevidence for that (does not entail that Proto-English has ɾ)?

Choosing the ”right” proto-form for A and B

• Frequency
• Does A → B occur more often than B → A across languages, or vv.?
• ”Elsewhere”-hood
• Does A seem to be the general, ”elsewhere” case, or does B seem so?

Be careful about picking your evidence

Mbabaram: dog /dɔɡ/ American English: dog /dɔɡ/ German: Hund /hʊnt/

What next?

• Look at how Proto-Germanic developed into OI