Historical and comparative linguistics concerns how and why languages change over time.
Regular sound correspondence: Phonemes that sound different in different dialects
Sound shift: Phonological change that affects certain sounds instead of individual words
Romance languages are genetically related because of their common ancestry (Latin)
English/German are dialects of the protolanguage called Proto-Germanic
Protolanguages are not actually attested languages, but are hypothesized by linguists to explain the relationships between existing languages
Latin and Proto-Germanic are descendants of the protolanguage Indo-European
Genetically related languages have many sound correspondences (ex: when an English word begins with F, the corresponding Romance language word often begins with P — supporting evidence of p → f sound change from Indo-European)
Languages can lose phonemes over time (ex: Old English had the velar fricative /x/)
Languages can lose/gain phonological rules over time (ex: a rule was added to and then deleted from spoken English grammar deleting unstressed short vowels at end of words)
Great Vowel Shift: Between 1400–1600, many new phonemic representations of words/morphemes in English (Middle English → Modern English)
Early Middle English Vowel Shortening Rule is the reason why please/pleasant, serene/serenity, crime/criminal are pronounced differently (shortened the second word in each pair) — then later, the Great Vowel Shift only affected the first word in each pair
Many spelling inconsistencies were caused by the GVS
Languages can lose/gain morphological rules
Latin had case endings (suffixes on nouns based on their thematic role/relationship to the verb) — no longer found in Romance languages except on pronouns (he = nominative; him = dative/accusative; his = genitive)
Declension: A list of cases for a noun
English used to have a richer system of subject/verb agreement that let you identify the subject on the basis of the verb’s inflection, and also SOV order
Lexicon of a language can add/subtract words or change syntactic category of words
Ex: “text” is now a verb meaning “to communicate through text message”
Words can be created/coined outright to fit some purpose (asteroid, Xerox)
Eponyms coined from proper names (sandwich — from the Earl of Sandwich)
Blends produced by combining two words and deleting some parts (brunch = breakfast + lunch; frenemy = friend + enemy)
Created by clipping or abbreviating longer words (flu = influenza; porn = pornography)
Acronyms (radar, AIDS) or alphabetic abbreviations (UCLA, MRI, OMG)
Loan words or morphemes borrowed from other languages (ménage à trois, wasabi, Bach)
Loan translation = expression borrowed and then translated into the borrowing language (ex: “long time no see” from Chinese hǎojiǔbújiàn)
Native word = one whose etymology (history) can be tracked to the earliest known stages of the language
Direct borrowing = taking a native word from another language; indirect borrowing = taking a loan word from another language (ex: algebra came from Arabic by way of Spanish)
60% of common English words are borrowed, but the actual frequency of native words in usage is ~80% (most of the 500 most frequent words are native)
English borrowed a lot from French (via the Norman conquest), Greek/Latin (during the Renaissance), Celtic/Dutch/Italian, Native American languages, Yiddish, and many scientific words from Arabic
Languages lose words through generational shift/technological change
Semantic change: Meaning/semantic representation of words may change over time
Broadening: A word means everything it used to mean and more (ex: holiday used to be “holy day” but is now a day off; mouse now means computer mouse)
Narrowing: A word loses meanings (skyline once meant “horizon” but now means “outline of a city on the horizon”)
Meaning shifts (lewd used to mean “ignorant”; lust used to mean “pleasure”)
19th century comparativists aimed to establish major language families of the world and define principles for the classification of languages
Grimm’s Law (1st Germanic Sound Shift): Certain rules of sound change that applied to Germanic languages did not apply to Sanskrit/Greek/Latin
PIE voiceless stops → Germanic voiceless fricatives (ex: Latin piscis → English fish; Latin pater → English father)
PIE voiced stops → Germanic voiceless stops (ex: Latin duo → English two; Latin labium → English lip)
Verner’s Law (2nd Germanic Sound Shift): Explained apparent exceptions and inconsistencies with Grimm’s Law
PIE voiceless stops → Germanic voiced fricatives when they appeared in a medial/final position in a word, or were preceded by an unstressed syllable in PIE
PIE voiceless stops → Germanic voiceless fricatives otherwise
High German Consonant Shift: Affected southern West Germanic varieties
Germanic voiceless stops → High German affricates/fricatives
Germanic voiced stops → High German voiceless stops
Neogrammarian Hypothesis: Believed laws of sound change were exceptionless (supported by Verner’s Law)
Once we know languages are related, we can determine their protolanguage via comparative reconstruction (applying the comparative method)
Internal reconstruction: Applying the comparative method to earlier/later forms of the same language
Language isolates: Have no demonstrable genealogical relationship with other living languages (ex: Zuni in SW US and Basque in the Pyrenees mountains)
4 major language families: Indo-European, Finno-Ugric (Hungarian/Finnish/Estonian), Hamido-Semitic (Hebrew/Arabic and biblical languages), Sino-Tibetan (Chinese languages + Burmese and Tibetan)
Children construct grammar by themselves from the linguistic input they receive; small differences between adult/child grammar may accumulate over generations
Assimilation (ease of articulation — one sound influences the pronunciation of an adjacent sound)
Analogic change: Reduction of the number of exceptional/irregular morphemes (ex: the plural of cow is cows, not kine, because of plow/plows and vow/vows)
Language contact (ex: we got /v/ from French following the Norman invasion)
Elaboration to maintain intelligibility + tendency toward simplification
History of Writing
Petroglyphs: Cave art
Pictograms: Each pictogram is an image of the concrete object it represents; explicit relationship between shape of symbol and its meaning
Ideograms: Each ideogram is a representation of the abstract idea it represents (🚳 is a pictogram; 🔞 is an ideogram)
Cuneiform: Wedge-shaped stylus creates symbols that do not necessarily have a direct shape-meaning relationship
Logograms (in logographic writing): Symbol representing a word or phrase
Syllabic writing or syllabary: Each symbol represents a syllable (ex: Babylonians/Assyrians/Persians)
Phonographic symbol: Has no visual relationship to the word it represents; only stands for sounds that represent a word
Rebus principle: A single sign can be used to represent all words that sound alike (a rebus is a representation of a word by a picture of an object whose name sounds like the word)
Hieroglyphics originated as pictograms, later became logograms
Consonantal alphabet or abjad: Characters stand for consonants alone (first example: Phoenicians developed the West Semitic Syllabary)
Alphabetic writing: Vowels and consonants are both represented by characters
Morphophonemic spelling system: Different words are spelled differently although they are pronounced the same; words in the same family are spelled the same even though they are pronounced differently; a particular marker (such as plural) is spelled the same no matter how it’s pronounced
In English: a, e, i, o, u on their own are all short vowels; long vowels = diphthongs
Arabic numbers, monetary symbols, math and tech/phone symbols are ideograms
Ablaut: System of vowel alternation that occurs in the roots of Germanic words to indicate grammatical changes (ex: sing/sang/sung; drive/drove/driven; break/broke/broken — present/past/past participle)
Umlaut: A type of assimilation involving vowel fronting due to the influence of a high front vowel in a following syllable (man → men; foot → feet)