Anexo I. Historical and Comparative Linguistics

1. Historical Linguistics is the branch of linguistics concerned with:
1. 1. The study of language change and stability.
2. 2. The reconstruction of earlier stages of languages.
3. 3. The discovery and implementation of research methodologies by which genetic relationships amond languages can be put forward.
4. The linguist is interested in a dynamic vision of language. The main difference between Descriptive and Historical Linguistcs:
  1. Descriptive Linguistics: describes a particular stage of a language.
  2. Historical Linguistics: address why languages look the way they do, how the changes show how they relate to each to each other and whether a parent language can be propounded for different languages.
    1. They use the Comparative Method. Thus, Historical and Comparative Linguistics are interconnected.
    2. Linguists go back to stages where an old and a current form of a language are distinctly different. These forms are dead languages and no speakers can be used in the study.
      1. Linguists rely on extant written evidence in the form of manuscripts, inscriptions on stones or pieces of jewellery.
      2. We may say that a diachronic analysis always follows a synchronic analysis, but for Bynon this methodology will not catch the continuous changing nature of language.
        (Bynon) 2 factors internal to linguistics have stood in the way of the study of linguistic variation:
        Synchronic studies use idealisations of a language in order to describe it. Due to the fact that variation in a specific moment is too large to be apprehended in a synchronic grammar.
        Structuralism and Generativism use strong generalisation of the actual linguistic system.
        The belief that the way languages are transmitted is responsible for a majority of linguistic changes
        Bynon thinks that to attribute linguistic change to the improper learning of the language by children is a simplistic view of the phenomena. Further, improper learning is counteracted by speakers that struggle to keep the integrity of the linguistic system.
        Thus, she suggest a twofold strategy to study linguistic change:
        Focus on different grammars from different time spans of a language and contrast them with other related languages. The changes found should lead to the extrapolation of diachronic rules.
        Do not separate linguistic variation from sociological factors: contact between languages plays an important role.
2. Origins of Historical Linguistics
1. Contrastive study of Greek and Latin in the Renaissance period.
2. More technically, 19th century: when Sanskrit was object of study in Europe. They found that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin had some similarities.
  1. Achievement 1: the acknowledgement of the ubiquity of linguistic change.
  2. Achievement 2: the development of the Comparative Method.
3. Why the development of Comparative Linguistics did not take place earlier? Beekes gives 3 reasons:
  1. 1) Greeks were not sufficiently acquainted with other languages.
  2. 2) People had to learn that languages change.
  3. 3) Greeks never compared words cross-linguistically.
  4. But tracing genetic relatedness is not that easy because sometimes languages evolve in a way that it is impossible to identify any correspondence.
    1. A common procedure was the comparison of cognates, which allowed historical linguists to identify certain phonological patterns which signalled that all these words come from the same ancestral parent language.
      Annotations:
      - Cognate: a term with the same etymological origin but different phonological, and often semantic, evolution.
3. The Comparative Method
1. Developed in the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and used in the analysis of other language families. The basis: the regular principle of phonological change (introduced as a linguistic rule by the Neogrammarians).
  1. Phonological changes had not been considered rules, but tendencies. Patterns in phonological change were studied in terms of sound laws.
    1. Grimm's Law
    2. Verner's Laws
    3. Also, Saussure's Laryngeal Theory hypothesised for the Indo-European.
    4. CM's steps:
      1. 1) Isolation of a set of cognates
      2. 2) Extraction of a number of phonological correspondences
      3. 3) The use of sound laws in order to reconstruct a series of phonemes
2. Criticism
  1. The reconstructed forms are the result of comparing attested cognates, but they cannot be taken as bearing a 100% correspondence.
  2. Taken for granted that all languages are born from a parent language. Therefore, what happens with the parent language?
  3. Belief that once 2 languages have split from their ancestor, they diverge until they do not bear any resemblance. But there is not just one single direction: they can converge again.
4. The Wave Theory
1. In order to overcome the shortcomings of the CM and the Family-tree metaphor.
  1. Bynon: the family-tree metaphor is a a situation of continuity in the course of time, an ideal temporal-spatial frame, a "relative chronology".
2. Johannes Schmidt: changes in language would spread as waves in the water from a politically or historically important centre, but not all changes reach the same place. Bynon offers different ideal cases:
  1. A political, commercial, cultural, etc., centre appears inside a linguistic territory.
    1. Some innovations occur and they only reach part of the territory where the language is spoken, while the rest of the territory is ruled by the pre-existing centre
      1. Isoglosses start to rise until the speakers lose mutual intelligibility and 2 different languages remain.
  2. 2 independent languages start sharing certain features.
    1. If territories become integrated under a political force with a single administrative and cultural centre, some isoglosses will start to disappear and a common traits will be shared.
5. Proto-language: a hypothetical reconstruction of the earlier form of a language. No written records exist so the reconstruction draws upon the comparison of related words and expressions of the different languages derived from it. The reconstruction depends on the evidence available.
6. Linguistic Genealogies: ways to classify language (not mutually exclusive)
1. Typological: based on similarities in the linguistic structure (frequent in the case of unwritten languages). It draws upon grammar structure.
  1. Isolating (analytic): words made up of a single morpheme. Classical Chinese and Vietnamese.
  2. Agglutinative: words consist of a series of morphemes, each of them representing a single grammatical category. Japanese, Turkish, and Finnish.
  3. Inflectional (Synthetic): a single morpheme in one word may represent several grammatical categories. Greek, Latin and Sanskrit.
2. Genetic: lead to the establishment of language families, language stocks which are related by common origin because of cognates.
  1. Phylum: it encompasses a number of language families.
  2. Language isolate: a language family made up of just one language.
7. The Neogrammarians
1. Group of young German linguists that defended the view that phonological change was always regular; apparent exceptions did not have an explanation yet.
  1. The linguist's work is to find the rules behind those apparent exceptions.
  2. Karl Verner found an explanation for the apparent exceptions to Grimm's Law, and showed they were conditioned by the phonological environment.
8. Internal Reconstruction (Method)
1. Focuses on the analysis of irregular linguistic patterns.
2. Main tenet: irregular linguistic patterns have developed from earlier regular forms.
3. Called 'internal' because it is not necessary to examine other languages to reconstruct the earlier stages of a given one.
4. Example: English participles. The English regular verbs form the PP by the addition of -ed: love/loved, paint/painted...
  1. A number of strong verbs construct the PP by using -en: write/written, take/taken...
    1. This pattern is not productive anymore (new verbs follow the -ed pattern).
      1. BUT some old verbs maintain the -ed suffix for their PP and the -en suffix for adjectival forms: shaved/clean-shaven, melted/molten lead, mowed/new-mown...
        Conclusion: the original forms of the PP showed the -en pattern as strong verbs, but by analogy with the weak verbs the regular forms -ed displaced the original strong pattern. However, the adjectival form was not affected.

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Anexo I. Historical and Comparative Linguistics

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