History of Linguistics

Syllabus

  • Indian tradition

  • Greek Linguistics

  • Roman tradition

  • Arabic and Hebrew (Semitic) Traditions

  • Middle-ages in Europe

  • European Colonialism

  • Modern Linguistics # - Beginning F. D. Saussure, Diversification, the Prague school, British Structuralism, Danish Structuralism, American Structuralism

    • Contemporary approaches to Linguistics - Formal and Functional

  • Scope of Modern Linguistics

    Readings

  • Hock, Hans Henrich. Principles of Historical Linguistics. (Specific edition will be provided).

  • Cardona, George. Pāṇini: A Survey of Research. (Specific edition will be provided).

  • Blust, Robert. 101 Problems in Historical Linguistics.

Indian tradition

  • Pāṇini or Pāṇiniya (6th to 4th century BCE)
  • aṣṭādhyāyī
  • Cardona, George. 1997. Pāṇini: His Work and Its Traditions. Motilal Banarsidass

Linguistic self-conciousness

  • Do birds marvel at their ability for flight?
  • Do fish ponder over their ability to swim?
  • Origin of language stories

Folk linguistics

  • Dogmatic and prescriptive speculations
  • About the origin of languages
  • When do folk linguistics, origin stories become science?

Alt text

  • Yahweh a Levantine deity, god of the Israelite kingdoms of Israel and Judah conflates the speech of the inhabitants of the city of Shinar

  • Leading up to the eventual dispersion of the peoples and languages throughout the world

  • Let’s begin by asking a few questions about this particular origin story

    • Ursprache - All languages come from the same source
     Now the whole earth had one language and the same words. And as they migrated from the east, they came upon a plain in the land of Shinar and settled there. And they said to one another, "Come, let us make bricks and fire them thoroughly." And they had brick for stone and bitumen for mortar. Then they said, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, "Look, they are one people, and they have all one language, and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech." So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused (balal) the language of all the earth, and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

Indian tradition

  • Pāṇini or Pāṇiniya (6th to 4th century BCE)
  • aṣṭādhyāyī
  • Cardona, George. 1997. Pāṇini: His Work and Its Traditions. Motilal Banarsidass

Historical Linguistics

Language change

  • Ancient views

    • Instead of “correct” Sanskrit hē rayō hē rayaḥ, they say a dialectal form hē lavō hē lavaḥ
    • Notice something?
    • r~l alternation in Sanskrit
    • Unwittingly - acknowledgement of change or at least variation
    • Modern Hebrew is a revived language
    • Sanskrit is NOT Hindi or Bengali

  • Language change is a non-random process

  • With no effect on communicative function

    • Neither have we lost our ability to communicate effectively due to change
    • Nor are we speaking some “impure” form

    Lord’s prayer

    • Looking at text which hasn’t changed much in centuries
    • In the Lord’s, the content remains the same
    • Words more or less appear in the same context

Old English (ca. 950 A.D. Lindisfarne, Northumbrian)

Fader urer ðu arð [oððe] ðu bist in heofnum [oððe] in heofnas, sie gehalgad noma ðin, to-cymeð ric ðin, sie willo ðin suæ is in heofne ond in eorðo, hlaf userne oferwistlic sel us todæg ond forgef us scylda usra suæ uoe forgefon scyldgum usum, ond ne inlæd usih in costunge, ah gefrig usich from yfle.

Middle English (ca. late 14th c., Wycliffite) After the Norman conquest

Oure fadir þat art in heuenes, halwid be þi name, þi reume or kyngdom come to be. Be þi wille don in herþe as it is doun in heuene. Geue to vs to-day oure eche dayes bred. And forgeue to vs our dettis, þat is oure synnys, as we forgeuen to oure dettoris, þat is to men þat han synned in vs. And lede vs not in-to temptacion, but delyvere vs from euyl. Amen, so be it.

Early New English (AD 1534, Tyndale)

O oure father which arte in heven, hallowed be thy name. Let thy kingdome come. Thy wyll be fulfilled, as well in erth, as it ys in heven. Geve vs thisdaye oure dayly breede. And forgeve vs oure treaspases, even as we forgeve our trespacers. And leade vs not into temptacion, but delyver vs from evell. For thyne is the kyngedome and the power and the glorye for ever. Amen.

Modern English (ca. l985)

Our father who is in heaven, may your name be sanctified. Let your kingdom come. May your will be fulfilled just as much on earth as it is in heaven.

Variation and philology

  • Lexical choice is not change, not always at least
  • There could also be a preference for certain constructions in different times
    • Fader urer in Old Engl., may seem like a structural change but was actually ‘choice’, possibly style or emphatic
  • Written text may also show changes that didn’t take place in the oral language
  • And vice-versa
  • Old Engl. ure : Middle Engl. oure : Mod. Engl. our
    • Spelling suggests a change in the initial vowel from Old to Middle English.
    • IN reality, Middle Engl. ou is a spelling taken over from French to denote the long ū sound as that of Old Engl. ure.
    • Changing ū to the modern diphthong, took place after the Middle English period
  • The final e otoh, is etymological spelling; attempt to preserve a historical form
  • Interpretation of wriiten texts is therefore rather difficult

Sound change

  • What consitutues sound change?
  • ure in Old Engl. and our in Mod. Engl refer to the same word
  • This correspondence is not merely accidental or fortuitous
  • Sound change is systematic and in its most conservative form, considered regular
  • Sound changes are conditioned by phonetic and/or phonological factors; non-arbitrary - linguistically

Analogical change

  • Changes not conditioned by phonetic factors
  • Analogy in the word for ‘heaven’.
  • Old English final -n was lost after unstressed vowel, as in Old Engl. ðin vs. MEngl. þi
  • Why does Old Engl. heofon, Mod. Engl. heaven retain the final -n?
  • ‘heaven’ has a number of inflected forms, such as Old Engl. heofnum, heofnas.
  • The non final n was not subject to loss
  • Retention in heaven therefore was analogical and reacquired in Mod Engl.

Changes due to contact

  • Presence of borrowed and inherited forms
  • reume to realm in Mod. Eng while still retaining Anglo-Saxon kyngdom
  • temptacion replaced costung
  • Evidence that I get my humor from my advisor

Considering that such borrowed items are rarely returned, the terms theft or embezzlement would 
be more appropriate, but they sound less nice. 
(Besides, the donor language does not lose the words in the process of
borrowing.)
  • Rapid or prolonged contact can also lead to convergence
  • Language death or obsolescence
  • Development of Pidgins

Semantic change

  • Drift in meaning or loss of original sense
  • OE heafon in the Mod. Engl heaven could easily have been used for the physical sky as the spiritual
  • Sky was borrowed from Scandinavian
  • If this didn’t happen, the Bond movie would have been called Heavenfall, which doesn’t ring as well

Chapters to cover

  1. Introduction
  2. Phonetics, transcription, terminology, abbreviations, glosses
  3. Sound change: The regularity hypothesis
  4. Sound change and its phonological implications
  5. Types of sound change

Sound change: The regularity hypothesis

  • Deriving affixes from historical lexical item
  • Greek future tense marker -s- in lū́-s-ō ‘I will loosen’ derived from the root es- ‘to be’
  • Gothic past tense suffix -dēdun, as in nasidēdun ‘they saved’, derived from a root whose reflex is found in Mod. Engl. do.
  • Hock calls Bopp’s attempt at this etymology suspect and a speculation at best. The failure came from two reasons:
    1. Lack of or incomplete understanding of sound change
    2. Lack of understanding of the constraints of historical-comparative method
  • Later work on Germanic languages leads us to the regularity hypothesis
  • In essence, Sound Change is overwhelmingly regular

What does regularity mean?

germanic
germanic

Regularity, but with some exceptions

germanic
germanic
  • Unshifted voiceless stops
  • Another set of apparent exceptions - PIE voiceless stops change, but the outcome does not agree with predictions made by [+ stop, - voice] > [+ fric.].
  • Instead of a voiceless fricative we find a voiced segment
germanic
germanic
  • The regular change is found in the same word, as in the initial stop of the first item in (5a)
  • Additional evidence for irregular phonetic correspondences
  • Neither the Sanskrit initial b- nor the Greek initial p- can be related to the initial b- of Gothic by Grimm’s Law
  • Skt. b would have to correspond to p, and Greek p to f.
  • Moreover, in this case even the correspondence between Skt. b- and Gk. p- appears to be irregular

Reformulation of Grimm’s law

  • [+ stop, -voice] > [+ fric.]/[-obstr.]___
  • Compare 5 (a) and 5 (b)
  • Stress placement is key in determining if weakening into a fricative will take place

Counter evidence to Grimm’s law

  • Irregular phonetic correspondences is seen in (7) where neither the Sanskrit initial b- nor the Greek initial p- can be related to the initial b- of Gothic by Grimm’s Law
  • Skt. b would have to correspond to p, and Greek p to f.
  • Moreover, in this case even the correspondence between Skt. b- and Gk. p- appears to be irregular.