History of Linguistics
Professor Indranil Dutta https://duttalab.github.io/
2026-08-24
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.
- 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
- Introduction
- Phonetics, transcription, terminology, abbreviations, glosses
- Sound change: The regularity hypothesis
- Sound change and its phonological implications
- 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:
- Lack of or incomplete understanding of sound change
- 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
The discovery of
Indo-European
“The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful
structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and
more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a
stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of
grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong
indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without
believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps,
no longer exists: there is a similar reason, though not quite so
forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though
blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the
Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family, if this
were the place for discussing any question concerning the antiquities of
Persia.” (Sir William Jones, Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus,
Royal Asiatic Society, 1786)
- Turning point in historical and comparative linguistics
- Jones’ suggestion led to a lot of research on far-flung
languages
- Why Indo-European?
- Members extended from India in the east to Europe in the west
- The common ancestor referred to as Proto-Indo-European
- A recent member of the family – Tocharian – discovered in Chinese
Turkestan
- Farther east than the northwestern part of India
- Relatedness of languages was nothing novel or even without
precedent
- Romance languages from Latin
- Dante had proposed the same
