Historical linguistics (HL) 2nd years, all groups (2023-2024)

Definition of HL: (Also called diachronic linguistics and is a branch of linguistics, it was traditionally
known as philology). Historical linguistics is concerned with the study of the history of language(s), its/
their evolution realized in its/ their changes and developments over time. Its primary tool is the
comparative method, a way to identify relations among languages based on textual evidence (though
many written records were absent). For Crystal, 19 th C comparative philology proved to be of great use in
HL as it raised and clarified many points.
The aim behind historical studies is the construction of theories that can account for how and why
languages change.
The historical linguist: (also features of HL)
(1) His job is to know how languages are related (i.e., they have a common ancestor) by (a) having a large
number of words in common called cognates, and (b) by having similar structures as a criterion of family
relatedness (through comparative grammar studies).
(2) He also studies in detail these related groups of languages in order to know how words, orthography,
sounds, grammar rules in addition to meanings have changed in the course of time (change cross
linguistically- between languages- or within a language itself). He describes and accounts for the
observed changes.
(3) Etymology, which is the reconstruction and origins of words, is part of a HL work as it is a commonly
studied aspect of language change.
(4) Speech communities and their multiple languages are analyzed and described by the HL.
(5) Grouping languages into families according to the degree of similarities between them is another job
of a HL. He reconstructs earlier stages of languages, where they descended from, sister languages, etc…
(6) Dialectology is his concern as well. He carries out a historical study of dialects and how they changed
in the course of time at different linguistic levels.
In the 20th C, the HL effectively applied the 19th C theories and methods to study and classify non-Indo-
European languages.

Language Change:
Language is always changing: across space, social group and also across time. Historical linguistics
deals with this, i.e., it studies the diachronic process(es) of change in language over time. Generation by
generation, pronunciations evolve, new words are borrowed or invented, the meaning of old words
changes (semantic change and borrowing), and morphology develops or decays. Fast or slow, the changes
increase until the "mother tongue" becomes distant and different. After a thousand years, the original and
new languages will not be mutually intelligible (understandable). After ten thousand years, the
relationship will be essentially indistinguishable. Before divergent (differing) dialects lose mutual

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intelligibility completely, they begin to show difficulties and inefficiencies in communication. People
react negatively to language change. Nevertheless, it is a universal fact.

Examples of Change:
1. Sound change: All aspects of language change, the phonological system too (i.e., sound change).
A/ In Hawai'ian, all the "t" sounds in an older form of the language became "k". So when Europeans met
Hawai'ian, there were no "t" in it at all, though the closely related languages as Tahitian have "t".
B/ The ‘Great Vowel Shift’ is another sound change occurred between Middle and Early Modern English
(around Shakespeare's time). Long vowels like long (i) /i:/ became /ai/ as in 'bite': /bait/ which was /bi:t/.
Similarly, the long (u) /u:/ became /au/: the earlier 'house' /hu:s/ became /haus/.
C/ Processes of sound change:
Assimilation, or the influence of one sound on the next sound. Assimilation processes changed Latin /k/
when followed by /i/, first to /ky/, then to "ch", then to /s/, so that Latin faciat /fakiat/ 'would make'
became fasse /fas/ in Modern French (the subjunctive of the verb faire 'to make'). Crystal cites Modern
English third from Old English thrid , and Modern English bird is a parallel example. In Old English,
there were two forms of the word "ask": ascian and acsian. So, phonological change led to
morphological change.
The least effort principle: A principle in verbal human communication in which speakers make the least
amount of effort in a communicative act by simplifying language. The latter will be sloppy and will
eventually change with time. Eg: it looks easier to use ‘maths’ instead of ‘methematics’, ‘gonna’ instead
of ‘going to’ or ‘showed’ and not ‘shown’ (preference for regular forms) and even ‘good bye’ to
economize ‘God be with you.’
2. Morphology and syntax change: Words change over time as in ‘earwig’ which was ‘earwicga’ in Old
English and ‘arwygy’ in Middle English (type of insect). Words like ‘amidst’ and ‘amongst’ are in their
way out as they are less found in speaking and only used now in few formal writing. The word ‘bet’
became ‘bit.’
Means of expression evolve: inflectional systems, grammatical structures and word order. For
comparatives in Old English, ‘adjective + ra’ was used as in ‘wearm → wearmra / long → lengra’ (the
stems may or may not change).
3. Semantic change: Meanings of words do change in a phenomenon known as semantic shift. You are
familiar with the case of ‘deer’ which indicates a specific animal, yet, previously it meant only ‘animal’.
Meanings of words become (a) broader or (b) narrower:
(a) The instance of ‘mouse’ which used to refer to animal, now its meaning got broader to include ‘a part
of a PC’ technologically speaking. ‘Dove’ also as an animal noun became a significant of ‘peace.’
(b) the example of the word ‘art’ which used to refer to ‘skill’ in general and through time it got narrow
in sense to refer to ‘aesthetic skill.’

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How and why does language change?
For many reasons: changes can begin in language learning, or through language contact, social
differentiation, and natural processes in usage.
1. Language learning: Language is transformed as it is transmitted from one generation to the next. Each
individual must re-create a grammar and lexicon based on input received from parents or the older people.
The experience of each individual is different so that the result is variable across individuals. However,
those learners prefer regularization and this leads to systematic drift, generation by generation.
2. Language contact: Migration, conquest and trade bring speakers of one language into contact with
speakers of another. Some individuals will become fully bilingual as children, while others learn a second
language more or less well. In such contact situations, languages often borrow words, sounds,
constructions and so on.
3. Social differentiation: Social groups are different and linguistically distinct (their vocabulary,
pronunciation, morphological processes, syntactic constructions …etc are different).
4. Natural processes in usage: Rapid speech results processes such as assimilation, vowel reduction and
deletion of some sounds. Through repetition, this becomes a habit. Words meaning change in a similar
way, through the adoption of processes like metaphor.
Some linguists distinguish between internal and external sources of language change. Internal change
occurs within a single linguistic community (people want to simplify and economize language systems).
External change is due to contact with other languages.

How do we know how languages are related?

Linguists rely on systematic sound changes to establish the relationships between languages. The
basic idea is that when a change occurs within a speech community, it gets diffused across the entire
community. If, however, the communities have split and are no longer in contact, a change that happens
in one community does not get diffused to the other community. Thus, a change that happened between
early and late Latin would show up in all the 'daughter' languages of Latin, but once the late Latin
speakers of the Iberian peninsula were no longer in regular contact with other late Latin speakers, a
change that happened there would not spread to the other communities. Languages that share
innovations are considered to have shared a common history apart from other languages, and are put on
the same branch of the language family tree. Linguists rely on cognates that show these. Study the
following to learn more:
Clear cognates → same branch: Germanic
English Dutch Danish
One Een En
Two Twee To
Seven Zeven Syv
Eight Acht otte

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Words in two or more daughter languages that derive from the same word in the ancestral
language are known as cognates. Sound changes work to change the actual phonetic form of the word in
the different languages, but we can still recognize them as originating from a common source because of
the regularities within each language. For example, a change happened in Italian such that in initial
consonant clusters, the l that comes after p and f changed to i. Thus Italian words like fiore 'flower';
fiume 'river'; pioggia 'rain'; and piuma 'feather' are cognates (having a common Romance ancestry) with:

 French: fleur; fleuve; pluie; and plume, and with

 Spanish: flora, fluvial (adj. 'riverine'); lluvia (by a later change); and pluma respectively.
In the same Romance languages and others (table below), the word for 'mother' is cognate in all the six
contemporary languages. Yet, ‘father’ is cognate only in five.
The original r has also suffered different fates: Where we find r deleted in final position in the word for
'mother', we also find it deleted in the same position in the word for 'father'.

English French Italian Spanish Portuguese Rumanian Catalan

mother mer madre madre mae mama mare
father per padre padre pae tata* pare

Out of these instances of linguistic resemblances, the HL proceeds to grouping into families.

Historical reconstruction and the family tree model (FTM):

The family tree model was developed by Schleicher (1861–2) to describe the origin of individual
languages which were believed to have branched off from older languages. Influenced by Darwin’s
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(1859) theory of evolution -since plants and animals have a birth, development and death so why not
language too?- Schleicher reconstructed the origin of the Indo-European languages from a hypothetical
Indo-European ‘proto-language’ in the form of a genetic tree whose branches are meant to correspond to
the differentiation between individual languages of each branch (caused by an interruption in contact).
This model was criticized by Schmidt (1872) who provided an alternative model known as the wave
theory.
In this model also, the central effort has been to establish a systematic pattern of change, most often
sound change and many other correspondences of cognate pairs prove it. This level of understanding is
useful for several reasons. First, a systematic pattern of phonological correspondence in many words is
unlikely to have arisen by chance, whereas completely unrelated languages often develop surprising
similarities in particular words, entirely by chance. Second, given systematic changes of this type, we can
start to apply the comparative method to reconstruct the parent language.

Another approach; however, put by the American Structuralist Morris Swadesh, is called lexicostatistics.
For a set of languages of interest, we get a vocabulary list of common basic words (typically 100-200
items). For each pair of languages, we determine the percentage of words on this list that appear to be
cognate (say 60% and higher). We can then arrange these cognate percentages in a table, from which we
draw some conclusions about the degree of relationship among the languages.

What are the results of language change?

When accompanied by splits of populations, language change results in dialect divergence: languages
separate from one another and go in a different direction (as opposed to convergence: languages come
together from different directions to become more similar over time as a result of language contact).
Examples of divergence are the kinds of differences between British and American English; between
the French of France and that of Quebec which changed in different ways in different places leading to
geographical variation. Over longer periods, humanity witnessed the emergence of separate languages as
in the contemporary Romance languages, separated by about 2000 years, and the Germanic languages,
whose divergence began perhaps 500 years earlier. Both of these families are part of Indo-European.
Political considerations often intervene in whether a particular speech variety is considered to be a
language or a dialect.
Conclusion: “Time changes all things: there is no reason why language should escape this universal
law.” F. De Saussure.