Language History and Culture Notes

Language History & Culture

• Language in Life
• Language History: involves traits, features, or properties that characterize something. Languages sometimes share traits.
  • Question: Where do these traits come from?

Language History: Lexical Traits

• All words are traits.
• Cognates: words with a shared source.
  • Examples:
    • German Hund, English hound, Spanish can
• Innovations in form and meaning can sometimes obscure the common source.

Language History: Observation

• Some languages are known to be related.
  • Examples:
    • Spanish and Italian, also French and Portuguese
    • Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian
• Related languages share many traits.

Language History: Origins of Traits

• Inherited traits: properties of a language that transmit from previous generations.
  • Related languages inherit traits from the same ancestor.
• Non-inherited traits:
  • Innovations
  • Origins in language contact

Language Change & Relationships

• Cognates: words in different languages inherited from the same form.
  • They may have consistently dissimilar sounds.
• Regularity of sound change demonstrates shared inherited traits.
  • Allows reconstruction.

Cognates & Regularity

• Cognates in English vs. German:
  • t / ts (“z”)
    • two / zwei
    • ten / zehn
    • tooth / Zahn
    • toe / Zehe
    • tell / zählen
    • timber / Zimmer

Cognates & Regularity: Timber

• Timber: a long beam of wood used in construction.
  • Compare to German Zimmer / ʦɪmɛʀ/, meaning ‘room (of a house).’
  • Compare to Dutch timmer, meaning ‘build/hammer.’
• These words come from a word meaning ‘house’ in a language ancestral to these languages.
• Each descendant language shifted its meaning.
  • Compare Latin domus, Russian dom, and PIE dem-

Cognates & Regularity

• Cognates in English vs. Spanish:
  • t / d
    • two / dos
    • ten / diez
    • tooth / diente
    • toe / dedo

Language Change & Relationships: Innovation

• Using innovation to track relatedness.
• Comparative method:
  • Analyze multiple languages for sound shifts.
  • Regular differences in traits.
  • Sound correspondences among related languages.
  • Some descendants inherit conserved phonemes.
  • Others inherit an innovated phoneme.

Language Change & Relationships

• Consistent sound patterns suggest a common source.
• Comparison of related languages leads to reconstruction of proto-language.
  • English and German suggest proto-Germanic.
  • Germanic and Romance suggest earlier proto-language.
  • PIE: Proto-Indo-European.

Regularity in Language Change

• Shifts in PIE to Germanic:
  • *dem- → timber
  • *dwoh → two
  • *dekm- → ten
  • *dont- → tooth
  • *deg- → toe

Regularity in Language Change

• Shifts in PIE to Germanic:
  • *peku- → fee
  • *pehur → fire
  • *plat- → flat
  • *penkwe → five
  • *pods → foot

Cognates & Relationships

• Cognate comparison can be obscured by borrowings.
  • Borrowings: words acquired from another language (not directly inherited).
    • Examples: domestic, canine, pecuniary, dental
• Cognate comparison can be obscured by other kinds of replacement.
  • Examples: perro for can, dog for hound
  • bear, vedmid’, lokys vs. arktos, rksa, ursus

Language History: Shared Inheritance vs. Influence

• Examples:
  • Germanic → English
  • PIE → German → Latin → Spanish/French

Language History: Shared Inheritance vs. Influence

• Examples:
  • Germanic → English: hundoz → hound
  • PIE kunes
  • German hund → Latin canis → Spanish can, French chien

Language History: Shared Inheritance vs. Influence

• Examples (summary):
  • Germanic to English
  • PIE to German to Latin to Spanish and French

Language History: Shared Inheritance vs. Influence

• Examples:
  • Germanic → English: hundoz → hound, canine
  • PIE kunes
  • German hund → Latin canis → Spanish can, French chien

Regularity in Language Change

• Sound correspondence can reveal borrowing.
  • queso and cheese / kaas / Käse
  • ganso and goose / gans / Ganz

Cognates vs. Borrowings

• Readily borrowed words:
  • Cultural constructs (food, clothing, art, tech).
• Some items resist borrowing:
  • Highly frequent words.
  • Body parts.
  • Familial relationships.
  • Basic expressions of motion, thought, and possessions.
  • Numerals.

Numeral Cognates: Germanic

• Lists of numeral cognates in various Germanic languages including:
  • Dutch, Frisian, German, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic, Norwegian from one to twelve.

Numeral Cognates: Romance

• Lists of numeral cognates in various Romance languages including:
  • Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese from one to twelve.

Numeral Cognates: Slavic

• Lists of numeral cognates in various Slavic languages including:
  • Polish, Slovakian, Croatian, Czech from one to ten.

Numeral Cognates: Indic

• Lists of numeral cognates in various Indic languages including:
  • Persian, Punjabi, Gujarati, Hindi, Bengali from one to ten.

Numeral Cognates: Austronesian

• Lists of numeral cognates in various Austronesian languages including:
  • Tagalog, Indonesian, Javanese, Malagasy, Hawaiian, Samoan, Maori from one to ten.

Numeral Cognates: Bantu

• Lists of numeral cognates in various Bantu languages including:
  • Swahili to five.
  • Xhosa to five.
  • Zulu to five.
  • Sesotho to five.

Numeral Cognates: Chukchi-Kamchatkan

• Lists of numeral cognates in various Chukchi-Kamchatkan languages including:
  • Chukchi, Koryat, Ker, Al, Itelmen.

Families

• Sino-Tibetan
• Chukchi-Kamchatkan
• Austronesian
• Uto-Aztecan

Semantic Change: Metonymy

• Metonymy: a non-metaphorical shift in scope.
  • A word’s conceptual space moves into adjacent conceptual space.
    • timber ‘house’ → ‘building material’
    • barbecue: ‘style of cooking’ → ‘outdoor event’
    • ham: ‘back of leg’ → ‘meat of pig’s leg’

Semantic Change: Metaphor

• Metaphor: applying a word in a different conceptual space.
  • broadcast ‘sow (seeds)’ → ‘transmit (signals)’
  • calculus ‘little limestone’ → ‘a system of math’

Semantic Change: Consequences

• Polysemy:
  • A word has multiple semantic interpretations.
  • One interpretation is a metonymic or metaphorical shift of the other.
    • room ‘space’ → ‘space / structural compartment’

Semantic Change: Common Shifts

• Physical vs. metaphysical
  • grasp, get
  • comprender / comprendre / comprehend
    • ‘physically hold’ → ‘cognitively understand’

Semantics: (Meta)Physics

• thing
  • object, idea (the thing is, is that a thing etc)
  • Althingi
• matter
  • ‘physical substance / concern’
• res
  • res publica, re:, reify
• cosa / causa
  • ‘object, thing, cause’

Word History & Cultural Contact

• Word Stories:
  • Some words have complicated histories involving lexical borrowing, sound change, and semantic change.

Complicated Word Stories: Chocolate

• Olmecs (proto-Mixe-Zoque): kakawa
• Borrowed into proto-Mayan: kakaw ~800CE
• Mayan sound change #k → ch: chakaw
• Borrowed by Aztecs (Nahuatl ): ʃokolaːtɬ
• Reanalyzed as xocol ‘bitter’ + atl ‘water’

Complicated Word Stories: Chocolate

• Aztecs (Nahuatl ): ʃokolaːtɬ
• Borrowed by Spanish: chocolate
• …into virtually every other language.
  • Mandarin 巧克力 qiăokèlì
  • Hawaiian kokoleki

Complicated Word Stories: Tea

• Inland/Mainland China: cha
  • Mandarin, Korean, also Japanese ocha
  • chai, shay (India, Persia, ME, Turkey, Russia, E Africa)
• Coastal China (Fujian, Taiwan): te
  • Dutch, Javanese, W Africa, W Europe

Complicated Word Stories: Coffee

• Yemeni Arabic qahweh
• Borrowed into Ottoman Turkish kahve
• Turkish → Italian caffè
• Italian → Dutch → English coffee
• Italian → French, Spanish café

Complicated Word Stories: Coffee

• In indigenous North America
  • Stress on borrowed word tells whether English or French is source.
  • Salish languages usually calque borrowings.
    • ‘car’ [p'ip'ujʃn] = ‘it has wrinkled paws’
  • except ‘coffee’!: ka'fe, from French settlers.

Complicated Word Stories: Rancho

• rancho (Sp)
  • ‘modest house’ → ‘farm for livestock’
  • from range (Fr) ‘items in a row’

Complicated Word Stories: Rancho

• rancho (Sp)
  • ‘modest house’ → ‘farm for livestock’
• ranch (Eng)
  • ‘farm for livestock’ → ‘rural accommodation’
  • Hidden Valley Ranch
    • ‘salad dressing’ → ‘dip, flavor’

Complicated Word Stories: Forms

• Forms via influence:
  • Words that have borrowing in their history.
    • Eg, chocolate, tea, coffee
• Forms via inheritance:
  • Words that pass from gen to gen (w/ innovation).
    • Eg, horse, timber, room
• cow

Agriculture & Wealth: Cow

• cow
  • female of bovine species
  • no general species term
    • compare horse/mare ; sheep/ewe

Agriculture & Wealth: Cow vs Cattle

• cattle refers to livestock in general
  • derives from medieval French, ultimately from Latin capital
  • similarly, capital “possessions” from capital “heads (of livestock”)

Agriculture & Wealth: Synecdoche

• Synecdoche:
  • another type of semantic change
  • using a part to refer to a whole
    • capital ‘head’ → entire animal
  • synecdoche is a kind of metonymy

Agriculture & Wealth: Metaphorical Extension

• Metaphorical extension:
  • applying a word in a different conceptual space
    • capital ‘owned animals’ → ‘accumulated wealth’

Agriculture & Wealth: Semantic Change

• Semantic change may yield polysemy.
  • word with multiple semantic interpretations
  • one interpretation is shift of another
    • capital ‘head’ → ‘head / unit of livestock / wealth’
      • metonymy
      • metaphor
      • cattle

Complicated Word Stories: Cow

• cow was once not a gendered term
  • its gendering is quite old
    • cf koe, kuh, …
  • PIE *gwos
    • generic term for bovine species
    • Latin bovus

Complicated Word Stories: Cattle and Wealth

• pecus: generic Latin term for cattle/livestock
  • … → pecunia: wealth, money
  • related to OE feoh ‘cattle, property, money’
    • → fee

An Epic Word Story: Chaturanga

• Chaturanga
  • ‘army’
  • (~ four limbs)
  • precursor to chess, in India
  • Spread to Persia & Middle East
    • chatrang, al-shatranj
  • Then to Iberian peninsula
    • xadrez, ajedrez

An Epic Word Story: Related Words

• chatrang, shah, shah mat
  • Mid. Persian shah king, king piece
  • Arabic shah (mat) ‘king (is dead)’
  • Spanish jaque (mate) rey king piece
  • Italian scacchi name of game scacco(matto) re king piece

An Epic Word Story: Chess, Check

• Old French escecs name of game escec warning call échecs, échec (et mat) roi king
• Mid Eng chess name of game check(mate) warning call king king

An Epic Word Story: Check

• check ‘place king piece in danger’
• stop, limit something
• to counter an opponent in soccer or hockey
• inspect, determine fitness or accuracy
• the mark you make on a list
• payment
• document to promise money (metonymy from checking items in a ledger)
• bill, receipt