Language History, Language Change, and Comparative Reconstruction

Overview of Language History and Philology

  • Philology and Historical Linguistics:

    • Investigating the features of older languages and the mechanisms through which they developed into modern languages is the domain of philology (the study of language history and change).

    • During the nineteenth century, philology dominated linguistic research, leading to the creation of "family trees" to illustrate historical relationships among languages.

  • Demonstrating Historical Language Change:

    • The evolution of English over the past millennium is clearly evidenced by comparing historical texts to modern forms.

    • Textual Example — The Lord's Prayer (c. 1000):

    • "Fæder ure þu þe eart on heofonum, si þin nama gehalgod. Tobecume þin rice. Gewurþe þin willa on eorðan swa swa on heofonum. Urne gedæghwamlican hlaf syle us to dæg. And forgyf us ure gyltas, swa swa we forgyfað urum gyltendum. And ne gelæd þu us in costnunge, ac alys us of yfele."

    • This c. 1000 text demonstrates that "Englisc" has undergone profound structural, phonetic, and orthographic transformations to become contemporary Modern English.

Family Trees and Proto-Indo-European

  • Discovery of Language Families:

    • Before family trees could be constructed, linguists had to discover that languages spoken across geographically distant regions shared a common origin.

    • In 1786, Sir William Jones, a British government official in India, made a landmark observation regarding Sanskrit, the ancient language of Indian law:

    • "The Sanskrit 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."

  • Hypothesizing Common Ancestry:

    • Sir William Jones proposed that languages from vastly different geographical areas originated from a shared ancestral language.

    • Because no written records of this ancestral language exist, it must be hypothesized through comparative analysis of descendant language features.

    • The term Proto-Indo-European was established in the nineteenth century:

    • Proto: The original ancestral form.

    • Indo: Source of modern languages across the Indian sub-continent.

    • European: Source of modern languages across Europe.

  • The Indo-European Family Tree:

    • Proto-Indo-European serves as the ancestral "great-great-grandmother" language, branching into major sub-families:

Indo-European Language Family Tree

  • Germanic: Danish, English, German, Swedish.

  • Celtic: Breton, Gaelic, Irish, Welsh.

  • Italic: Evolved from Latin; includes French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish.

  • Hellenic: Evolved from Greek; includes Greek.

  • Balto-Slavic:

    • Baltic: Latvian, Lithuanian.

    • Slavic: Czech, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian.

  • Indo-Iranian:

    • Indic: Evolved from Sanskrit; includes Bengali, Hindi, Punjabi, Urdu.

    • Iranian: Kurdish, Pashto, Persian, Tajik.

    • Global Distribution and Language Demographics:

  • Indo-European is the language family with the largest population and geographic distribution worldwide.

  • Worldwide Language Count: There are approximately 30 major language families comprising 7,102 known languages (Ethnologue, 2015).

  • Speaker Demographics:

    • Chinese: Highest number of native speakers (over 1 billion).

    • Spanish: Over 400 million speakers; widely distributed globally.

    • English: Over 330 million native speakers; widely distributed globally.

    • Traces of Shared Ancestry:

  • Distantly related modern languages (e.g., Italian and Hindi) show minimal obvious connection, but historical antecedents (e.g., Latin and Sanskrit) reveal close structural and lexical ties.

  • Phonetic comparison of core vocabulary across ancient languages:

    • "father": Sanskrit pitar, Latin pater, Ancient Greek pate-r.

    • "brother": Sanskrit bhrātar, Latin frāter, Ancient Greek phrāter.

Cognates and Comparative Reconstruction

  • Cognates:

    • A cognate of a word in one language is a word in another language that shares a similar phonetic form, a common origin, and a similar meaning.

    • Germanic Branch Examples:

    • English mother, father, friend are cognates of German Mutter, Vater, Freund.

    • Italic Branch Examples:

    • Spanish madre, padre, amigo are cognates of Italian madre, padre, amico.

  • Comparative Reconstruction Procedure:

    • Comparative reconstruction is the process of analyzing cognate sets from related languages to reconstruct the unrecorded proto-form of their common ancestor.

    • The Majority Principle:

    • If a specific sound appears in a majority of cognates within a set (e.g., three words starting with [p] and one with [b]), the majority sound is assumed to be the original sound retained from the ancestor.

    • The Most Natural Development Principle:

    • Based on observed universal directions of sound change that regularly occur in natural languages:

      • Final Vowels Disappear: Vowels at the ends of words are lost (e.g., vino → vin).

      • Voiceless Sounds Become Voiced Intervocalically: Voiceless consonants become voiced when positioned between vowels (e.g., muta → muda).

      • Stops Become Fricatives: Plosive sounds weaken into fricatives (e.g., ripa → riva).

      • Final Consonants Become Voiceless: Consonants lose voicing at word ends (e.g., rizu → ris).

  • Applying Comparative Reconstruction — Sound Level:

    • Sample Cognate Analysis (Languages A, B, C):

    • "sing": A cantare, B cantar, C chanter

    • "chain": A catena, B cadena, C chaîne

    • "dear": A caro, B caro, C cher

    • "horse": A cavallo, B caballo, C cheval

    • Phonetic Analysis:

    • Languages A and B feature the initial stop consonant [k].

    • Language C features the initial fricative consonant [ʃ].

    • Majority Principle: [k] occurs in 2 out of 3 languages, indicating [k] is older.

    • Most Natural Development Principle: Stops shift to fricatives ([k] → [ʃ]), supporting [k] as original.

    • Historical Verification:

    • Languages A, B, and C represent Italian, Spanish, and French, derived from Latin.

    • Latin original forms (cantare, catena, carus, caballus) confirm the reconstructed initial [k].

  • Applying Comparative Reconstruction — Word Level:

    • Sample Analysis of Unknown Non-Indo-European Languages (1, 2, 3):

    • "stream": Language 1 mube, Language 2 mupe, Language 3 mup

    • "rock": Language 1 abadi, Language 2 apati, Language 3 apat

    • "knife": Language 1 agana, Language 2 akana, Language 3 akan

    • "diamond": Language 1 enugu, Language 2 enuku, Language 3 enuk

    • Step-by-Step Reconstruction:

    • Intervocalic Voicing: Language 1 shows voiced consonants ([b], [d], [ɡ]), whereas Languages 2 and 3 show voiceless counterparts ([p], [t], [k]). By the principle that voiceless sounds become voiced between vowels, Languages 2 and 3 are older than Language 1.

    • Final Vowels: Language 3 lacks the final vowels present in Language 2. By the principle that final vowels disappear, Language 3 underwent vowel loss.

    • Proto-Forms: Language 2 represents the closest form to the original proto-language (mupe, apati, akana, enuku).

Historical Periods of English

Old English Manuscript Excerpt

  • Timeline of the Four Main Periods:

    • Old English: Prior to 1100.

    • Middle English: 1100 to 1500.

    • Early Modern English: 1500 to 1700.

    • Modern English: After 1700.

  • Orthographic Character Shifts:

    • Old English characters replaced over time:

    • þ ("thorn") and ð ("eth") were replaced by th (e.g., þu → thou, eorðan → earth).

    • æ ("ash") was replaced by a (e.g., to dæg → today).

  • Old English Period (Pre-1100):

    • Origins: Germanic languages spoken by Angles, Saxons, and Jutes migrating from northern Europe to the British Isles in the 5th century (historically characterized as "God's wrath toward Britain").

    • Terminology Origin: "Anglo-Saxons" derives from Angles and Saxons; "Englisc" derives from Angles; "Engla-land" (land of the Angles) became England.

    • Basic Germanic Vocabulary: mann ("man"), wīf ("woman"), cild ("child"), hūs ("house"), mete ("food"), etan ("eat"), drincan ("drink"), feohtan ("fight").

    • Christian Conversion (6th–8th Century): Introduced Latin religious and scholarly terms: angel, bishop, candle, church, martyr, priest, school.

    • Viking Invasions (8th–10th Century): Old Norse settlements integrated terms: give, law, leg, skin, sky, take, they; days of the week Tiw's day (Tuesday) and Thor's day (Thursday); winter festival jól → Yule.

  • Middle English Period (1100–1500):

    • Defining Event: The Norman Conquest of 1066 led by William the Conqueror at the Battle of Hastings.

    • French Influence: French became the language of the nobility, government, law, and high culture for two centuries.

    • French Borrowings: army, court, defense, faith, prison, tax.

    • Social Class Lexical Split (Animals vs. Food):

    • English-speaking peasants raised live animals: sheep, cow, swine (Old English origins).

    • French-speaking upper class consumed cooked meats: mutton, beef, pork (French origins).

    • Middle English Literature (Geoffrey Chaucer, late 14th century):

    • "She was cleped Madame Eglentyne / Ful wel she song the service dyvyne, / Entuned in her nose ful semely, / And Frenche she spak ful faire and fetisly."

    • Chaucerian Vowel Quality: Pronunciation differed significantly from modern forms: hoos ("house"), weef ("wife"), hay ("he"), weena ("wine"), heer ("here"), mona ("moon").

    • The Great Vowel Shift (1400–1600):

    • A systematic raising of all long vowel sounds across the English language (e.g., long [o] shifted up to long [u], as in mōna → moon).

    • Made Early Modern English pronunciation (c. 1500) fundamentally distinct from Middle English.

    • Invention of Printing (1476): Introduced by William Caxton to England. Printers fixed spellings reflecting contemporary 15th-century pronunciations (e.g., knee, gnaw), freezing orthography before subsequent sound changes occurred.

  • Types of Language Change:

    • External Change: Lexical borrowings caused by contact with outside groups (e.g., Norman French, Old Norse).

    • Internal Change: Phonological and structural evolution occurring naturally within the language.

Specific Types of Sound Changes

  • Sound Loss:

    • Complete disappearance of specific speech sounds over time.

    • Initial [h] Loss: Old English hlud → loud, hlaford → lord.

    • Silent Letters: Loss of word-initial velar stops [k] and [ɡ] when preceding nasal [n] (e.g., knee, gnaw).

    • Velar Fricative [x] Loss: Pronounced in Old English niht as [nɪxt] (similar to German Nacht), fully lost in Modern English night [naɪt]. Retained in dialectal forms such as Scottish loch.

  • Metathesis:

    • The reversal in position of two adjacent or non-adjacent sounds within a word.

    • Historical English Shifts:

    • acsian → ask

    • frist → first

    • brinnan → beornan ("burn")

    • bridd → bird

    • hros → horse

    • wæps → wasp

    • Modern Dialectal Metathesis:

    • Pronouncing pretty good as purty good.

    • Pronouncing ask as aks (e.g., "I aksed him already").

    • Non-Adjoining Metathesis (Latin to Spanish [l] and [r] transposition):

    • Latin miraculum → Spanish milagro ("miracle")

    • Latin parabola → Spanish palabra ("word")

    • Latin periculum → Spanish peligro ("danger")

  • Epenthesis:

    • The insertion of an additional sound into the middle of a word.

    • Historical English Shifts:

    • æmtig → empty (insertion of [p] after nasal [m])

    • spinel → spindle (insertion of [d])

    • timr → timber (insertion of [b])

    • Modern Colloquial Epenthesis:

    • Pronouncing something as "sumpthing".

    • Pronouncing film as "filum".

    • Pronouncing arithmetic as "arithametic".

  • Prothesis:

    • The addition of a sound to the absolute beginning of a word (not naturally found in historical English evolution).

    • Latin to Spanish Evolution (addition of prothetic [e] before initial [s] + consonant clusters):

    • schola → escuela ("school")

    • scribere → escribir ("to write")

    • spiritus → espíritu ("spirit")

    • sperare → esperar ("to hope")

    • Second Language Acquisition Effect: Native Spanish speakers learning English often insert a prothetic vowel, pronouncing strange as "estrange" and story as "estory".

Syntactic and Semantic Changes

  • Syntactic Changes (Sentence Structure & Grammar):

    • Modern English primarily uses Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) order, whereas Old English exhibited diverse structural orders:

    • Verb-Subject: ferde he ("traveled he").

    • Object-Verb: he hine geseah ("he him saw").

    • Fronted Object: him man ne sealde ("[to] him man not gave [any]").

    • Negative Constructions:

    • Modern English not gave (ne sealde) is ungrammatical.

    • Double Negative Structures: Standard in Old English, as in ne sealdest þū næfre ("not gave you never").

    • Complete VSO Construction Example:

    • and ne sealdest þū me næfre ān ticcen (Literal: "and not gave you me never a kid").

    • Loss of Inflections:

    • Old English had extensive inflectional suffixes indicating grammatical role across nouns, adjectives, articles, and pronouns.

    • Verb Inflections: sealde ("he gave") vs. sealdest ("you gave"). Most inflectional endings decayed and disappeared in Middle and Modern English.

  • Semantic Changes (Meaning Shifts):

    • Word Obsolescence: Words disappear when their cultural referents vanish (e.g., foin meaning "the thrust of a sword"; Old English were meaning "man", surviving only in werewolf).

    • Archaic Vocabulary: lo, verily, egad, and medieval names (Bertha, Egbert, Percival).

    • Broadening of Meaning:

    • holy day (specific religious feast) → holiday (any period of rest from work).

    • foda (fodder specifically for animals) → food (all nourishment).

    • luflic ("loving") and hræd ("quick") → lovely ("wonderful") and rather ("preferentially").

    • docga (originally specified a single specific breed) → dog (encompasses all canine breeds).

    • Narrowing of Meaning:

    • hund (originally applied to any dog) → hound (restricted to specific hunting dog breeds).

    • mete (originally applied to any food) → meat (restricted to animal flesh).

    • wife (originally applied to any woman) → wife (restricted to a married woman).

    • steorfan (originally meant "to die from any cause") → starve (restricted to dying from lack of food).

    • Evaluative Shifts (Pejoration and Amelioration):

    • nice: Shifted from negative Latin nescius ("ignorant", "not knowing") to positive modern meaning.

    • notorious: Shifted from "widely known" to "known for something bad".

    • vulgar: Shifted from "ordinary/common" to "offensive".

    • naughty: Shifted from "having nothing" to "mischievous".

Diachronic vs. Synchronic Variation

  • Diachronic Variation:

    • Analysis of language variation viewed historically, examining change through time across centuries.

  • Synchronic Variation:

    • Analysis of language variation viewed at a single point in time, examining regional, spatial, and social group differences within a language community.

  • Mechanisms of Language Transmission and Instability:

    • Language change occurs gradually and continuously.

    • Major social events (wars, invasions, migrations) accelerate external changes, but cultural transmission across generations is the fundamental engine of change.

    • During language acquisition, each child must "recreate" the language of the community, naturally acquiring some elements precisely while acquiring others approximately or introducing conscious innovations.

Reconstructing Etymological Trees and Comparative Datasets

  • Historical Etymology of "Heart" Cognates:

Etymological Derivation Chart

  • Proto-Indo-European Root: *kerd

  • Hellenic Branch: kerd → Greek kardia → kardiakos → Modern English cardiac.

  • Italic Branch (Path 1): kerd → Latin coraticum → Old French corage → Modern English courage.

  • Italic Branch (Path 2): kerd → Latin cordialis → Modern English cordial.

  • Germanic Branch: kerd → Proto-Germanic herton → Old English heorte → Modern English heart.

    • Historical Comparison of Biblical Verse (Matthew 27:73):

  • Modern English (1961): "Shortly afterwards the bystanders came up and said to Peter, 'Surely you are another of them; your accent gives you away!'"

  • Early Modern English (1611): "And after a while came vnto him they that stood by, and saide to Peter, Surely thou also art one of them, for thy speech bewrayeth thee."

  • Middle English (1395): "And a litil aftir, thei that stooden camen, and seiden to Petir, treuli thou art of hem; for thi speche makith thee knowun."

  • Old English (1050): "þa æfter lytlum fyrste genēalæton þa ðe þær stodon, cwædon to petre. Soðlice þu eart of hym, þyn spræc þe gesweotolað." (Literal: "then after little first approached they that there stood, said to Peter. Truly thou art of them, thy speech thee makes clear.")

    • Proto-Polynesian Comparative Reconstruction Dataset:

  • Cognate Matrix across Five Polynesian Languages:

    • "eye": Tongan mata, Samoan mata, Rapanui mata, Māori mata, Hawaiian maka → Proto-Polynesian *mata

    • "canoe": Tongan vaka, Samoan vaʻa, Rapanui vaka, Māori waka, Hawaiian waʻa → Proto-Polynesian *vaka

    • "water": Tongan vai, Samoan vai, Rapanui vai, Māori wai, Hawaiian wai → Proto-Polynesian *vai

    • "sea": Tongan tahi, Samoan tai, Rapanui vaikava, Māori tai, Hawaiian kai → Proto-Polynesian *tahi

    • "seaweed": Tongan limu, Samoan limu, Rapanui rimu, Māori rimu, Hawaiian limu → Proto-Polynesian *limu

    • "sky": Tongan langi, Samoan lagi, Rapanui rangi, Māori rangi, Hawaiian lani → Proto-Polynesian *langi

    • "lice": Tongan kutu, Samoan ʻutu, Rapanui kutu, Māori kutu, Hawaiian ʻuku → Proto-Polynesian *kutu

  • Systematic Phonological Rules for Hawaiian Cognate Derivation from Tongan:

    • Sound Shifts: Tongan [t] → Hawaiian [k]; Tongan [v] → Hawaiian [w]; Tongan [ng] → Hawaiian [n]; Tongan [k] → Hawaiian glottal stop [ʔ] (written as ʻ).

    • Applied Tongan to Hawaiian Correspondences:

      • tapu ("forbidden") → Hawaiian kapu

      • toto ("blood") → Hawaiian koko

      • ika ("fish") → Hawaiian iʻa

      • mohe ("sleep") → Hawaiian mohe

      • vela ("hot") → Hawaiian wela

      • hiva ("nine") → Hawaiian hiwa

      • tonga ("south") → Hawaiian kona

      • hingoa ("name") → Hawaiian hinoa

      • toki ("axe") → Hawaiian koi

      • tangata ("man") → Hawaiian kanaka