comparative linguistics which show how linguistics is the source of history,

INTRODUCTION

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Ademola Ajayi(1989)  also described it as the scientific study of language and their relationship. It encompasses the description of languages, the study of their origin, and the analysis of how people acquire language and how people learn languages other than their own. Linguistics is also concerned with relationships between languages and with the ways languages change over time. Linguistics, therefore, has as a twofold bearing on history. On the one hand, language as a system and tool of communication is a historical phenomenon. On the other hand, history is a product of language on two counts: as discourse and as historical evidence. Every language can provide internal technical data bound up with its actual structure, but can also offer extra-linguistic data, which refer back to the entire general context. Historical linguistics served as the cornerstone of comparative linguistics primarily as a tool for linguistic reconstruction. Scholars were concerned chiefly with establishing language families and reconstructing prehistoric proto-languages, using the comparative method and internal reconstruction. The focus was initially on the well-known Indo-European languages, many of which had long written histories; the scholars also studied the Uralic languages, another European language family for which less early written material exist. The dating of the various proto-languages is also difficult, several methods are available for dating, but only approximate results can be obtained. This is why there is no branch of linguistic to which historians can remain completely indifferent. That is why the task of historical research recognizes the linguistic evidence as a credible source of information for interpretation of the human past, the present and the future. According to J. Vansina in a study titled “Languages of Africa”, it has been argued that all human languages have a parent source and that it is from these main sources that other variant of human language emerged. For Africa two groups are identifiable within the predominant forming namely: the Afro-Asiatic and the Nilo-Sahar. This practice is unfortunate, since it disregards the linguistic interpretation resulting from migration, invasion and so on. Essentially, linguistics has helped in the study of African past particularly useful in the study of preliterate societies. Although there are many ways of studying language, most approaches belong to one of the two main branches of linguistics such as descriptive linguistics and comparative linguistics which show how linguistics is the source of history, Azani, (1994).

 Comparative linguistics

It is the study of the relationships or correspondences between two or more languages and the techniques used to discover whether the languages have a common ancestor. Comparative grammar was the most important branch of linguistics in the 19th century in Europe. Also called comparative philology, the study was originally stimulated by the discovery by Sir William Jones in 1786 that Sanskrit was related to Latin, Greek, and German. An assumption important to the comparative method is the Neogrammarian principle that the laws governing sound change are regular and have no exceptions that cannot be accounted for by some other regular phenomenon of language. As an example of the method, English is seen to be related to Italian if a number of words that have the same meaning and that have not been borrowed are compared for example piede and “foot,” padre and “father,” pesce and “fish.” The initial sounds, although different, correspond regularly according to the pattern discovered by Jacob Grimm and named Grimm's law after him, the other differences can be explained by other regular sound changes. Because regular correspondences between English and Italian are far too numerous to be coincidental, it becomes apparent that English and Italian stem from the same parent language. The comparative method was developed and used successfully in the 19th century to reconstruct.

Descriptive linguistics

This is the study and analysis of spoken language. The techniques of descriptive linguistics were devised by German American anthropologist Franz Boas and American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir in the early 1900s to record and analyze Native American languages. Descriptive linguistics begins with what a linguist hears native speakers say. By listening to native speakers, the linguist gathers a body of data and analyzes it in order to identify distinctive sounds, called phonemes. Individual phonemes, such as /p/ and /b/, are established on the grounds that substitution of one for the other changes the meaning of a word. After identifying the entire inventory of sounds in a language, the linguist looks at how these sounds combine to create morphemes, or units of sound that carry meaning, such as the words  push and bush, Morphemes may be individual words such as push; root words, such as berry in blueberry. The study of languages and their relationships is an important means of learning about change and contacts among people in the past. Language is our primary means of communication. Languages change over time, and in the process encode information about these changes, the nature and sequences of which can be revealed by careful comparison between languages and or dialects. Reconstructing these changes is the principal task of historical linguistics, which, particularly when employed in conjunction with other sources of evidence, can tell us much more about the past than the history of languages considered in the abstract. It can provide important clues to the location and identity of past speech communities, and enables researchers to develop strong hypotheses about social and political organization and economic practices in the past, including practices relating to the use and management of natural resources, Carol M et al, (2009).

Linguistic evidence can, moreover, supply unique insights into the history of cultural ideas and practices including ritual practices many aspects of which can only be guessed at from the archaeological record in the reconstruction of history by using language. The following are the evidences by, Adeboye (1989).

Linguistic evidence helps in tracing a family tree

Through most of human history, a language could exist only because there was a society to which that language belonged and whose members used it as their vehicle of social and cultural communication. When, for whatever historical reason, people lose the sense that they belong to a commonality distinct from those of other peoples, the language they speak soon ceases to be passed down to younger generations and so begins to die out. Conversely, the continuing existence of a language over a long span of time reveals a corresponding long-term societal continuity of one kind or another among the speakers of language, extending right across the different periods of its history.

Linguistic evidence provides taxonomic framework

Linguistic evidence provides researchers especially historians with a taxonomic framework to test against frameworks from other discipline. There’s no necessary one-to-one relationship between the history of the people who speak it today, nor between a family tree diagram and migrations. The comparative methods also helps in constructing ancestral languages from which later languages derived. While linguistics are able to reconstruct considerable parts of ancestral languages, reconstructed vocabulary for key cultural, economic, political and societal concepts is the most useful component for historians. Reconstruction and classification have been of most use so far for events from 5000 B.C. to the recent past.  Historical linguists employ a number of methods to classify languages and to reconstruct their genealogies and the history of interactions between them. The principal technique of reconstruction is generally referred to as the ‘Comparative Method’ and is based on the analytic procedures first developed to study the Indo-European family of languages. The same procedures were used at the end of the nineteenth century to define the Bantu family of languages later recognized as a part of the Niger-Congo phylum and begin work in reconstructing proto-Bantu, work which has continued through to the present, Azani, (1994).

Linguistic evidence serves as historical source to trace migration

Historians use language to trace migration. For instance, in the case of the ruins of Lobi region of Burkinafaso, the suggestion that they were Portuguese in origin was ruled out by examining the line of the road leading to them and by the fact that the dating of the finishing showed them to be recent. On the other hand, the local name of kol na wo,or ‘stable for foreigners’ cattle’, given to the site finally put the investigation on the right track, but the style of the pottery found in the ruins and the chronology of migratory tradition in the area had to be taken into account before the builders could be identified as kulango. It also facilitates historical sources for genetic research. For some archaeologists believe the first Americans did not come from northeastern Asia, but from Europe, crossing the North Atlantic Ocean by boat. No ancient boats have been found, but proponents note that modern humans traveled by boat to Australia perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 years ago. Archaeological support for this theory is based mainly on similarities observed between Clovis artifacts and those of the Solutrean Period of prehistoric Europe. Some researchers also find support for a North Atlantic route in several ancient human skeletons found in the Americas. These skeletons, proponents argue, appear to have more anatomical similarities with modern Europeans than with modern Native Americans, Obenga (1981).

Conclusion

From the discussion, it is clear that no single source can adequately supply information about the historical linguistics. The sources work hand in hand to help the scholars to achieve the best result. It has been examined that linguistics is the scientific study of languages and their relationships. Through such studies, the historian compares features of different languages or groups of language that have developed over time from a common parentage or ancestral language. Historians and researchers have used the study of linguistic development to expand their understanding of Africa’s past as it provides a powerful set of tools for probing the widest range of past developments within communities and societies as a whole and it leads itself well to the studies of history over the long term. Through Linguistic evidence therefore, historians are able to reconstruct the relationship among a group of language and simultaneously establish the historical existence of the societies that spoke the languages. It also enable them to establish that some sort of societal continuity connects the histories of the speakers of each language right back in time to the people who spoke the ancestral language, the proto-language of the family as a whole and their tree of relationships, Encyclopædia Britannica, (2010).

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