HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS – LL 303
HISTORICAL
AND COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS – LL 303
Module
1:Language and History
INTRODUCTION
Historical and
comparative linguistics can be defined as the scientific study of language
development. However a more conclusive definition of historical and comparative
linguistics requires an understanding of three terms which are:
Historical:
Is an adjective being derived from the noun history, and in its broad sense is
the development of human institution.
Comparative:
Is an adjective derived from the word “compare”, the word compare means
examining items or things in order to establish their similarities and their
differences.
Linguistics:
Is
the scientific study of language.
Thus
historical and comparative linguistics is a study that combines two disciplines.
In this programme the course is treated as a single branch of learning, but it
should be noted that its component disciplines differ considerably with respect
to their goals and methods.Thecomponent disciplines of the course are;
historical linguistics (also called diachroniclinguistics) component which
deals with the scientific study of language change over time, and comparative
linguistics (originally comparative philology) which is concerned with comparing
languages to establish their historical relatedness.
According
to Arlotto (1971) Historical and comparative linguistics is a branch of
linguistics that studies a development of a language as a human institution,
paying particular interests in the forces which influences language change.
LANGUAGE
RESEMBLANCE
Resemblance
in Historical and comparative linguistics is the situation where languages look
alike at sound and meaning level. That is phonological and semantic
resemblance.
Causes of language Resemblance
Historical factor.
Historically,
resemblance is caused by common origin of languages, where languages which are
said to belong to the same/common ancestor tend to look alike in some ways at
sound and meaning level.Example:Romans languages: i.e. Italian, Romanian,
French, Portuguese, Spanish, are all descendants of Latin.
Linguistic Borrowing.
Language
resemblance is a result of contact among speakers of deferent languages. Due to
language contact languages borrow linguistic items from the lending language to
borrowing language;finally the lending language and the borrowing language
attain resemblance at sound and meaning level.
Example:
linguistic item lending
language borrowing language
Hela German Kiswahili
Meza Portuguese Kiswahili
Shukrani Arabic Kiswahili
Bunge kigogo Kiswahili
Philosophia Greek English
Safari Kiswahili English
Chapati Indian Kiswahili
Accidental factor.
Lexical
items in a language can look alike as result of chance, this means that
languages that resemble are not related genetically and resemblance is not a
result of borrowing.
Example:
the lexemes, ‘kata’ and ‘cut’,”keen and ‘makini’the sound system and meaning is
the same but Kiswahili did not borrow from English either do not relate
historically.
NB:
Resemblance due to chance is the least occurring factor that explains language
similarities.
THE
CONCERNS OF HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS
Approach
to language study
The
famous Switz scholar Ferdinand De Saussure distinguished two approaches to the
study of language, that is Diachronic and Synchronic approach. Historical and
comparative linguistics is the only branch of linguistics that uses Diachronic
approach to language study where it studies language historically. Other
branches of linguistics such as socio linguistics, psycholinguistics, and
applied linguistics use the Synchronic approach in studying language.
LANGUAGE
CHANGE
Meaning
of language change
Language
change refers to variation over time in a language's phonetic, morphological,
semantic andsyntactic, features. It is the phenomenon by which permanent
alterations are made in the features and the use of a language over time. The
change affects all areas of language use. Types of language change include
sound changes, lexical changes, semantic changes, and syntactic changes.
NATURE
OF LANGUAGE CHANGE.
Language
change is characterized by two aspects, which are systematicity and gradual
processes.
Systematicity.
Language
change tends to follow a specific pattern of which this consistence allows
historical and comparative linguists to predict the pattern for language
change.
Example:
In Spanish the original ‘p’ regularly become ‘b’ in the environment between
vowels that is (P> b / v-v). This means that in the context between vowels
every ‘p’ sound becomes ‘b’.
Graduality
Language
change is a gradual process that is it does not happen suddenly, the change of
language from one generation to another generation takes a certain length of
time until when the change becomes significant.
Note.
In historical and comparative linguistics the historical factor for language
resemblance is the most crucial factor, while resemblance due to chance is the
least occurring factor that explains language similarities.
LINGUISTICS
AS A SOURCE OF HISTORY
Linguistics
as a scientific study of language is an important source of historical
information since language does not exist in a vacuum as it is used within a
cultural setting. As a source of history linguistics can provide the following
historical information:
Language as a tool in examining
various cultural aspects.
Historians
have been able to use linguistics data to establish the origin of a certain
practice or cultural practices that is important to a certain culture. A good
example can be drown from the Italians who have had a great influence on music
since most musical terms such as Piano, Guitar, Moderato and allegro, have
their origin in Italy. Many legal terms and words relate to the nation such as
law, autocratic, Democracy, Government, Judiciary, have their origin in French
since French people are very well organized in judicial structure and
governance system. Again in the history of education and scholarship Greek had
much influence, this is experienced in the etymology of most words relating to
education, schooling and academics with linguistics terms like Philosophy,
Biology, Sociology, Psychology etc as used in the field of Education.
Linguistics as a tool to establish
homeland.
Linguistics
evidences is used as a crucial tool in establishing the origin homeland of a
certain group of people by use of language reconstruction. For example using
language reconstruction technique linguistics evidences have made the conclusion
that the original homeland of Bantu speaking group is the Niger Congo Basin.
Linguistics as a pointer for early
civilization.
Linguistics is an important pointer that helps
in understanding early civilization as historians use lexical analysis to
interpret the mode of civilization attained for instance Historians were able
to establish that a ‘dog’ was an important animal in the life of Indo- European
and the reason behind was that in all daughter languages of Indo- European the
word “dog” was present and had the same form in sound and meaning level.
Language as a tool of drawing
migration Maps
This
is done through analyzing language resemblance because the history of migration
depicts a clear picture of how a group of people moved from the original
dialect or language.
THE
DEVELOPMENT OF HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE LINGUICS
Historical
and comparative linguistics is the oldest branch of linguistics and its
development can be analyzed into different stages by different scholars.
COMPARATIVE
PHILOLOGY STAGE
The
stage began in the 19th century, and was propounded by the Greek
scholars. The field of the language study began as “Philology” and the word
philology originates from Greek word “Philologia” that translates as love of
something. During this stage the Greek language scholars had much love and
interest to undertake a historical study of language development, where language
was analyzed in a wide perspective, in this stage scholars were analyzing the similarities
of a given languages while paying great attention to grammar/structure and
literature analysis that would lead to establishing principles and methods of
setting up language families, developing a general theory of language change
and finally establishment of language relationship. However the stage of
comparative philology was not purely a linguistic study stage since the level
of analysis was on both grammar and literature.
COMPARATIVE
LINGUISTICS.
This
stage marks the commencement or the beginning of linguistics as specific field
of study, during this time literature that was in comparative philology was
left unaddressed. The stage was influenced by three personalities such as Sir.
William Jones, Rusmus Rask and Franz Bopp.
Sir. William Jones
He
was a British official working in India as a chief justice, for him being a lawyer
he was familiar with the old Greek, and Latin as lawyers were familiar with the
languages of scholarship. During his stay in India that is 25th
September 1783 to 27 April 1794 Sir. Jones was interested on the study of
language and he got interested specifically in establishing how Latin and old
Greek bore great resemblance to Sanskrit i.e. parent language of most languages
in India and Iran. In his observation Jones observed that the Sanskrit language
is of very wonderful structure, more perfect than old Greek, more beautiful
than Latin and more refined than either, yet baring a very strong resemblance
to both. With the resemblance observed to the languages He concluded that
Latin, Old Greek and Sanskrit were sister languages that originated from the
same ancestor.
Rusmus Rask
He
was a Deny scholar who investigated the relationship of languages in the
Scandinavian Region; his study involved Swedish, Norwegian, Islandish etc. Rask
concluded his study by conducting a second comparison between his study and
that of Jones. The conclusion was that the languages of Scandinavian language
might have the same origin as Latin, Old Greek and Sanskrit.
Franz Bopp
He
was a Germany scholar who studied the conjugation system of verbs in old Greek,
Latin, and Sanskrit with that of Persian and Germany. He concluded his study by
observing that all five languages must have come from a common ancestor since
verb conjugation in these languages was almost the same.
NB:
All the three scholarsanalyzed languages at the level of comparison by looking
languages relationship.
THE
BEGINNING OF LANGUAGE RECONSTRUCTION
This stage was propounded in (1822) by Jacob
Grimm. It is characterized by a shift of interest from just language comparison
to a serious analysis of language characteristics that would lead to
establishing of the form to earlier language, with the main question being
whether comparison also led into a conclusion about the ancestral language.
Arriving to a conclusion Grimm worked on three languages; Latin, Old Greek, and
Sanskrit, the three languages were all dead languages however , Grimm had the
advantage that Latin had written records, using Latin Grimm successful
established a method of language reconstruction using reconstructed forms from
the romans languages like Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, French,
Romanian which were proven using the written records of Latin, the languages
were compared where the sound system of chosen lexical items were analyzed
following Grimm’s methodology. The principle was also applied in the
reconstruction of other dead languages.
THE
SOUND CHANGE LAW
The
stage came into existence in (1822) and the main personality was Jacob Grimm.
After establishing a method of reconstruction Grimm related the consonants of
proto- Indo European to those of Germanic languages. For example the
reconstruction of a word “man” meaning a male human being as analyzed below;
Languages lexeme
English
man
German
mann
Dutch
man
Danish mand
Swedish man
Norwegian mann
Using
the majority principle therefore the original word is ‘man’ since is the one
that has occurred most frequent. Grimm’s observation can be summarized on what
we call Grimm’s Law of sound change as stipulated below:
1st Law
The
voiceless plosives of indo- European became the voiceless fricatives in
Germanic language.
Indo-
European
Germanic
2ndlaw
The voiced plosivesof Indo – European became the
voiceless plosive of Germanic languages
Indo- European Germanic
3rd
law
The voiced aspirated plosives in indo- European
became the voiced unaspirated plosives in Germanic languages.
Indo- European Germanic
Note: In modern English the voiced plosives are not
aspirated but voiceless plosives are aspirated. Reconstructed sounds/words are
usually marked with an asterisk (*) to indicate that they are hypothetical.
OTHER CLASSIFICATION MODEL
Earlier models in historical development of language
concentrated on reconstructions which would lead to genetic classification. In
1818 Schlegel a Germany linguist thought to classify languages using
morphological typology (morphological structure). In his classification he
identified three types of languages.
a) SYNTHETIC LANGUAGES
These are
languages that are made up by a long string of words, also known as Fusion
languages. They are languages with bound morphemes;howeverone bound morpheme
could mark several categories. In this type of language there is no clear
division of specific category marked by each bound morpheme or derivational
morpheme.For example, the Latin suffix -is represents the combination of
categories “singular” and “genitive” in the word form hominis“of the
man,” but one part of the suffix cannot be assigned to “singular” and another
to “genitive,” and -is is only one of many suffixes that in different
classes (or declensions) of words represent the combination of “singular” and
“genitive.”. This type of classifying language was seen to be easy because it
did not require a lot of language data.
b) AGLUTINATING LANGUAGES
These are languages where bound morphemes are
clearly identifiable and they represent specific grammatical categories.
Example: From Kiswahili language in the word
“wamepigiana” will be;
Wa – 3rd person plural
-me - Aspect
-pig - Root
- I -
Benefactive/ Applicative
- an- Reciprocal
marker
NB: Schlegel did not mention out the fourth
morphological type of language which is polysynthetic language.
c) ANALYTICAL LANGUAGES
They are non-Morphological languages where words
have no affixes but root only. However grammatical category such as tense,
aspect and number are marked by root itself. An example can be drown from
Chinese language and Vietnamese.
Analytical Languages are also known as isolative
language because each word is in isolation.
LANGUAGE CHANGE PATTERN
The stage was propounded by August Schleicher in
(1862).During this era of language development there was a need to discover a
way of language change. Schleicher related the three morphological types to the
theory of evolution, in his theory of evolution Darwin is of the view that
“change is usually accounted from simple to complex”. However Schleicher’s
model of language change has the opposite view that is from complex to simple
thus to Schleicher, isolative languages are more simple
languages in learning because learners have only to deal with roots. The second
type of simple language is Agglutinating language because it contains affixes
which are clearly identifiable, and the most difficult languages are synthetic
language because different categories of the aspect of language are marked by a
single affix.For example, the Latin suffix -is represents the
combination of categories “singular” and “genitive” in the word form hominis“of
the man,” but one part of the suffix cannot be assigned to “singular” and
another to “genitive,” and -is is only one of many suffixes that in
different classes (or declensions) of words represent the combination of
“singular” and “genitive.”
THE NEOGRAMARIAN
Neo grammarians were a group of German scholars
based at the University of Leipzig. These scholars proposed that language was a
regular phenomenon and language rules should apply without exceptions, for
instance NP + VP are regular and apply in all languages, S+ V is regular aspect
that applies to all languages. Derivational and inflectional aspect of language
is never a regular phenomenon since they are language specific. These scholars
looked a language as a conventional thing with fixed and regular rules; however
Neo grammarians were criticized because some of the language rules are language
specific.
MODERN GRAMMAR
This was propounded in (1959) by the founder of
modern grammar Ferdinand De Saussure a Switz Scholar. De Saussure made
distinction between four things; La parole and La langue, Diachronic and
synchronic approach, spoken and written language. Before he made distinction
between diachronic and synchronic approach language study was purely a diachronic
phenomenon that based on historical study. He advocated for a synchronic study however,
Ferdinand still recognized the value of diachronic approach.
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