Chronological Description
A chronological description in linguistics refers to the organization of language data or linguistic phenomena in a sequential order based on time. This approach allows researchers to analyze language changes, evolution, and historical developments over time. By examining language data in a chronological manner, linguists can gain insights into the historical and cultural contexts of languages.
3 Key excerpts on "Chronological Description"
eBook - ePubLanguage, Culture, and Society
An Introduction to Linguistic Anthropology
- James Stanlaw, Nobuko Adachi, Zdenek Salzmann(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...8 Language Through Time LEARNING OBJECTIVES • Explain the various ways languages are classified. • Name some of the features of language typology. • Describe some of the regularities of sound changes. • Describe some of the processes of vocabulary change. • Be able to do reconstructions of some protolanguage forms. The structure of a language may be analyzed and described as it exists at some point in time, either in the present or the past. The approach that considers a language as though it had been sliced through time, ignoring historical antecedents, is referred to as synchronic linguistics. But it is also possible to study the historical development of a language by giving attention to the changes that occurred in the language over a period of time. Such an analysis or approach is diachronic, or historical, linguistics. This chapter shows some of the ways a diachronic approach can benefit anthropologists. HOW LANGUAGES ARE CLASSIFIED Anyone who knows Spanish will tell you that other languages, such as Portuguese or Italian, seem to be related to Spanish. This is due to their common origin from Latin. Traditionally, one of the most common activities in historical linguistics has been to classify languages according to these genetic relationships. It is difficult to give the exact number of languages spoken in the world at present, but the total undoubtedly approaches 6,000 (Krauss 1992:5–6), possibly 7,000. It is impossible to guess how many languages must have become extinct in prehistoric times. We do know that during the historical period for which we have written records, a great many languages have died out. Language Families A language family includes all those languages that are related by virtue of having descended from a single ancestral language...
eBook - ePub- Mark Q. Sutton(Author)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The reasoning is that if a society has writing (in whatever form) they must have had a system too complex to function just based on peopling remembering things. Thus, writing is one of the criteria for the classification of a society as a state (see Chapter 7). Chapter summary Anthropological linguistics is the systematic study of all aspects of human language. Many of some 7,000 languages still spoken are in immediate danger of extinction. Following cognitive linguistics, the loss of a language also means the loss of a unique way of thinking and of human understanding. Anthropological linguistics can be divided into three major categories: descriptive, historical, and social. Descriptive linguistics strives to understand the formal rules of a language. Grammar is the structure of a language, including the arrangement of clauses, phrases, and words in sentences and paragraphs. Morphology is the rules of word formation in a language, phonemes are distinct units of sound, while morphemes are the smallest units of sound that carry a meaning. Syntax is the set of rules regarding the assembly of phrases and sentences. Phonology is the study of the production, transmission, and reception of speech sounds. Languages are then classified in relation to other languages. Historical linguistics traces the origins, divergences, and movements of languages across space and time. Related languages and their geographic locations can be traced back to an earlier common language and the movements of languages (and people) can be traced back in time. This can inform us about when and where people came from, how they changed over time, and what their past society was like. Sociolinguistics examines the language variations used by different social groups, such as those based on age, sex, gender, ethnicity, religion, or class. It is common for professions and some other groups to use specific terms and phrases not commonly used in everyday speech...
eBook - ePubTheory in Social and Cultural Anthropology
An Encyclopedia
- R. Jon McGee, Richard L. Warms(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...The endeavor to compare individual languages, and the search for potential universals, is known as linguistic typology. DL may be understood as the preliminary step in the typological effort, the stage during which the facts of each individual language are established, before comparison can take place. These subdisciplines of linguistics differ in their scientific goals, yet they essentially share with DL the same fundamental principles, including the emphasis on a bottom-up, empirical approach: All these approaches are complementary components of a single scientific agenda. By contrast, the principles of DL conflict more frontally with those of formal linguistics. Formal linguists—particularly proponents of generative grammar—claim that the facts of language are best explained by resorting to an apparatus of theoretical principles that are defined a priori, independently of the facts of particular languages. Descriptivists reject these aprioristic assumptions and require that all results be derived from the observable structures of the languages themselves. History A Long History of Language Description The earliest known attempts to describe a language in a systematic way originated in ancient northwestern India, where the desire for a faithful transmission of the sacred scriptures known as the Vedas brought about the need to describe Sanskrit. The best known member of that grammatical tradition, commonly dated 5th century BCE, is Panini—arguably the first descriptive linguist. Similar grammatical traditions were later established in other civilizations and gave birth to the first grammars of Greek, Latin, Tamil, Chinese, Hebrew, and Arabic. Due to the dominance of Latin in medieval Europe, most modern languages had to wait until the Renaissance to be described for the first time— for example, Spanish in 1492, French in 1532, and English in 1586—whether in the form of grammars or lexicons...
