Languages & Linguistics
Historical Development
Historical development in linguistics refers to the evolution and changes in languages over time. It encompasses the study of how languages have developed, diversified, and influenced each other through various historical, social, and cultural factors. Understanding historical development is crucial for tracing the origins of languages, identifying language families, and analyzing language change and variation.
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6 Key excerpts on "Historical Development"
eBook - PDF- Ingo Plag, Maria Braun, Sabine Lappe, Mareile Schramm(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
As you will notice, trying to meaningfully answer such questions necessitates a general understanding about how language ‘works’, i.e. what kinds of structural entities language consists of and how these entities interact with each other to create that highly complex system we call language. Having worked through the preceding chapters, you are now equipped with this kind of understanding. 7.2. Historical linguistics: how languages develop In the late 18th century, William Jones made a discovery that was seminal for the study of the Historical Development of languages, i.e. for the academic field that later came to be known as historical linguistics . Studying the ancient Indian language Sanskrit he found that Historical linguistics: how languages develop 211 [t]he Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful struc-ture; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger af-finity , both in the roots of verbs and in the form of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident ; so strongly indeed, that no phi-lologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source which, perhaps, no longer exists : there is a reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin as the Sanskrit; and the Old Persian might be added to the same family. (Jones 1786, emphasis added) At the time little was known about the ‘common source’ of the languages mentioned, and Jones was mostly speculating. However, his hypothesis was so strong and attractive that many people started investigating the alleged ‘af-finity’ in a systematic fashion. Let us follow in their footsteps by looking at data from English and German, two languages which also show a remarkable affinity that does not look accidental.
eBook - PDF- Ruth Wodak, Barbara Johnstone, Paul E Kerswill, Ruth Wodak, Barbara Johnstone, Paul E Kerswill(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications Ltd(Publisher)
Even languages that have written documentation of the past lack a written record representative of the language community as a whole. Wide-ranging illiteracy lies at the root of this historical ‘bad-data prob-lem’. This is not only the case of the distant past but would also apply to modern sociolinguistics if it were to rely on written material as its data source. According to the statistics published by UNESCO, 774 million people, about one-fifth of the world’s adult population, could not read or write in 2008. Historical linguistics, in turn, has a long tradition of defining its objectives in rather abstract terms. This is justified, as noted above, because all the prehistory and most of the history of human lan-guages even since the advent of writing have gone unrecorded. What can be reconstructed is based on comparisons of the information available on the sound systems, morpheme inventories and vocabu-lary of genetically related languages. The compara-tive method relies on the basic hypothesis that language change, and sound change in particular, is regular. The application of this method requires that the object of investigation is limited to one system at a time. A typical view of a historical linguist is expressed by André Martinet, who specifies the object of historical linguistics as the study of a perfectly homogeneous community. He writes: To simplify our analysis, we shall assume that the language in process of evolution is that of a strictly monoglot community, perfectly homogeneous in the sense that observable differences represent successive stages of the same usage and not con-current usages (Martinet, 1964: 164). However, aware of linguistic variation, Martinet refers to central concepts used by sociolinguists, Historical Sociolinguistics T e r t t u N e v a l a i n e n THE SAGE HANDBOOK OF SOCIOLINGUISTICS 280 such as the speech community.
- Johannes Dellert(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Language Science Press(Publisher)
2 Foundations: Historical linguistics Te purpose of this chapter is to give readers with a causal inference background sufcient knowledge o f historical linguistics to arrive at a basic understanding of the new application domain. For readers with a linguistics background, it may serve as a quick overview of the relevant core de fnitions and issues o f historical linguistics as I am framing them for the purpose of my work, sometimes deviating a litle from the established terminology. Te second half of the chapter is of more interest to the linguist reader. It gives a rough overview of existing computational approaches to modeling language history, and discusses the current state of the art in reference to the methods of classical historical linguistics. For the exposition, I need to presuppose some basic knowledge of phonology, or the sounds occurring in spoken languages. I will normally represent sounds by means of the IPA (International Phonetic Alphabet), which has become the standard across all branches of linguistics. To learn what these symbols represent, I recommend Ladefoged & Maddieson (1996), the standard textbook of phonology. For readers who are not interested in languages and their pronunciation, but merely want to understand the methods I am developing and describing here, it should also be possible to follow the discussion by treating the IPA as a bag of elementary symbols (an alphabet in the formal sense), and not assigning any meaning or properties to them. 2.1 Language relationship and family trees While very encompassing defnitions o f language can be given, at the core, a language such as English or Spanish can be seen as a system of symbols (vo-cabulary) and combination rules (grammar) used for communication.
- Sylvain Auroux, E.F.K. Koerner, Hans-Josef Niederehe, Kees Versteegh(Authors)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
This is because linguistics, unlike philosophy for example, is a science and because we have to do with (usually) em- pirically verifiable facts as well as with (often rather complex) theories and at times rather rigorous research practices, not merely gene- ral ideas about the nature of language. This assertion might require the historian of lin- guistics to enter into the debate about the sci- entific status of linguistics, at least where 19th and 20th century linguistics is con- cerned, but it need not consume most of his energies. (For earlier periods of the study of language, preceding the scientific age ushered in by 19th-century natural science, other cri- teria may have to be developed; no doubt, the application of modern principles in the philosophy of science to these earlier periods is hazardous. Indeed, the understanding of what is ‘scientific’ and what constitutes ‘sci- ence’ may have to be redefined for different periods in the history of the discipline under investigation.) The other, possibly complementary, ave- nue open to the historian of linguistics is the drawing up of principles derived from his- torical practice. I am thinking of the develop- ment of particular models which may guide his research (cf. Koerner 1989: 4759), the critical analysis of the work of our predeces- sors, several of which have shaped much of our view of the past, and discussion of par- ticular problems facing the researcher, such as the (frequent misuse of the) argument of ‘influence’ (cf. Koerner 1987), the continuity/ discontinuity debate, or the question of ‘meta- language’ in linguistic history-writing, to cite just a few examples (cf. Koerner 1995: 15 22, for discussion). These issues and the pos- sible pitfalls will have to remain in the minds of historiographers of linguistics in order to assure respectable research results. 2811 286. The development of linguistic historiography history, methodology, and present state 4.
eBook - PDFLanguage
Its Structure and Use
- Edward Finegan, , , (Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 452 Chapter 12 Language Change Over Time: Historical Linguistics At no other time in history have there been such intensive contacts between language communities as in recent centuries. As a result of the exploratory and colonizing enterprises of the Dutch, English, French, Portuguese, and Spanish, European languages have come into contact with languages of Africa, Native will be shown to be related to one another, as some researchers are attempting to do with Nostratic, but those connections lie at such a chronological distance that we can’t trace the relationships with confidence, at least not yet. Consider a few historical facts as background to today’s explosive interest in language evolution. As we noted earlier in this chapter, as early as 1786 William Jones recognized that certain languages bore so strong an “affinity” to one another in verbs and grammar that, as he put it, they must have “sprung from some com-mon source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.” That source we now call Proto-Indo-European. Jones’s insight led to many hypotheses about the origins of language and they in turn were fueled by publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species in 1859. So speculative were these hypotheses that in 1866 the influential Linguistic Society of Paris banned the presentation of papers on the subject of language origins.
eBook - PDFLong Story Short:
An Interactive Journey through the History of English
- Paula Rodríguez Abruñeiras, Jesús Romero Barranco(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Publicacions de la Universitat de València(Publisher)
UNIT 1. LANGUAGE AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE 1.1. GETTING STARTED We start our journey into the history of the English language by considering some preliminary notions which are relevant to Historical Linguistics, a branch of linguistics which “is dedicated to the study of ‘how’ and ‘why’ languages change” (Campbell 1999: 4). In this journey, we should always bear in mind that language and society evolve hand in hand, and the history of English is a history of invasions. The melting-pot of civilisations that settled in England in the course of time brought their own cultures, traditions and languages with them, which generated sweeping changes in the form and structure of English to such an extent that Old English may look like a completely different language to the modern speaker. Moreover, we should also be aware that the multiplicity of changes which will be presented in the coming chapters “are usually embedded in a more general trend whose direction might become visible only within the time-span of several centuries” (Kastovsky 1999: 13). Language change is unavoidable and inevitable: all languages change over time, and yet the popular attitude towards change in language is resoundingly negative. The changes are often seen as corruption, decay, degeneration, deterioration, as due to laziness or slovenliness, as a threat to education, morality and even to national security. We read laments in letters to newspapers stating that our language is being destroyed, deformed and reduced to an almost unrecognisable remnant of its former and rightful glory. These are of course not new sentiments, but laments like this are found throughout history.
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