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Establishing relationships among languages, and the original source

Establishing relationships among languages, and the original source. Archeology from modern and ancient languages. Not histories of words, but histories of sounds and a focus on grammatical elements…. Rasmus Rask (1787-1832):

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Establishing relationships among languages, and the original source

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  1. Establishing relationships among languages, and the original source • Archeology from modern and ancient languages. • Not histories of words, but histories of sounds and a focus on grammatical elements….

  2. Rasmus Rask (1787-1832): “…experience demonstrates that agreement in words is extremely uncertain. Through the intercourse of different peoples, an incredible number of words may pass from one language to another, however different the two may be in origin and type…. Grammatical agreement is a much more

  3. Certain indication of kinship or of original identity, because a language which is mixed with another seldom or never takes over morphological changes or inflections from it….this kind of agreement, which is the most important and the most certain, has nevertheless been almost entirely overlooked hitherto in the derivation of languages, and this oversight is the principal error in most previous discussions of this subject; for this reason earlier work is so uncertain and of so little scientific value.” (c.1811)

  4. One family • Sanskrit • Greek • Latin • Germanic

  5. Consonants in Germanic • Rask still (I'm missing symbols): • p > f: Gr patér (L. pater) Old Norsk fadhir • t > th: Gr treis (L. tres) ON thrír • k> h: L. cornu, O.N. horn • d>t: Gr. damáo ‘I tame’L. domo, ON tamr • g>k: Gr. gyné, O.N. kona ‘woman’ • Gr. génos, ON kyn ‘family’ • Gr agró-s (L. ager) ON akr ‘field’

  6. A great leap:regular sound change • In Grimm’s first edition (1819), he didn’t see it; in the second (1822), he did. It is one thing to see relations between sounds in two families (Latin qu- words (quis? who? etc.) correspond to Germanic hw (now English wh, German w); But quite another to see that the sound changes are regular, and subject to sound law (regular sound change).

  7. Schleicher: 1837 • Not just comparisons among languages, but reconstructions of what the words were in the proto-language, like • “Indo-European *ekwo-s ‘horse’ -- not the same as Latin equus, Gr híppo-s, Sanskrit asva-s, OEnglish eoh, etc.

  8. 2nd half of 19th century • Verner, de Saussure, Brugmann • A vast and complex field of facts from the 12 branches of IndoEuropean was studied, and regular patterns of development from proto-forms were established; • Regular patterns of ablaut in the proto-language (sing,sang,sung) were established.

  9. Pride in laws:The Young GrammariansJunggrammatiker • Shift from “No rule without its exception…” to • “No exception without its rule”!

  10. When we compare languages, do we compare sounds, or sound categories? Spelling systems -- orthographies -- contain within the seed of a theory: that a language has just a small number of sounds that can organized (in a linear fashion…). So while languages change, it is their categories of sounds that change. Languages don’t have residues of old sounds. Speakers at all times keep just a limited set of sounds.

  11. Sound changes can be small, taken one at a time, but these small, gradual changes build up to great changes over long periods. • What does that sound like? • Evolution

  12. Charles Darwin(1809-1882) • Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace: theory of evolution by random change/ “indefinite variability” and natural selection. • Faced the same issues as the linguists with regard to whether the ancestor was extant today. • Combined ideas about the evolution of language, and the economic ideas of Adam Smith, who worked out the concept of the free market, the interaction of local economic agents (The Wealth of Nations).

  13. Summing up • 19th century linguistics was a spectacular success on its own terms, and set a high standard for other fields to seek. • It served as a paradigm for a rigorous and systematic way to explore humanity’s past and the structure of a part of human culture, language.

  14. Past Europe’s history? • There was some uncertainty in the field around the turn of the 20th century as to whether other language families could be explored using the same methods. • The anthropologists insisted they could, and they were proven right.

  15. Linguistics of this sort became part of the universalization of mankind, part of the movement to underscore the similarities that all humans share. • But linguistics underwent a radical shift in the early 20th century as well, one which went hand in hand with the emergence of the notion of the phoneme.

  16. The phoneme Began as a hazy conception among linguists, as the thought-category corresponding to the sounds of language. Languages are very restrictive with regard to what sounds and sound combinations they permit. A language permits a small number of ‘target sounds’ which speakers try to say and hearers expect to hear. These are the phonemes, it was thought.

  17. And it was the category of the phoneme that shifted over time, then. So the subject of study of historical linguistics could be taken to be the shift in the psychologically real sound-targets speakers adopted. • This led to the synchronic study of sound systems: from diachrony to synchrony as the center stage of linguistics.

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