Lesson 2

The Historical Study of Language

Samuel Johnson is in his own way a sociolinguist. The Oxford English

Dictionary, that great work of historical dictionary-making, that many of us
use in school or at home or in the class, this is a product of the sociology of
language. And so when we think about sociolinguistics, we need to think
about the ways in which what we are doing [is] a kind of field work of the
historical imagination.

O ur study of English can be informed by our own experience of language and by our
reading. This lecture presents some technical ways of studying language historically.
Keep in mind that our primary goal in this course is to construct a historical narrative;
we begin with origins and end with the future.
Scholars have three tools for studying language historically: articulatory phonetics,
sociolinguistics, and comparative philology.
Articulatory phonetics is the representation of the sounds of a language
using symbols developed for that purpose or the description of sounds
according to where and how they are produced in the mouth.
Sociolinguistics is the study of how language operates in society and
brings people into communities of culture. This study also encompasses
social attitudes toward language variation, use, and change.
Comparative philology is the technique of reconstructing earlier forms of
a language by comparing surviving forms in recorded languages.

With these tools, we will examine four specific areas of language change throughout this
course: pronunciation, grammar, and morphology (endings of words), meaning (semantic
change), and attitudes toward language change.

Let us return to the first tool mentioned above, articulatory phonetics. Phoneticians have
developed a technical vocabulary for describing how and where sounds are produced in the
mouth. Sounds that are produced only with the lips are known as labial sounds. These include
the sounds made in producing the consonants p and b. Dental sounds are those produced with
the teeth.

The sounds of f in file and v in vile are produced with the teeth and the lips. These are
labial-dental sounds. The sounds of th in thin or that are interdental sounds. The alveolar ridge
is located behind the upper teeth. We touch it with the tip of the tongue in pronouncing the sound
of t or d. These are known as alveolar sounds. Other examples include the beginning sounds in
cheer, jeer, red, and net. Palatal sounds, in which the arch of the tongue touches the soft palate,
include those heard at the beginning of plush or pleasure. Velar sounds include those heard in
cut and gut. Glottal sounds appear in many languages, although they are not meaningful sounds
in spoken English. Glottal stops do make a difference in meaning in languages such as Danish.

Vowels are classified according to where and how they

are produced in the mouth, they can be high or low, front or
Meaning, or
back. The difference between a consonant and a vowel semantics, is at the can
be described in terms of sound production. A vowel is a heart of language.
continuously produced sound. A consonant is a sound that
interrupts the production of a vowel. Such an interruption may be a stop (the p sound in lip), a
glide (the l sound in love), or an interdental (the th sound in thin).

The second of our tools for the study of language is sociolinguistics, which embraces
social attitudes toward language change and variation. This discipline involves a kind of
fieldwork—the search for informants; in the study of the history of language, such informants
are the written records of past speakers. It may be anachronistic to call Isaac Newton, Geoffrey
Chaucer, or the 13th-century courtier Walter of Bibbesworth sociolinguists, but these are all
individuals who thought and wrote about language in its social contexts. Samuel Johnson, who
produced his great dictionary of 1755, was in his own way a sociolinguist.

Our third tool is comparative philology. The word philology comes from Greek and means
a love of language or a love of the word. Since the middle of the 19th century, the word has come
to connote the historical and empirical study of language change and the rules of individual
languages and how we can use surviving words to reconstruct earlier forms of languages.
Comparative philology was developed at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th centuries,
when many scholars and scientists were involved in the comparison of fossils and anatomical
structures to understand the development of animals. Early figures in science, such as Carl
Linnaeus, Georges Cuvier, and Ernst Heackel, stand side by side with the Grimm brothers as
pioneers in comparative studies.

As we said earlier, the objects of our studies with these tools are fourfold: pronunciation,
grammar, meaning, and attitudes toward language change. Pronunciation is, of course, the way
people speak, but how can we recover the sounds of past speakers? As a related question, we
might ask: How is the history of pronunciation linked to the history of spelling and grammar?
Grammar is a complex phenomenon. Another term used in the study of grammar is morphology,
which means the study of the shapes of things. In linguistics, it is applied to the study of word
endings; thus, it relates to grammatical cases in nouns, verb endings, and singular and plural
forms.

Meaning, or semantics, is at the heart of language. Let’s look at an example of semantic

change with the word silly. In Old English and Modern German, the root of this word means
blessed, touched by the spirit of the Lord. Over time, the word came to describe, not an inner
spiritual condition of someone, but the outer and physical manifestations of silliness. By the 15th
and 16th centuries, the word moved from a description of an interior condition to an exterior
condition, and in Modern English, it has completely lost its sense of being blessed.

Finally, we will look at how attitudes toward language change. What do people think of
language? What are the metaphors and images used to describe language and language change?
What is the evidence for language change? Surviving written evidence is important, but it is not
definitive. Language is not writing. Linguists do not look for beautifully written or printed
texts. Instead, they seek handwritten letters, marginalia, or diary entries. The writers should be
just educated enough to be able to write but not so educated as to use learned spelling
conventions. In other words, the best evidence for the history of pronunciation is the writing
of the barely literate. Scribes in the Middle Ages often wrote texts in their own regional dialects,
and they tended to spell as they spoke. Thus, before the development of spelling conventions,
these written texts can be used as evidence for pronunciation. A modern example of this might
be found in the “eye dialect” of Mark Twain or other regionalist writers. These writers evoke
the sound of a speaker through spelling: sez for says, wanna for want to, gonna for going to.
The eye dialect of early writers gives us a window into early pronunciation. When we look at
speech sounds, the historical study of language gives us certain rules and conventions of sound
change. We can work backward from these conventions to reconstruct the sounds of earlier
languages.

One final way of learning how earlier people spoke is through writing about language,
such as manuals of Latin for schoolroom teaching, glosses, and dictionaries.
Let us close this lesson by looking at four myths about language.
❖ Myth of universality. There is, as far as we can tell, no universal language—
no single living language that is comprehensible to all speakers—and no way
to reconstruct a language that would be comprehensible to all speakers. Nor is
there any single word or expression that is the same in all living languages. In
the language of the Republic of Georgia, mama means father and dada means
mama.
❖ Myth of simplicity. No language is harder or easier for its own speech
community to learn. Six-year-olds in every culture have the same relative
ability to speak or write their languages. As a corollary, no language was
simpler in an earlier form. Languages neither decay nor evolve.

❖ Myth of teleology: Language change does not move toward a goal. Languages
do not evolve from lower to higher forms.
❖ Myth of gradualism. Languages do not change at a steady rate. The Great
Vowel Shift took place in the space of about 150 years, but the history of
pronunciation has been relatively stable for the 400 years since the shift ended.
Radical semantic change took place during the Renaissance and is taking place
now, but semantics has been stable over other periods of time.

When we look at Indo-European languages in the next few lectures, we will look not simply
at the methods of study but at the practice of those methods and at how the history of the study
of language has been affected by these myths. Indo-European languages are the origins of the
languages we see today, and it is here that we will see the methods for language study worked
out in context.
 Lesson 3
Indo-European and the Prehistory of English

How can we know anything about a group of people who lived 3,000 to
5,000 years ago and left no written records and very little archeological
remains? The evidence is in the surviving languages.

T he very term “Indo-European” conjures up images of a deep past. Who were the Indo-
European speakers? What language did they speak? Why should we study this language in the
history of the English language? In this lecture, we will answer those questions and see how the
study of Indo-European languages can help us understand the historical study of language in
general and some particular aspects of English in detail.
The term “Indo-European” refers to a postulated language or group of dialects out of which
the Western and Eastern European, Indian, and Iranian languages developed. These languages
are believed to have descended from a common language spoken by a group of people who lived
in the 4th or 3rd millennium B.C. in southeastern Europe, probably in the area around the Black
Sea. The Indo-European languages that survive today are the languages of Iran, Greece, the
Romance languages that are descended from Latin, the language of Albania, the Germanic
languages, the Baltic languages, and the group of languages called Tocharian. Their discovery
played an important role in developing the idea of the Indo- European language. The languages
in the Indo-European group share certain sound relationships, words, and grammatical forms.
It is generally believed that the Indo-Europeans were an agricultural population living in
southeastern Europe in the 4th and 3rd millennia B.C. Recent archaeological discoveries suggest
that they buried, rather than cremated, their dead. This is important from a linguistic standpoint
because one of the key words for burial, sepulcher, must descend from a group who buried their
dead (inhumators). The Indo-Europeans moved into central Europe and central Asia, then
engaged in a series of later migrations.
We have many shared words and concepts in the languages that descended from Indo-
European. Almost all these languages have similar-sounding words for snow, which of course,
prompts scholars to posit that the Indo-Europeans came from an area where they experienced
snow. Similar words for beech tree that also mean book or letter lead us to believe that these
people may have written on beech bark. Other words shared among
languages descended from Indo-European include corn, wolf, bear, yoke, and honey or mead. By
looking at these surviving words, scholars can place the Indo-Europeans geographically and
culturally.
Indo-European languages also have similar words for heart, lung, foot, hand, head, star, sun,
and moon. What is interesting here is that these languages share a core vocabulary. The Indo-
Europeans developed a vocabulary for the basics of the body and the concepts of the cosmos, and
these words traveled with them in their migrations.
Why spend time studying Indo-European? In tracing the origins of words back through time,
we are reconstructing a social and intellectual structure. We can see how words of seemingly
different sound and sense can go back to shared origins. In later lectures, we will look in more
detail at how comparative philology allows us to recover historical context through words. As we
will see, certain names of gods and goddesses, places, plants, and other objects have about them
the “aura” of the Indo-European.
Who discovered Indo-European? At the close of the 18th century, scholars posted to colonial
positions in the British Empire noticed something recognizable in the exotic languages they
encountered. At the end of the 18th century, the English scholar and diplomat William Jones,
working in India, noticed certain features in the vocabulary and grammar of Sanskrit (the ancient
classical language of India) that were shared with Latin and Greek and the modern European
languages. In particular, he noticed certain words, such as Sanskrit raj, Latin rex, German
Reich,and Celtic rix, that seemed similar in sound and meaning (they were all words relating to
a kingdom or ruler). He also noticed certain grammatical features, such as forms of the verb to
be and certain case endings, that were shared in the different languages.
 Jones publicized his work in his third- anniversary address to the Asiatic Society in 1799.
This address brings together many of the myths of language, but it is also an important document
in the history of language. Jones believed that the Indo-European languages descended from an
original, and that the original must be more perfect
than the later languages. In other words, he seemed to
subscribe to the myth of linguistic decay. His Jones believed that the
Indo-European
descriptions of Sanskrit are not descriptions of the
languages descended
language but of his attitude toward antiquity and from an original, and that
language change. Jones’s discovery of Indo-European the original must be more is
perfect than the later
as much a product of his time, and phrased as much in the
languages.
rhetoric of his age, as the discovery of the ruins of
Pompeii.
In the 19th century, following up on Jones’s discovery, language scholars began to develop
the study of comparative grammar. Scholars, particularly in Germany, began to codify
relationships of sounds among different languages. They also proposed lines of descent among
the different languages, introducing the metaphor of the “language tree,” modeled on biological
or evolutionary trees. At this time, the development of language was the sole subject of
linguistics. This is very different from what a linguist does today; in the 19th century, however,
the study of language was the historical study of comparative philology.
By the 1870s, scholars had formulated a series of sound relationships among the languages
that were recognized as having historical meaning; that is, they showed not only relationships
among living languages but also lines of descent from earlier forms of the languages. The neo-
grammarians of the 1870s formulated laws of language change, which we will explore in
subsequent lectures. One of these laws was formulated by the Brothers Grimm and provides us
with valuable empirical evidence, despite its imperfections, for reconstructing words and sounds.
The Indo-European languages also preserve certain words that are clearly not from Indo-
European. Any word that ends in the sound -inth is not Indo-European; examples include plinth,
labyrinth, Corinth, and hyacinth. Scholars have shown that these words come from the pre-Indo-
European inhabitants of the Greek peninsula and were later absorbed by Indo-European
conquerors and settlers. Interestingly, many of these words are related to myth. Is the myth of the
labyrinth or the hyacinth more ancient than the Greeks themselves? It is also interesting to note
words that Indo-European languages do not have in common. For example, Indo-European
languages do not have a common word for the sea. Thus, scholars believe that groups of Indo-
Europeans discovered the sea separately in their migrations. In contrast, all Indo-European
languages have words beginning with the “nav- ” sound, such as navigate and navy. This unit of
language connotes boat or ship. All these languages also have a unit of language that means to
row. Thus, we can hypothesize that these peoples must have known water in the form of lakes or
rivers.

Lesson 4
Reconstructing Meaning and Sound

When we look at the surviving Indo-European languages, what we’re

looking at are provocations to describe them genetically or to describe them
typologically. In other words, do we want to go back in the past to see where
they came from—recreate the tree of language—or do we want to look at
them as they exist today, or as they survive in written documents, by
comparing their key features?

I n this lecture, we will continue our inquiries into Indo-European language and culture by
bringing to bear the study of historical linguistics on the emergence of the Germanic languages
from Indo-European.
As we will see, the study of Indo-European was closely related to the study of the
Germanic languages. As mentioned in the last lecture, the discovery of Indo-European depended
on the transplanting of English scholars to non- European postings. William Jones, for example,
found similarities among Sanskrit, living Indian languages, and European languages, which
suggested to him that an earlier language root must have existed from which the modern
languages emerged.
Scholars after Jones built on his theories and developed the edifice of Indo-European,
recognizing that the surviving languages of Iran, northern India, and Europe all shared a common
historical origin. At the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th, these scholars
calibrated their researches to the reconstruction of older forms. At the end of the 19th century and
the beginning of the 20th, other scholars discovered languages that had been lost, including Hittite
and Tocharian. In this lecture, we’ll look closely at some of the technical devices of comparative
philology to see how scholars work to reconstruct languages today.
Linguists have developed two broad approaches to classifying languages. Genetic
classification implies the growth or development from a “root stock” and the branching into
language groups or families. Genetic classification looks for shared features of vocabulary,
sound, and grammar that enable scholars to reconstruct earlier forms. This is a historical, or
diachronic system of classification. Typological classification means comparing languages for
larger systems of organization. For example, do the languages signal meaning in a sentence by
means of inflectional endings (a so-called synthetic language, such as Latin), or do they signal
meaning by word order patterns (an analytic language, such as Modern English)? In this
synchronic system of classification, what matters is not the historical descent but the current
features of the languages.
Some languages, such as Modern Turkish and Georgian, are typologically classified as
agglutinizing. In these languages, individual words or word elements are combined into a single
word that constitutes a sentence. Many of the Chinese languages are typologically classified as
isolative. In these languages, each individual word or unit of meaning in a sentence is a single
syllable—isolated—and strings of these syllables constitute meaningful sentences. Broadly
speaking, the surviving Indo-European languages can be classified into two groups defined by
geography: eastern and western branches.
These are distinguished, for practical purposes, by representative words for 100.
The western languages that descended from Indo-European are so-called centum
languages. Centum is the Latin word for 100, and all these languages have a word for that number
closely related to centum. (The Germanic languages have
the word beginning with h, which is a later sound change.)
The eastern languages are so-called satem languages; The reconstruction of
sound here leads to a
satem is the Old Persian or Avastan word for 100. The
reconstruction of society.
centum-satem distinctions indicate a historical
geographical split in Indo-European, as well as a larger
sound change.
We can also make some general claims about the Indo-European language. It was a highly
inflected language. It had eight noun cases, including the evocative, locative, and instrumental
cases. It had six tenses, each of which was signaled with special verb endings. It had grammatical
gender for the nouns. It had a special system of distinguishing words by changing the root vowel
to indicate changes in tense, location, or aspect. In linguistics, the term “ablaut” is used to
designate this kind of system. This phenomenon descends into the Germanic languages in the
form of strong verbs, that is, those that signal change in tense by a shift in the root vowel of the
word: drink, drank, drunk; sing, sang, sung; bring, brought. Weak verbs in the Germanic
languages simply take a suffix to indicate the past tense: walk, walked; talk, talked. We will
explore the features of Germanic languages in detail in subsequent lectures, but for now, it is
important to recognize that the sound changes and patterns of meaning (what we call semantic
changes) across Indo-European languages matter most to us for the Germanic languages, from
which English descends.
By comparing surviving words in the Indo-European languages, we can go back to their
originals. Certain relationships of sound and pronunciation have been discovered that enable us
to say with assurance that words are related (or cognate) in different languages. A cognate is a
word shared by different languages whose relationship can be explained by precise sound laws.
By reconstructing sound (phonetic reconstruction), scholars compare the sounds of surviving
languages and use sound laws to recover the Indo-European originals. In the process, we can
learn much about how certain surviving words are related.
Perhaps the most important tool for reconstruction is the set of sound relationships known
as Grimm’s Law. Discovered by the Grimm brothers (who also gave us the fairy tales) in the
early 19th century, it is a set of sounds characteristic of the Germanic languages that correspond
to the sounds of non-Germanic Indo-European languages. In other words, certain consonants in
the Germanic languages correspond to consonants in the non- Germanic Indo-European
languages, and these point to cognates. Below are some examples:

English fish ~ Latin pisces

English tooth ~ Latin dentis
English hundred ~ Latin centum

These correspondences illustrate that the f sound in a Germanic language corresponds to

a p sound in a non-Germanic Indo-European language. Words that indicate this relationship
include fish, pisces; foot, pedal; father, pater. Tooth is important in this context because it shows
that non-Germanic d corresponds to Germanic t. Other examples from other languages generate
the following set of correspondences:

Germanic Non-Germanic Type of Speech Sound

p b Stop
t d Stop
k g Stop
b bh Aspirated stop
d dh Aspirated stop
g gh Aspirated stop
f p Aspirated stop
th t Aspirated stop
h k Aspirated stop

What do these correspondences mean in practical terms? We can see historical

relationships by comparing, for example, certain English and Latin words: lip/labial,
tooth/dental, heart/cardiac, gall/choleric, knee/genuflect, foot/pedal. We can also use
Grimm’s Law, and other sound relationships, to recover something of the world of the Indo-
Europeans. All the surviving Indo-European languages have a word, fee (meaning a certain
amount of money), that corresponds to an f word in Germanic languages and a p word in
non-Germanic languages.
In Modern German, Vieh means cattle or cow. This corresponds in Latin to pecos or
pecuniary, words for money. What do these cognates (one meaning cow and one meaning money)
tell us about the root language from which they descended? Scholars hypothesize that wealth was
measured in terms of livestock in the early Indo-European world. The reconstruction of sound
here leads to a reconstruction of society. Another example is found in the Latin word cara, which
means dear one. The k sound at the beginning of this word should correspond to an h sound at
the beginning of a Germanic word, and it does—whore. In Old English, the word whore meant
dear one. It later came to mean one who is dear, that is, expensive.
When we look at historical relationships among languages, we see how languages have
changed and how they have borrowed words from other languages. The Greek word kleos means
fame that has been transported by sound or song. The Greek kl sound originally corresponded to
a Germanic hl sound. This sound cluster has been lost to us, but we retain the early relationship
to kleos in our words listen and loud. The name of the Greek hero Herakles (whom we call
Hercules) is made up of Hera, the goddess, and kleos; thus, he is someone who has fame on
account of Hera. About 25 years ago, Calvert Watkins, perhaps the greatest Indo-Europeanist of
our time, was able to apply these techniques of language study to a tablet inscribed in Hittite.
According to Dr. Watkins, this tablet was a Trojan version of Homer’s Iliad, the epic tale told
from the point of view of the losers.