Chapter .

8
Language Change:
The Syllables of Time
By
1.) Sumarti [ E1D117096 ]
2.) Yana Latifah [ E1D117102 ]
3.) Swa Harta Harini Rela Ning Tyas [ E1D117098 ]
Language Change
• All languages, spoken and signed, change
continuously
Wolde guman findan þone þe him on soeofote sare geteode.
“He wanted to find the man who harmed him while he slept”

• All parts of a grammar are subject to change over

time

• Historical and comparative linguistics is the

study of how languages change, what kinds of
changes occur, and why they occurred.
The Regularity of Sound
Change
• Regular sound correspondence:

• Sound differences between dialects are usually regular

and not confined to just a few words

• words pronounced with the diphthong [at] in non-

southern English will usually be pronounced with the
monophthong [a:] in the South

• And this is true for all words, not just a few, so this is a
regular sound correspondence
Ancestral Protolanguages
• A protolanguage is the ancestral language from
which related languages have developed

• What are now English and German used to be dialects

of a common ancestor called Proto-Germanic

• Latin and Proto-Germanic were descendents of Indo-

European (or Proto-Indo-European)

• Thus, English is genetically related to German and the

Romance languages such as French and Spanish
Ancestral Protolanguages
• One way we can tell if languages are genetically related is
if they have a large number of sound correspondences

• Where an English word begins with an f, the corresponding word

in French and Spanish begins with a p:

English /f/ French /p/ Spanish /p/

father père padre
fish poisson pescado

• From these correspondences, we can hypothesize that Indo-

European had a /p/ since more related languages have the /p/ form,
and that at some point the p  f in the Germanic group
Phonological Change
• The phoneme inventory of a language can change
in several ways

• A phoneme can disappear as the /x/ did in most dialects

of English (night used to be pronounced [nɪxt]

• A phoneme can be added (Old English did not have the

phoneme /ʒ/)

• An allophone may become a separate phoneme (Old

English had [v] only as an allophone of /f/ when /f/
occurred between vowels)
Phonological Rules
• An interaction of phonological rules may result in
changes in the lexicon

• As illustrated by the changes to words like house and

bath and house and bathe

• Phonological changes occur over the course of

many generation and are unplanned

• In a single generation, only dialect differences are the

only evidence of phonological change in progress
The Great Vowel Shift
• The Great Vowel Shift occurred in English between
1400 and 1600

• In the Great Vowel Shift,

the seven long vowels of
Middle English shifted
so that each sound
underwent an increase
in tongue hieght and the
highest sounds [iː] and [uː]
became the diphthongs
[aɪ] and [a]
The Great Vowel Shift
• As a result of this vowel shift, the pronunciation
of many English words have changed:
The Great Vowel Shift
• Before the Great Vowel Shift, the vowels in each of the following
pairs of words were pronounced the same:

• please/pleasant, serene/serenity, sane/sanity, crime/criminal

• Then the Early Middle English Vowel Shortening rule shortened

the vowels in the second word of each pair

• When the Great Vowel Shift occurred, it only affected long vowels
(the vowel in the first word of each pair), and now these
morphologically related words are pronounced differently

• The Great Vowel Shift is a cause of a great many spelling

inconsistencies because the written language tends to change more
slowly than spoken language
Morphological Change
• Rules of morphology also change; Indo-European
languages have undergone extensive morphological
change

• Latin had case endings, suffixes on each noun that

marked the thematic role or grammatical relationship to
the verb:

• But these are no longer in use in Romance languages

Morphological Change
• English has retained the genitive case, which is
written as ‘s as in John’s book, but that is the only
case marking left on nouns

• Pronouns have a few more case distinctions

• He/she are nominative, him/her are accusative and
dative, and his/hers are genitive

• English has replaced the case system with a

system of prepositions and word order to express
the same relationships
Syntactic Change
• When the case system of English became simplified,
speakers needed to rely more heavily on word order to
convey the thematic roles of NPs

• The case system of Old English allowed the following

sentence to be understood as “The man slew the king”:

• But because of Modern English’s reliance on word order,

that string of words is only grammatical as a relative
clause meaning “the man that the king slew”
Syntactic Change
• Old English used to have an SOV word order like German and
Dutch, but unlike German and Dutch, the English VP changed from
VP  NP V to VP  V NP

• In Modern English, we form questions by moving the auxiliary to the

front of the sentence, and if there is no auxiliary we add do
• But older forms of English had a rule to move the first verbal element
which would allow the question Kisses the girl the boy often?
• The case markings would have made it clear who was kissing whom

• Old and Middle English allowed split genitives in which words that
describe the possessor occur on both sides of the head noun (The
Wife’s tale of Bath meant “The Wife of Bath’s tale”)

• Modern English does not allow this, but does allow very complex
genitive expressions before head nouns (The girl whose sister I’m dating’s
roommate)
Lexical Change: Change in
Category
• Changes in the lexicon of a language also occur

• For example, words can change their lexical

category:

• Noun text becomes verb text

• Verb twitter becomes noun Twitter
• Adverb to and fro becomes verb to-ing and fro-
ing
Addition of New Words
• One of the ways a language can change is
through the addition of new words, and unlike
other linguistic changes, new words are readily
apparent

• Societies require new words to describe new

ideas and to reflect social changes
Word Coinage
• Words may be created outright to serve some
communicative purpose

• The advertising industry creates words such as nylon, Vaseline,

and Jell-O
• Science gives us new words such as asteroid, neutron, and vaccine

• Greek and Latin morphemes borrowed into English have

provided a means to create new words

• thermometer is from a combination of the Greek thermos (“hot”)

and metron (“measure”)
• The prefix ex- is from Latin and gives us words like ex-husband,
ex-sister-in-law, and ex-teacher
Words from Names and Blends
• Eponyms are words formed from proper names

• sandwich is named for the fourth Earl of Sandwich

who put his food between two slices of bread so that he
could eat while he gambled

• Blends are produced by combining two words

such that parts of the combined words are deleted

• smog is a blend of smoke and fog

• brunch is a blend of breakfast and lunch
Reduced Words
• Clipping is the abbreviation of longer words into shorter
ones
• Fax for facsimile, gym for gymnasium

• Acronyms are words derived from the initials of several

words, and such words are pronounced as the spelling
indicates
• NASA [ns] for National Aeronautics and Space
Administration
• scuba from self-contained underwater breathing apparatus

• Alphabetic abbreviations are like acronyms in that they

are composed of the initials of several words, but are
pronounced by sounding out each letter
• NFL [ɛnɛfɛl] for National Football League
Borrowings or Loan Words
• Borrowing occurs when one language adds a word or
morpheme from another language into its own lexicon
• These words are called loan words

• Loan words are often altered to fit the phonological rules

of the borrowing language
• English borrowed ensemble [ãsãbl] from French but pronounces
it as [ãnsãmbl]

• Some loan words are borrowed and then translated

directly into the borrowing language, these are known as
loan translations
• English borrowed German Weltanschauung and translated it to
English as worldview
History through Loan Words
• Loan words can reveal much about the history of
language speakers

• After the Norman Conquest of 1066, English borrowed

many words from French for government, cuisine, and
art
• government, nation, religion, prince, croissant, bouillon, brie,
ragout, quiche, beef, mutton, pork
Loss of Words
• Languages may be said to lose words in the sense
tha the frequency of usage falls below a certain
threshold. Such words may still be counted when
tallying up the size of the lexicon, but they are
lost to the general population. The departure of
an pld word is never as striking s the arrival of an
new one. When a new through inattention-
nobody thinks of it, nobody uses it, and its usage
fades away to nothing.
Semantic Change
• Broadening: the meaning of a word gets broader, to
incorporate more referents
• dogge used to refer to a specific breed of dog, but now refers to all
dogs; picture used to mean “painted representation”

• Narrowing: the meaning of a term narrows to have fewer

possible referents
• meat used to mean “food” (now it is a certain kind of food); deer
used to mean “animal” (now it is a certain kind of animal)

• Meaning Shifts: a lexical item may undergo a shift in

meaning
• knight used to mean “youth”; silly used to mean “happy”; nice
used to mean “foolish”
The Nineteenth-Century
Comparativists
• Nineteenth century historical and comparative
linguists aimed to establish the genetic
relationships between languages and establish the
major language families of the world

• Sir William Jones noticed that Sanskrit, Greek

and Latin had some striking similarities that
could not be accidental and that they had
stemmed from a common ancestor language
The Nineteenth-Century
Comparativists
• Jakob Grimm identified several regular sound
correspondences between Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, and the
Germanic languages

• Where Latin has a [p], English has a [f], where Latin has a [t],
English has a [], where Latin has a [k] English often has an [h]
• This correspondence is known as Grimm’s Law
Cognates
• Cognates are words in related languages that developed from
the same ancestral root
Cognates
• Grimm noted that there were some exceptions to the
regular sound changes
• So he concluded that sound changes were general tendencies

• Karl Verner formulated Verner’s Law to account for these

irregularities

• Verner’s Law: When the preceding vowel was unstressed, f, ,

and x underwent further change to b, d, and g

• The Neo-Grammarian hypothesis states that sound

shifts are not merely tendencies but apply in all words
that meet their environments
Comparative Reconstruction
• Once linguists suspect that languages are related, their
ancestral protolanguage can be partially reconstructed
using the comparative method

• To use the comparative method, analysts identify regular

sound correspondences in cognates of related languages
and then deduce the most likely sound in the parent
language

• Sometimes analysts choose the sound that appears most frequently

in the correspondence (the “majority rule” principle)

• But the likelihood of certain phonological changes may take

precedence of the majority rule principle
Comparative Reconstruction

• Wherever Languages A and B have h, Language C has f and Language D has

v, so the correspondence is h-h-f-v

• The majority rule principle would lead us to reconstruct h as the sound in the
proto-language

• But, from data on historical reconstruction and phonological rules, we know

that h rarely changes into v; however /f/ and /v/ becoming [h] occurs
historically and in phonological rules, so we reconstruct an *f in the parent
language
Comparative Reconstruction

• The other correspondences are not problematic:

o-o-o-o n-n-n-n a-a-a-e r-r-r-l m-m-m-m

• These correspondences lead us to reconstruct *o, *n, *a, *r, and *m as proto-
sounds, and the sound changes “a becomes e” and “r becomes l” in
Language D

• The words of the proto-language were probably *fono, *fari, *rafima, and
*for
Comparative Reconstruction
• The previous example illustrates an unconditioned sound change, in
which the changes occurred regardless of the context

• The following example from Italian illustrates a conditioned sound

change, in which the sounds only change in specific contexts

• The correspondence sets are: f-f-f, i-i-i, s:-s-s, o-o-<>, k-k-k, a-a-a, a-
a-
Comparative Reconstruction

• It is straightforward to reconstruct *f, *i, and *k, and

knowing that a long consonant like sː commonly becomes
s, we reconstruct *sː in the proto-language

• We construct *o and *a and recognize a vowel weakening

trend happening in Lombard
• In Lombard a conditioned sound change occurred in which vowels
were weakened (a) or deleted (o) word-finally
Historical Evidence
• In addition to the comparative method, linguists examine
written records to figure out how words were pronounced

• Especially documents written by naïve spellers who wrote words

as they pronounced them

• Writings from prescriptivists about “improper” pronunciation also

provide clues

• Puns and rhymes also provide evidence regarding pronunciation

• The examination of written evidence is combined with

the comparative method to reconstruct the pronunciations
of proto-languages and previous forms of languages
Extinct and Endangered
Languages
• A language becomes extinct when no children learn it

• A language may die suddenly when all of the speakers of a

language die or are killed

• A language may die quickly when all the speakers of a language

choose to stop speaking their language (often because of political
repression or genocide)

• A language may also die gradually, over generations, as more and

more speakers of each generation switch to a different language

• This is the most common scenario

Extinct and Endangered
Languages
• Some languages may suffer “partial death” and
will only be used in certain contexts, such as
Latin

• Linguists attempt to preserve dying languages

and dialects for posterity

• Sometimes people learn an endangered language

as a symbol of culture
• Irish Gaelic for adults and children
• Hebrew in Israel
• Hawaiian in Hawaii
The Genetic Classification of
Languages
• The similarity between English and German is
pervasive. Sometimes it is extremely obious
(man/mann), but at other times a little less
obvious (child/kind). No regular similaritis or
differences apart from those resulting from
chance are found between them and Viernamese.
Languages of the World
• It’s difficult to say how many languages there are
in the world, but the best guess is somewhat less
than 7000

• Some languages do not seem to be related to any

other living language (called language isolates)
• Basque and Ainu are examples

• It is possible that all human languages are

descended from the same ancestral language that
some have termed Nostratic
Languages of the World
• Other major language families of the world include:

• Uralic: Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian

• Afro-Asiatic: Hebrew, Arabic
• Sino-Tibetan: Mandarin, Tibetan
• Niger-Congo: Swahili, Zulu
• Austronesian: Hawaiian, Malay, Tagalog
Types of Languages
• Languages are also classified by their linguistic
traits regardless of genetic relationship

• Phonologically, languages may be classified

based on their vowel inventory, the use of tones,
and syllable structure

• Lexically, languages may be classified by

pronoun system type, what distinctions are made
regarding person, number, and gender, what
classifications are made for kinship terms, etc.
Types of Languages
• Languages may be sorted according to their type of
morphological system

• Isolating or analytic systems: no affixation

• Synthetic systems: affixation does occur and words may contain more
than one morpheme

• Agglutinative synthetic systems: words may be formed by a root and

multiple affixes where the affixes are easily separated and retain the same
meaning

• Fusional synthetic systems: morphemes are fused together so it’s hard to

identify their basic shape
Types of Languages
• Languages can also be classified syntactically,
and 90% of the world’s languages are SOV or
SVO
• In SVO languages, the auxiliary verb come before the
main verb, adverbs follow the main verb, and
prepositions precede the head noun
• In SOV languages the opposite tendencies exist

• Linguists have observed that two syntactic

principles are favored:
• 1. Subjects precede objects
• 2. The verb is adjacent to the object
Why Do Languages Change?
• Languages change as they are passed from
generation to generation

• Assimilation for ease of articulation may account

for some sound changes
• Vowels are frequently nasalized before nasal
consonants, and then the nasalization on the vowel may
be enough to carry the nasality and so the nasal
consonant may be dropped

• Sound change also occurs to maintain contrasts

Why Do Languages Change?
• Analogic change is the generalization of rules
that reduces the number of irregular
morphemes

• The plural form of cow used to be kine, but based on

analogies to plow/plows and vow/vows, speakers
started regularizing the plural to cows

• The past tense rule is also undergoing generalization

• Children now often say lighted instead of lit and waked
instead of woke
• These regularized forms are now so common that they appear
in the dictionary next to the irregular forms because both are
in use
The History of Writing
There are many stories about the invention of
writing. Greek legend has it that Cadmus,Prince
of Phoenicia and founder of the city of Thebes,
invented the alphabet and brought it with him to
Greece.
Pictograms and Ideograms
The roots of writing were the early drawings made by ancient
humans. Cave art, called petroglyphs, have been found in such
places as the Chauvet-Pontd’Are cave in southern French, the
so-called “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.” These can be “read”
today although they were created by humans living 30.000 or
more years ago.
Later drawings, however, are clearly “picture writings,” or
pictograms. Pictograms began to represent ideas rather than
objects. Such generalized pictograms are called ideograms
(“idea picture” or “idea writing”)
Cuneiform Writing
• Much of what we know about writing stern form the record left by
the Sumerians, an ancient people of unknown origin who built a
civilization in southern Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) more than six
thousand year ago. They left tens of thousand of inscribed clay
tablets containing business documents, epics, prayers, poerns,
proverbs, and so on, written in an elaborate pictography.
The Rebus Principles
• When a graphic sign on longer has a visual
relationship to the word it represents, it become a
phonographic symbol, standing for the sounds
that represent the word. A single sign can than be
used to represent all words that sound alike. If,
for example, symbolΘ stood for sun in English, it
could then be used in a sentence like MyΘis a
doctor.
From Hierologyphics to The
Alphabet
• The ancient Greeks tried to borrow the Phoenician
writing system, but it was unsatisfactory as a syllabary
because Greek has too complex syllable structure. In
Greek, unlike in Phoenician, vowels cannot be
determined by contest so they had to be specifically
written Fortuitously. Phoenician had more consonants
than Greek, so when the Greeks borrowed the system
they used the leftover consonant symbols to represent
vowel sounds. The result was alphabetic writing, a
system in which both consonants and vowels are
symbolized.