WESTERN UNIVERSITY

faculty of human, arts, and languages

Introduction to Linguistics
Unit 12: Historical Linguistics
Lecturer: Mr. Thy Soklin

Group 2:
1. Houn Samneang
2. Heng Ngounhak
3. Lak Channak Year IV, Semester I
4. Chhon Kimchhay 2019-2020
5. Khem Bolong
 Agenda Style
Your Text Here
1 Get a modern PowerPoint Presentation that is beautifully designed

Your Text Here

2 Get a modern PowerPoint Presentation that is beautifully designed

Your Text Here

3 Get a modern PowerPoint Presentation that is beautifully designed

Your Text Here

4 Get a modern PowerPoint Presentation that is beautifully designed
 Welcome!!
Historical Linguistics
The main reasons that languages change:
• Politics, religions, economies, family values, trade and travel
all change over time.
• War has the big impact on change.
People do not have to move for culture change to occur. Cultural
elements might change to accommodate new knowledge or
changes in the physical environment. Also subgroups in the
society such as Rappers…
 The Relationships among Languages
• The database on languages of the world, Ethnologue,
lists 6909 languages in 228 countries.
• One of the facts is that language can be highly related,
minimally related and not related at all.
• In fact, languages that are said to derive from a common
language are called Daughter Language.
• Linguistics shows Language relatedness in two main way:
the family tree model and the wave model.
 The Family Tree Model
• The Family Tree describes how languages changed and
develop over time. It shows how many different languages
derive from one ancient language.
• Sir William Jones (1746-1794) was the first person to
formally describe the similarities among a number of
languages.
• Cognates: words in two different languages that have a
close spelling, meaning, and pronunciation.
• The comparative method involves looking at similarities in
languages.
 The Wave Model
• In 1872, Johannes Schmidt(1843-1901) proposed the wave
model of language relatedness to address some of the
inadequacies of the family tree model.
• An advantage of the wave model over the family tree model is
that the wave model shows more precisely how languages are
related.
• The circle enclosing Baltic, Slavic,
and Germanic (Label A) was drawn Figure 12.2: The Wave Model
because these languages have plural
case endings that have an [m]
of Language Relatedness
whereas many other Indo-European
languages have plural case endings
that include an aspirated b [bh]. There
is a circle (Label B) around Baltic,
Indic, and Iranian that excludes
German.
 Languages that are enclosed in the A
circle have plural case endings that
have an [m].
 Languages that are enclosed in the B
circle have an excessive amount of
palatalization.
• The circles also indicate that language is not a unified system
but has variation within it (dialects).
• More and more circles can be added to the diagram as new
similarities among languages are found. Also, wave diagrams
show the relationship among languages at one point in time
(synchronic) as opposed to showing how languages change
over time (diachronic). They only show the relationship between
or among the languages on the diagram, usually languages that
are adjacent to each other. We know that languages that are not
next to each other can influence each other through trade,
warfare, and other factors.
 Types of Language Change
• We have used sound change as examples of language change
so far and we are going to go into more detail on that in a
moment.
 Sound Change
• A sound change is the change of one or more distinctive features of a
sound to another feature or features.
• An unconditioned sound change is sound change that appears to
have happened spontaneously and everywhere (with a few
exceptions) in the language. That is, for example, everywhere that
there was a/b/ in Proto-Indo-European there is now a/p/ in English
and other Germanic languages. In other words, /b/ did not change
to /p/ only in certain phonetic environments, it changed in all
environments. Another example of unconditioned sound change is
referred to as the Great Vowel Shift.
• A Great Vowel Shift: is an unconditioned sound change that altered
all Middle English long vowels.
• Great Vowel Shift occurred in
English between about 1400 CE
( during the time that Middle
English was spoken) and about
1700 CE (during the time of
Modern English)
• Ex. Middle English long vowel [u:]
became the Modern English
diphthong [aw].
• So the Middle English word for
mouse [mu:s] became [maws] in
Modern English.
 Conditioned Sound Change
A conditioned sound change depends on the phonetic environment.
Ex. The /f/ sound in Old English becomes the /v/ sound in Modern
English. It only occurs if the /f/ in Old English occurred between two
vowels. Vowels are usually voiced and /f/ is voiceless. In Modern
English /f/ assimilates to the voiced vowels and becomes voiced. A
voiced /f/ is /v/. Ex. The Old English word heofonum became the
Modern English heaven, yfel became evil, and aefen became even
(ing). This is called voice assimilation.
 An Overview of the History of English
• Before the arrival of English, a variety of Celtic languages, including
Welsh, Cornish, Scots, Gaelic, Manx, and Irish Gaelic, were spoken
there. The British Isles were invaded by Romans at about the time of
the beginning of Christianity. The Romans stayed for nearly four
hundred years, but Latin only had minor influence on the Celtic
languages during this time.
• In 449 CE, Germanic tribes (the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes), from
what are today Germany and Denmark, invaded Britain.
• In the eighth and ninth centuries, the Vkings (from Denmark) invaded
the British Isles, introducing words with the sk sound, such as sky
and sky. The next big invasion occurred when the Normans (French)
invaded in 1066 CE.
 Morphological Changes
• What is Morphology? What is Morpheme?
• Morpheme is the smallest recurrent meaningful units of a language.
 Morphology is the study of how words are constructed out of
morpheme. Or Morphology is the study of structure and
classification of words and the units that makes up words.
For example:
• Cat (Free Morpheme)
• Cats (the suffix ‘s’ is called Bound Morpheme)
 Morphological changes also occur in a language. The most obvious
is the addition of new words or a change in meaning of existing
words.
 There are many types of changes such as; Compounding, Clipping,
Acronym formation…
For example:
• Notebook (Compounding)
• National Aeronautics and Space Administration = NASA
(Acronym formation)
• Gas from Gasoline (Clipping)
 Analogy
 Analogy is one of the morphological process that lead to changes. And
it is used to compare between things that have some elements of
similarity or likeness, but otherwise are quite different. In the study of
language change, analogy or analogous change occur when a dominant
linguistic pattern in a language replaces exceptions to that pattern.
 For example, the dominant pattern used to pluralized in modern
English is to add an –s. actually, depending on the phonetic
environment, either /s/, /z/, or // is added. In previous stages of
English, words were pluralized in a number of ways, depending on the
case of words. One of those plurals was –en.
For example: fox → Foxen
Cow → Cowen
 Syntactic Change
• Some of the general syntactic changes that occurred as Old English changed
to Modern English include a loss in inflectional endings, an emphasis on
prepositions, and an increase in the importance of words order.
 Semantic and Sociocultural Changes
semantic change is a form of language change regarding the evolution of
word usage—usually to the point that the modern meaning is radically
different from the original usage.
For example, up until the 1970s, medical professionals generally
classified homosexuality in the domain of illness. In 1973, the American
Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from their manual. In
1995, American Psychological Association supported that decision to
redefine homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle and not an illness
involved.
 Sociocultural Changes
The changes of what is in or out of a semantic domain dependent on
sociocultural changes. Sociocultural changes are changes in a culture that
influence changes in a language, or changes in a language to contribute to
changes in the culture.
Example: the changes in the use of the word man, the suffix –man, and
certain personal pronoun. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were a
conscious attempt to eliminate sexism in English. One change
is the elimination of the use of the word man for all of
humanity. Another changes is the elimination of the suffix –
man or men for occupations.
For instance: postmen → postal workers
policemen → police officers
firemen → firefighters
 How long does it take a language to change?
There are some factor that effect the potential rate of language
changes:
• Language contacts and linguistic isolation
• Culture
Ex: The French, they have a government institutions, Académie
Francoise, which work for replacing foreign words to the French
language with French sounding words. The new replace words
have no phonetic similarity to the old one.
There are 3 methods that linguist used to estimate how long daughter
language separated from their mother language:
• Lexicostatistic: it is a techniques of developing hypotheses about
the historical relationships between language and dialect, including
when these language and dialect diverged from each other based
on quantitative analysis of cognates. by using Lexicostatistic,
linguist Morris Swadesh estimated that daughter language would
lose 14 percent of the cognate that they inherited from the mother
language. according to Swadesh and other linguist, the time
separated for most of daughter language from mother language is
about five thousand to six thousand years. for instance, the
proposed date for the split of proto-indo-European into its ten
language families is put about five thousand to six thousand years
ago.
• Core vocabulary: it is a techniques that made up of hundreds to
two hundred words that represents concepts thought to be
universal to all or most language. in this method, we use the words
that had to do with climate, physical characteristics of the
landscape, type of tree, type of wild and domestic animals, and
type of artifacts. For instance. by using the core vocabulary, we
might specifically indicated location. For instance, the location of
proto-indo-European language have been indicted by Paul
Friedrich. In his research, he discovered that a large number of the
cognates for different type of tree refer to trees that are thought to
have been present in eastern Ukraine about five thousand years
ago.
• Glottochronology: is the study of the amount of time that sister
language have been separated from their mothers language. It use
a calculation of the amount of change that would take place in core
vocabulary over a specific amount of time. in this methods, linguist
attempting to use computer models to explore language changes
and historical relationships between language. For instance,
recent quantitative modeling has lead to the idea that some
classes of words, such as numerals, pronouns, and some verb, are
more " conservative" than other classes of words.
 Disappearing, Reappearing, and
Emerging Languages

 Disappearing
There are two main ways that languages become extinct.
• Change into something else
• Die out altogether
– A total genocide (killing) of a people
– The colonial powers
– The most frequently use
 Reappearing
Many societies are reacting to the loss of their native languages by
attempting to revive them.

 Emerging Languages
Today, with the growth of urban centers populated by peoples from
diverse areas of the globe, the rate of language hybridization is
rapid.
 The Spread of Englishes
 The economic power and culture of United States
– American and British movies, television, and other forms of
entertainment became popular and were distributed worldwide.
– Scientific research, science journals of the world are printed in
English.
– International corporations use English as their company
language.
 Technology
– Original development of the personal computer and the Internet
– The predominance of English on the Internet as well as in
education, commerce, politics, and other fields is one factor in
creating a world social class system.
 New Jargons

Because of the often extreme specialization of people in various

professions and the emergence of new areas of knowledge, an
increasing number of specific vocabularies are understood by
relatively small numbers of people.
 Thank you
For Your Atten
tion
Any Question?