Diacronía Anexo I

ANEXO I Historical and

Comparative Linguistics

Historical Linguistics is the branch of linguistics concerned with:

1. The study of language change and stability,

2. The reconstruction of earlier stages of languages,

3. The discovery and implementation of research methodologies by which genetic

relationships among languages can be put forward.

The linguist is interested in a dynamic vision of language, thus she is not as concerned

with a specific static span of time. It is a fact that one cannot conceive the dynamic

relationships without framing them in different moments in time. Therefore, the main

point differentiating Descriptive from Historical Linguistics is that the former describes a

particular stage of a language. O n the other hand, Historical Linguistics tries to address why

languages look the way they do; how the changes they have experienced can show how they

relate to each other; and finally, whether a parent language can be propounded for different

languages. In undertaking this task is where the Comparative Method is used, thus as the

student might suspect, Historical and Comparative Linguistics are branches of study which

are tightly interconnected.

Linguists studying diachronic changes must go back in time to stages in the language

where the differences between the old and current form are distinctly different. Those

stages are known as dead languages, thus n o speakers can be used in their scientific study.

Therefore, linguists must entirely rely on extant written evidence which has survived in the

form of manuscripts. However, when texts are not found, inscriptions on stones or pieces of

jewellery can help as a starting point in the reconstruction of a language. One may claim that

an expert in diachronic linguistics contrasts texts from different periods. These texts reveal

384 DIACHRONY AND TYPOLOGY

the main aspects about the state of the language in distinct stages of the language. Since a

diachronic analysis always follows a synchronic analysis, it can be regarded as dependant on

it. However, as Bynon argues (1981: 15), that methodology will not catch the continuous

changing nature of language. She uses in her argumentations an illustrative analogy from

geometry. It states that explaining linguistic change through the confrontation of different

texts would no t explain linguistic evolution, just as a series of straight lines linking the

different points of a circle do not explain that circle.

According t o Bynon there are two factors internal t o linguistics that have stood in

the way of the study of linguistic variation. T h e first factor is that synchronic studies

use idealisations of a language in order t o describe it. Th is is due t o the fact that the

actual variation existing in a specific m o m e n t is t o o large t o be apprehended in a

synchronic grammar. T h e variation we are referring t o depends on aspects such as

dialects, gender, social class and age. T h e two leading linguistic schools, structuralism

and generativism, have hindered historical linguistic analyses, since they use strong

generalisation of the actual linguistic system as their subject of study. As Bynon (1981:

16) pu t s i t , quo t ing Hocke t t and Chomsky, fo r s tructural is ts : "el p rocedimiento

descriptivo establece la ficcion de que las distintas articulaciones en cuestion n o poseen

orden temporal, espacial o social alguno," while for generativists: "una gramatica de

una lengua pre tende ser una descripcion de la competencia de u n hablante-oyente

ideal." In the analysis of current states of a language, the extent t o which a system has

been idealized can be collated t o the actual language, used by speakers, bu t this is no t

feasible when it comes to dead languages.

T h e second factor that has hindered diachronic linguistics analyses can be found,

according to Bynon, in the belief that the way languages are transmitted is responsible

for a majority of linguistic changes. T h e life of speakers is limited, then a new generation

has to learn the language again. This recurrent acquisition process by children has been

claimed to play a relevant role in variation. The use of word forms such as goed instead of

went or volvido instead of vuelto resembles attested linguistic developments across time, for

example, the replacement of the old form of the past preterit of the verb helpan, holp with

helped. However, Bynon thinks that t o attribute linguistic change to the improper learning

of the language by children gives a simplistic view of diachronic phenomena. Further, this

improper learning is counteracted by speakers that consciously struggle to keep the integrity

of the linguistic system.

Bynon concludes that even though the mistakes made by children may anticipate

linguistic variation, speakers of a language are not aware of this phenomenon. She suggests

a twofold strategy for the study of linguistic change. First, one has to focus on the different

grammars that result from the study of different time spans in the evolution of a language

and then contrast them with the description of other related languages. T h e changes

ANEXO I: Historical and Comparative Linguistics 3 8 5

attested in this kind of analysis should lead t o the extrapolation of diachronic rules.

Secondly, linguistic variation must be approached as a phenomenon tha t cannot be

separated f rom sociological factors. Geographical space, implying contact between

unrelated languages, is thought to play an important role.

Origins

It can be argued that Historical Linguistics has its origin in the etymological speculations

of classical and medieval times, more specifically in the contrastive study of Greek and Latin

carried out in the Renaissance period and the search of scholars for a parent language of the

other languages of the world. However, more technically, the origin of Historical Linguistics

dates back to the nineteenth century, when Sanskrit, the ancestor of most northern Indian

languages, was the object of scientific analysis in Europe. Its analysis found that despite the

geographical and cultural differences between Sanskrit, Greek and Latin some similarities

could still be identified. It seemed obvious that the only explanation for these systematic

correspondences was the existence of genetic links among these languages. However, this

had been stated a century earlier by the English Orientalist Sir William Jones, who in

1786 stated that Greek and Latin bore more systematic similarities than could have been

produced by chance or massive borrowing. One of the great achievements of nineteenth

century linguists was the acknowledgement of the ubiquity of linguistic change. Even

though this may seem obvious to us, it must be noted that people have not always known

that languages actually change and evolve through time. The second major achievement of

nineteenth century linguists was the development of the Comparative Method, which will

be studied later in this lesson. In fact, much of what we know today about English and its

ancestors was discovered in this century. Historical events contributed to this new attitude

in linguistic research, viz. the extension of the empire enhanced the interest in a whole

range of languages other than the classics. The interest in Sanskrit increased the settlement

of Europeans in India after the discovery of a sea-route by Vasco de Gama in 1498. T h e

student may be wondering why the development of Comparative Linguistics did not take

place earlier. Beekes (1995: 11) points to three main reasons that explain this situation.

First, the Greeks were no t sufficiently acquainted with other languages. Second, as we

have already mentioned, people had to learn that languages change. Previously, when some

change was identified it was considered a type of decay. T h e third reason is that Greeks

never compared words cross-linguistically, a technique which was solidly established in

India.

It is also important t o no te that tracing genetic relatedness back t o the common

ancestor is n o t always as straightforward as it was wi th the case of Latin, Greek and

DIACHRONY AND TYPOLOGY

Sanskrit. Occasionally, languages evolve in a way that makes it impossible to identify any

correspondence. According t o Trask (1996: 207), it takes 6000-8000 years when two

languages split for them to lose remnants of their common past. T h e historical linguist

can be considered a kind of archaeologist, who explores the remains of dead languages

t o define its history and attempts a reconstruction of their ancestry. T h e comparison

between languages can be developed in relation t o any of t he different aspects of a

language: sounds, grammar or vocabulary. A common procedure was the comparison

of cognates, which allowed historical linguists t o identify certain phonological patterns

which signalled that all these words come from the same ancestral parent language. This

was more obvious when these terms referred t o basic daily concepts, since they are less

frequently borrowed. For the sake of example we include below the declension of the

verb to be in Sanskrit and Latin, so that the student can observe the correspondences for

herself (Beekes 1995: 15):

Sanskrit. as-mi 'I am' Latin s-um

as-i 'you are' es

as-ti 'he is' es-t

s-mas 'we are' s-umus

s-tha 'you are' es-tis

s-anti 'they are' s-unt

T h e Comparat ive Method

This me thod was developed within the framework of Comparat ive Linguistics,

also known as Comparative Grammar or Comparative Philology. As has already been

mentioned above, this was the most active branch of linguistics in the nineteenth. It was

highly promoted by Sir William Jones' discovery that Greek, Sanskrit and Latin stemmed

f rom the same parent language. T h e Comparative Method was basically developed in

the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European, and then it was used in the analysis of other

language families. The basis of this method is above all, the regular principle of phonological

change. This principle, as we will study in the following section, was introduced as a

linguistic rule by the Neogrammarians. At the beginning, the Neogrammarians' hypothesis

endured strong opposition on the par t of some schools, since, until they entered the

linguistic scene, phonological changes ha:d n o t been considered rules, but tendencies.

Nevertheless, it was finally accepted as common procedure in the study of linguistic change

and the classification of language families. Patterns in phonological change were studied

in terms of sound laws, the most important being Grimm's law and Verner's Laws, both

ANEXO I: Historical and Comparative Linguistics 387

developed in connection with Germanic languages. It is also worth mentioning Saussure's

Laryngeal Theory hypothesised for the Indo-European.

In the Comparative Method we can identify the following steps:

1) The isolation of a set of cognates, or putative cognates, for example the numeral ten-.

Latin decern-, Greek deca-, Sanskrit dasa-, Gothic taihun

2) A number of phonological correspondences can be extracted:

(a) Latin d\ Greek d\ Sanskrit d; Gothic t

(b) Latin e\ Greek e\ Sanskrit a\ Gothic ai (this orthography represents a e sound in Gothic)

(c) Latin c\ Greek c; Sanskrit s; Gothic h

(d) Latin em-, Greek a-, Sanskrit a-, Gothic un

T h e sound laws mentioned before would help the scholar t o reconstruct a series of

phonemes. Af ter analysing the above evidence it was concluded that the Proto-Indo-

European word for ten was *dekm. Using regular phonological principles, we can figure

out how this word developed into the different variants in the languages under analysis.

Therefore, as the student can see:

1. One single change separates the reconstructed form from the Latin term: *m > em-,

2. In Greek we have t w o steps, t h e vocalizat ion of t h e syllabic nasal a n d t h e

disappearance of nasality *m > a-,

3. In Sanskrit two different, though related developments have taken place. O n the one

hand, the palatalization of the velar *k > s, and on the other, the same sound change

as in Greek *m > a.

4. The development that affected the Gothic term is probably the only one that seems to

be the least obvious to the student. It constitutes an exemplar of Grimms law. We will

simply describe the changes that derived taihun from *dekm. In the first place, *d > t

and *k > h, the dental has become voiceless and the velar has become a fricative. Then

*m > un, i.e. where the Indo-European term has undergone vocalisation of syllabic

nasal and velarisation of this nasal.1

However, despite t he empirical and scientific character of th is me thod , i t has

been subjected t o some criticism. For instance, there are linguists w h o claim that the

reconstructed forms are the result of comparing attested cognates, but they are of ten

unpronounceable and cannot be taken as bearing a 100% correspondence to the linguistic

reality of Indo-European. It took some time to humbly assume this fact, since in the

beginning of the Comparative Method linguists had an absolute faith in its feasibility.

1 This symbol (>) is the standard convention that signals that the form of the right of the symbol has derived from the term on the left.


Some of the basic assumptions of the Comparative Method have also been reconsidered.

It is taken for granted within this framework that languages at some point are born from a

parent language, and therefore, this view poses the question of what happens with the parent

language as their descendants rise. Another controversial point is the belief that once two

languages have split from their common ancestor they will diverge until they do not bear

any resemblance. The facts support the view that there is not just one single direction for

the evolution of two languages. They can also converge if social or historical developments

stimulate contact again, particularly if the languages happen to be geographically close. This

is something that occurs with the English dialects; they are converging rather than diverging

due to the pressure of the standard and the mass media.

T h e W a v e Theory

In order to overcome the shortcomings of the Comparative Method and the metaphor

of the Family-tree as pu t forward by August Schleicher, the German linguist Johannes

Schmidt (1872) propounded the existence of what is known as Wave Theory. In the view

of linguistic variation that he proposes changes would spread as waves in the water from

a politically or historically important centre, and as with waves, not all the changes have

t o reach the same area. This explains the fact that when two languages are compared,

there exists a certain correlation between geographic distance and the influence that one

specific change has. Thus, the farther an area is, the less consequential a specific change

will be. Bynon (1981: 266-8) offers an enumeration of the different situations that can

take place:

The ideal case consists of a linguistic territory that has not been "disturbed" by external

influences. A centre appears, which can be political, commercial, cultural, etc. Next, some

innovations occur which only reach part of the territory where the language is spoken,

while the rest of the territory is ruled by the pre-existent centre. It turns out that isoglosses

will start t o rise until, wi th time, the speakers of the two territories will lose mutual

intelligibility, and two different languages remain.

As we saw above, not all linguistic changes lead t o divergence between languages, the

opposite case may also occur. After two languages have become independent they can

start sharing certain features. The example Bynon suggests is that of two dialects that are

clearly differentiated but geographically adjacent. If the territories where they are spoken

become integrated under a political force with a single administrative and cultural centre,

some isoglosses will start to disappear and common traits will be shared. Also innovations

which apply to the totality of the new territory will promote the convergence of the two

languages.


T h e spreading of common traits is n o t limited only to languages that are previously

related; it can also occur with languages that are geographically close, whether related or not.

Bynon (1981: 268) concludes that the situation presented by the family-tree is of

continuity in the course of time, since the evolution of language is presented in an ideal

temporal-spatial frame. It is what this author calls "a relative chronology" of the changes

that a language is likely to undergo, but it does not deal with actual innovations which take

place in real time and space. Vandeloise (1984: 34) distinguishes between historical and

logical time, "logical time is idealized historical time." H e uses this distinction to explain

the path semantic evolution followed. His starting point is this postulate: "Words evolve

from a simple toward a complex meaning." However, for him, logical and historical time

do follow parallel routes: "Indeed in historical time a word can simplify itself, either by

fusion of two usages or because one of its usages becomes obsolete. I believe however that

the preceding postulate keeps a statistical value and that logical time roughly parallels

historical time." Therefore, considering Vandeloise s arguments it is understandable why the

family-tree has become common in the representation of linguistic evolution. We believe

that it is sometimes necessary to idealise actual facts so that general theories about linguistic

variation and relatedness can be constructed. However, when more emphasis is placed on

how variation is determined by geographical or social factors, the Wave Theory should

be used. Thus, as it usually occurs in linguistic studies, these two approaches to linguistic

change can be considered to complement rather than to exclude one another.

• T h e Not ion ©f Proto-language

A proto-language is a hypothetical reconstruction of the earlier form of a language.

N o wri t ten records exist of a proto-language and its reconstruction draws upon the

comparison of related words and expressions of the different languages that derived from it.

Thus, the proto-language is the ancestral parent language of all the derived languages. The

extent to which a proto-language can be reconstructed with more or less accuracy depends

on the evidence available to linguists. In the case of Proto-Indo-European, linguists have

been successful in reconstructing a great deal of the phonological, morphological, and

lexical systems.

: Linguistic Genealogies

There exist two basic ways in which languages can be classified: typologically and

genetically. A typological classification of languages is based on similarities in the linguistic

390 DIACHRONY A N D TYPOLOGY

structure. Typological classifications have been particularly frequent in the structuring of

unwritten languages. W h e n scholars observe that these languages could also be grouped

on genetically grounds the genetic classification is usually preferred. However, the use

of typologies is again gaining relevance in the study of the world's languages, as the one

devised by Matthew S. Dryer at Buffalo University which draws upon grammar structure.

There are scholars who have focused on lexical typologies. These are particularly useful

for anthropologists, since they bring along a large amount of data on social organization

and cultural spaces. Typological classifications of language lead to the establishment of

language families which consist of language stocks that are considered to be related by

common origin because of cognates in vocabulary. Concerning the notion of language

family, the student must also be acquainted with the meaning of phylum. This category

encompasses a number of language families and very often the term phylum is equated with

that of language family and both terms are often used interchangeably. Occasionally, one

can come across a family that is made up of just one language, the label for this is language

isolate. These two distinct methods of classifying languages are no t mutually exclusive,

rather they can be combined. For instance, once a genetic classification has been established,

a typological classification can be superimposed to observe the variation in linguistic type

within the same phylum or language family.

Finally, for the sake of example we will include here a typological classification of

languages that, as Traugott states "was in the air during the first decades of the nineteenth

century (1994: 19)." Following this typology, there exist three main types of languages:

Isolating (also known as analytic), agglutinative, and Inflectional (also known as Synthetic).

In isolating languages, words are typically made up of a single morpheme, that is why it is

also called analytic, among the world's isolating languages we find Classical Chinese and

Vietnamese. In agglutinative languages, words consist of a series of morphemes, each of

them represents a single grammatical category. Some examples of agglutinative languages

are Japanese, Turkish, and Finnish. W h e n it comes t o inflectional languages, one of the

main features is that a single morpheme in one word may represent several grammatical

categories. Greek, Latin and Sanskrit are prototypical examples of inflected languages.

T h e Neogrammarians

As stated above, despite the regularity attested in phonological changes there remain

exceptions that have led linguists to speak of tendencies instead of rules. One such case is

presented by Trask (1996: 224). Old English hus, mus, lus, dun, tun, mu, have evolved into

house, mouse, louse, down, town, mouth, in present-day English, all with the diphthong /au : / .


This occurred due to the effects of the Great Vowel Shift, but we still have Old English rum, also

with the sound /u : / which has evolved into room, and has kept its original vowel sound. The

fact that Grimm's law explaining the First Germanic Consonant Shift presented exceptions

seemed to confirm that phonological developments should not be placed under rules but

should be considered as tendencies. However, the linguist Karl Yerner found an explanation

for those apparent exceptions to Grimms Law, and showed that they were conditioned by the

phonological environment. This proved that every Germanic word had evolved in a predictable

regular way. This demonstration of regularity in phonological change encouraged a group of

young German linguists to publicly defend the view that this kind of change is always regular

and the apparent exceptions were for which no explanation was yet found. As mentioned earlier,

this position came to be known as the Neogrammarian hypothesis. Most of these linguists were

working at the University of Leipzig. Pejoratively, they were called by other fellow linguists

Junggrammatiker, literally 'young grammarians', translated into English as Neogrammarians

or into Spanish as Neogramdticos. By the end of the nineteenth century the Neogrammarian

Hypothesis had become part of what could be described as the orthodoxy in Historical

Linguistics.

Among the factors that can account for the successful reception of the Neogrammarian

Hypothesis in the linguistic community are the rigorous methodology employed in their

analysis and the scientific concern that this Hypothesis held. A n example of this interest

in approaching language change can be identified in their attitude towards exceptions.

Exceptions were only apparent and it was a linguist's work to find the rules that were behind

those apparent exceptions.

internal Reconstruction

T h e method of Internal Reconstruction supplements Comparative Linguistics in the

reconstruction of earlier forms of a language. It focuses on the analysis of irregular linguistic

patterns and its main tenet is that they had developed from earlier regular forms. This

method has risen from the structuralist approach to language as the following example of

Internal Reconstruction in Latin shows.

In Latin we have forms such as honos -oris or orator -oris, which may lead one to believe

that the regular form of the genitive singular of honos was honosis, bu t at some poin t

intervocalic / s / became / r / . Thus the reason why it is called internal is that it is n o t

necessary to examine other languages to reconstruct the earlier stages of a given language.

A further example of the application of the internal method in the reconstruction of earlier

forms of a language is provided by Trask (1996: 260) and it involves English past participles.

The past participle of English regular verbs is formed by the addition of the suffix -ed: love/


loved, paint/painted. In a number of strong verbs this past form is constructed using the

suffix -en instead: write I written, takel taken. As the student knows, this second pattern

is no t productive anymore, since all the new verbs entering the language follow the first

pattern: access I accessed, commute I commuted, escalate I escalated. However, as Trask explains,

some older verbs show a curious pattern; even though they keep the suffix -ed for the

construction of their past participles, they have developed adjectival forms ending in -en.

Trask illustrates this fact with the following examples:

1 . He has shaved but He is clean-shaven

2. The lead has melted, but This is molten lead

3. I have mowed the lawn, but This is new-mown hay

The conclusion that can be drawn after analysing this situation is that the original forms

of the participles showed the -en pattern, since they were strong verbs, but by analogy with

weak verbs the regular forms in -ed displaced the original strong pattern. Curiously the

adjectival form was not affected by this analogical development. If we take into account that

English displays a large number of adjectives derived from verbs that show the -ed ending,

this fact can be considered a strange development.

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Diacronía Anexo I