Linguistics is the scientific study of language. Synchronic linguistics studies a language's form at a fixed time in history, past or present. Diachronic, or historical, linguistics, on the other hand, investigates the way a language changes over time. The origin, growth and development of language is an important event in the life of the human race. Linguistics deals with this event.
The diachronic or historical linguistics is chiefly concerned with the growth of various languages or language as a whole through different periods of history. It divides this growth into different periods of progress, and describes them in its own manner. The various linguistic changes— phonological, grammatical and semantic—that have occurred in the past, are recorded in it. Just as history studies past events and happenings to throw light on the present social and political conditions, so linguistics studies changes and occurrences in language in the past so as to throw a light on, or account for, its present state. History is concerned with human beings; and so is language and linguistics. Thus, Linguistics and History are similar and thus become Historical Linguistics. It also forms a Typology – the classification of languages into different types; to find out how languages have developed; three areas of Comparative Historical Linguistics are of interest:
1.Language Changes,
2.Language Borrowings and
3. Establishment of Language Families. The purpose of Historical linguistics has been summed by Saussure:
“Describe and trace the history of all observable languages and finding their families. To determine the forces at work in languages and deduce and the general laws to which all specific historical phenomenon can be reduced (language universals)”
1.Language Change,
Change is the law of Nature. Everything that exists on this earth, including human life and society, changes. Language changes because the society in which it is used, changes. Language is never static or stagnant. It is always in a state of flux which involves change. Change is inevitable in language but language changes are frequent, gradual, and often abrupt. What are the causes of change? The individual as well as society play a part in language change. The speech habits of one generation are based on those of the earlier one, and a change is likely to occur during the course of the acquisition of these habits by others. The rise of new concepts and discover) of new objects cause changes in the vocabulary, structure and sounds of a language. Geographical conditions also affect changes in the sound of a language. Language changes because new concepts and discoveries are born, a huge migration takes place, a prestige is required so language is molded to suit new trends and also language changes because man is accustomed to least effort in speaking. There are usually five types of changes in language: phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantic and lexical.
Phonological Change: One of the major sound changes in the history of the English language is the so-called Great Vowel Shift. In Middle English, spoken from 1100 to 1500, the word house was pronounced with the vowel sound of the modern English word boot, while boot was pronounced with the vowel sound of the modern English boat. The change that affected the pronunciation of house also affected the vowels of mouse, louse, and mouth. This illustrates an important principle of sound change.
Morphological Change: An ongoing morphological change in English is the loss of the distinction between the nominative, or subject, form who and the accusative, or object, form whom. English speakers use both the who and whom forms for the object of a sentence, saying both “Who did you see?” and “Whom did you see?” The modern English word ‘stone’ has only three additional forms: the genitive singular ‘stone's’, the plural ‘stones’, and the genitive plural stones'. All three have the same pronunciation. In Old English they were different: stan, stanes, stanas, and stana, respectively. In addition, after certain prepositions, as in under stanum (under stones).
Syntactic Change: In modern English, the basic word order is subject-verb-object, as in the sentence “I know John.” The only other possible word order is object-subject-verb, as in “John I know (but Mary I don't).” Old English, by contrast, allowed all possible word order permutations, including subject-object-verb, as in Gif hie ænigne feld secan wolden, literally meaning “If they any field to seek wished.”
Semantic and Lexical Change: In Middle English, the word nice usually had the meaning “foolish,” and sometimes “shy,” but never the modern meaning “pleasant.” Change in the meanings of words is semantic and can be viewed as part of the more general phenomenon of lexical change, or change in a language's vocabulary.
Historical Linguistics is the study of how languages change over time and the relationship among different languages. Historical Linguistics studies the process of language change, the ‘genetic’ relationship between languages and how best to classify languages into groups. Using biological analogy, the linguist studies that languages are genetically related and are called a Language Family
Other source
Historical linguistics is the study of not only the history of languages, as the name implies, but also the study of how languages change, and how languages are related to one another. It might seem at first that this would be a rather dull, uneventful field of study, but that is far from the truth. Historical linguistics is full of lively debate and controversy and occasionally some nasty words are thrown around.
The main job of historical linguists is to learn how languages are related. Generally, languages can be shown to be related by having a large number of words in common that were not borrowed (cognates).
Word borrowing:
Languages often borrow words from each other, but these are usually not too difficult to tell apart from other words. When a related group of languages has been studied in enough detail, it is possible to know almost exactly how most words, sounds, and grammar rules have changed in the languages.
Q2. LANGUAGE CHANGE
DIFFERENCE B/W SYNCHRONY N DIACRONY
Historical Linguistics:
Definition:
Historical linguistics is the study of language change. Language change is both obvious and rather mysterious. The English of the late fourteenth century, for example, is so different from Modern English that without special training it is difficult to understand the opening lines to The Romance of the Rose cited below.
Many men sayn that in sweveninges
Ther nys but fables and lesynges;
CHAUCER, THE ROMANCE OF THE ROSE (c. 1370)
The existence of such differences between early and later variants of the same language raises questions as to how and why languages change over time. The origin, growth and development of language is an important event in the life of the human race. Linguistics deals with this event.
History of historical linguistics:
People have thought about the origin of languages for a long, long time. Like other early looks into nature and the universe, the early ideas about language where at best obvious (realizing that two very similar languages were related) or lucky guesses, at worst dead wrong, and almost always ethno-centric (only paying attention to nearby languages. This, of course, wasn't always their fault, since communication was so slow. However, for example, the Greeks simply considered most languages in Europe to be "Barbarian", even though there were certainly several distinct "Barbarian" languages).
One of the earliest observations about language was by the Romans. They noticed that Latin and Greek were similar. However, they incorrectly assumed that Latin came from Greek. The reality is that both came from Indo-European. More on that later.
There were lots of people looking at languages in the middle ages. However, most of them were trying to show Hebrew giving rise to all of the world's languages, specifically European languages. This never really worked, since Hebrew is not directly related to Indo-European languages.
When Europeans started travelling to India about 300 years ago, they noticed that Sanskrit, the ancient literary language of India, was similar to Greek, Latin, and other languages of Europe. In the late 18th century, it was first correctly theorized that Sanskrit and the languages of Europe had all come from the same language, but that that language was no longer living. This was the beginning of Indo-European. Since then, many languages from all over the world have been studied, and we are starting to get a good idea of how all the world's languages may be related.
Historical linguistics is concerned with both the description and explanation of language change.
Kinds of historical linguistics:
Linguistics is the scientific study of language. There are basically two types of study about the change in language.
Synchronic linguistics studies a language's form at a fixed time in history, past or present. Saussure proposed that language as a system of signs be studied as a complete system at any given point in time. Like chess, the important part of language is how pieces move and the positions of all pieces relative to one another. The shape of each piece is only important in that its potential can be recognized.
A synchronic relationship is one where two similar things exist at the same time.
Modern American English and British English have a synchronic relationship.
Diachronic, or historical, linguistics, on the other hand, investigates the way a language changes over time. Diachronic is the change in the meaning of words over time. For example in the way that 'magic' meant 'good' in youth culture for a period during the 1980s (and, to a lesser extent, beyond). It is thus the study of language in terms of how it visibly changes in usage. It is based in the dictionary meaning of words.
A diachronic relationship is where related things exist separated by time.
12th century English and 21st century English have a diachronic relationship.
The diachronic or historical linguistics is chiefly concerned with the growth of various languages or language as a whole through different periods of history. It divides this growth into different periods of progress, and describes them in its own manner. The various linguistic changes— phonological, grammatical and semantic—that have occurred in the past, are recorded in it. Just as history studies past events and happenings to throw light on the present social and political conditions, so linguistics studies changes and occurrences in language in the past so as to throw a light on, or account for, its present state. History is concerned with human beings; and so is language and linguistics. Thus, Linguistics and History are similar and thus become Historical Linguistics. It also forms a Typology – the classification of languages into different types; to find out how languages have developed; The purpose of Historical linguistics has been summed by Saussure:
“Describe and trace the history of all observable languages and finding their families. To determine the forces at work in languages and deduce and the general laws to which all specific historical phenomenon can be reduced (language universals)”
Language is not static or stagnant:
Change is the law of Nature. Everything that exists on this earth, including human life and society, changes. Language changes because the society in which it is used, changes. Language is never static or stagnant. It is always in a state of flux which involves change. Change is inevitable in language but language changes are frequent, gradual, and often abrupt.
Causes of language change:
1.The individual as well as society play a part in language change. The speech habits of one generation are based on those of the earlier one, and a change is likely to occur during the course of the acquisition of these habits by others.
2.The rise of new concepts and discovery of new objects cause changes in the vocabulary, structure and sounds of a language.
3.Geographical conditions also affect changes in the sound of a language.
4.Language changes because new concepts and discoveries are born, a huge migration takes place, a prestige is required so language is molded to suit new trends and also language changes because man is accustomed to least effort in speaking.
There are usually five types of changes in language:
phonological, morphological, syntactical, semantic and lexical.
Phonological Change:
One of the major sound changes in the history of the English language is the so-called Great Vowel Shift. In Middle English, spoken from 1100 to 1500, the word house was pronounced with the vowel sound of the modern English word boot, while boot was pronounced with the vowel sound of the modern English boat. The change that affected the pronunciation of house also affected the vowels of mouse, louse, and mouth. This illustrates an important principle of sound change. The Old English word hām [haːm] ‘home’ in the second sentence became [hɔːm] in Middle English, and then [howm] in Modern English.
Morphological Change:
In its morphology, Old English differed significantly from Modern English. The suffix -an on the Old English word for ‘sent’ indicates both past tense and plurality of the subject ( hı̄ ‘they’). An ongoing morphological change in English is the loss of the distinction between the nominative, or subject, form who and the accusative, or object, form whom. English speakers use both the who and whom forms for the object of a sentence, saying both “Who did you see?” and “Whom did you see?” The modern English word ‘stone’ has only three additional forms: the genitive singular ‘stone's’, the plural ‘stones’, and the genitive plural stones'. All three have the same pronunciation. In Old English they were different: stan, stanes, stanas, and stana, respectively. In addition, after certain prepositions, as in under stanum (under stones).
Syntactic Change:
Differences in word order are also readily apparent, with the verb following both the subject and the direct object in the first sentence and preceding both the subject and the direct object in the second. Neither of these word orders would be acceptable in the Modern English forms of these sentences.
V S O
þa sende sē cyning þone disc
then sent the king the dish
‘Then the king sent the dish.’
In modern English, the basic word order is subject-verb-object, as in the sentence “I know John.” The only other possible word order is object-subject-verb, as in “John I know (but Mary I don't).” Old English, by contrast, allowed all possible word order permutations, including subject-object-verb, as in Gif hie ænigne feld secan wolden, literally meaning “If they any field to seek wished.”
Semantic and Lexical Change:
In Middle English, the word nice usually had the meaning “foolish,” and sometimes “shy,” but never the modern meaning “pleasant.” Change in the meanings of words is semantic and can be viewed as part of the more general phenomenon of lexical change, or change in a language's vocabulary.
Semantic broadening
is the process in which the meaning of a word becomes more general or more inclusive than its historically earlier form
bird ‘small fowl’ ‘any winged creature’
barn ‘place to store barley’ ‘farm building for storage and shelter’
aunt ‘father’s sister’ ‘father or mother’s sister’
Historical Linguistics is the study of how languages change over time and the relationship among different languages. Historical Linguistics studies the process of language change, the ‘genetic’ relationship between languages and how best to classify languages into groups. Using biological analogy, the linguist studies that languages are genetically related and are called a Language Family.
Other source
Historical linguistics is the study of not only the history of languages, as the name implies, but also the study of how languages change, and how languages are related to one another. It might seem at first that this would be a rather dull, uneventful field of study, but that is far from the truth. Historical linguistics is full of lively debate and controversy and occasionally some nasty words are thrown around.
The main job of historical linguists is to learn how languages are related. Generally, languages can be shown to be related by having a large number of words in common that were not borrowed (cognates).
Word borrowing:
Languages often borrow words from each other, but these are usually not too difficult to tell apart from other words. When a related group of languages has been studied in enough detail, it is possible to know almost exactly how most words, sounds, and grammar rules have changed in the languages.
What does Historical Linguistics study?
Historical Linguistics explores different aspects of language change. The most commonly studied areas in historical linguistics are:
1. Etymology: Studying the reconstruction and origin of words.
2. Analysis and description of multiple speech communities.
3. Tracing (as far as possible) the history of language. This includes Sanskrit, Latin, Old English, and also modern languages, such as German, Italian and Japanese. This process also involves grouping languages into categories, or “families”, according to the extent to which those languages are similar to each other.
4. Describing and analysing changes of any type which have occurred cross-linguistically and within a language itself. Languages can change in any area of language; phonology, syntax, morphology and orthography are only a few of the areas which could be considered.
5. The construction of a framework of theories which can account for how and why languages change.
Sub-fields
As is evident, the study of Historical Linguistics concerns many different topics. For this reason, it is comprised of different sub-fields.
· Comparative Philology (or Comparative Linguistics) concerns the comparison of cross-linguistic features in order to establish the relatedness of languages.
· Etymology concerns the study of word histories. This process may involve answering the following questions:
Why did a particular word enter the language in question?
Where does that word/root come from?
How has its orthographic, phonological and semantic value changed over time?
· Dialectology concerns the historical study of dialects. Features which are usually a matter for debate are grammatical variations between two dialects, and phonological changes within a dialect over time.
· Phonology concerns the study of the sound systems which exist (or have existed) in a specific language. Studies in phonology can also concern comparative approaches to language studies between different time periods, dialects and languages.
· Morphology/Syntax concerns how the means of expression of a language evolve over time. It is usually focused on inflectional systems, grammatical structures, and word order.
The History of Historical Linguistics
It is impossible to provide an exhaustive account of all of those who studied this field, however, a few will be outlined below:
Classical Antiquity (approximately 5th century B.C. – 5th century A.D.): some contributors were Plato, Herodotus, Varro and Quintilian. These thinkers, rather than approacing Historical Linguistics as a science, studied it in a more philosophical way, according to the customs of their times.
The Middle Ages (from around 410 A.D. to 1492 A.D.): amongst the most famous scholars are Donatus, Prician, Tatwine, Boniface, Bede and Ælfric. The majority of these authors, however, focussed mainly on the study Latin and (partially) Ancient Greek, which were used by the Church for religious and communicative purposes. Little attention was paid to scholarly improvements during the Middle Ages, due to the crisis caused by the fall of the Roman Empire.
The Renaissance and after (approximately from 1492 A.D. to the 17th century): some important figures in this period were Girolamo Aleandro, Aldus Manutius and Pierre Ramée. The Renaissance saw the revival of learning and therefore, scholarly advancements in the field were increasingly more common.
The Modern Period (from around the 17th century to the present times): the most important figures are William Jones, Philip Vezdin, Jacob Grimm, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Henry Sweet. This period saw scholarly advancements in the field of Philology, especially with regard to the study of Ancient languages such as Old English, Sanskrit and so on.
Nowadays, this field is constantly expanding and many more world-leading scholars are contributing to it. We can for example cite Richard Hogg and David Denison (as well as The University of Sheffield’s Mark Faulkner and Graham Williams!)
Why focus on the past?
One of the most common answers to this question is that from the past we can understand more about the present. Only by drawing on how a language has changed over time, we can understand why this language has its current grammatical structures or phonological rules.
However, this is not the only reasons why Historical Linguistics is interesting. It allows Linguists to compare different methodologies which have been used in the past and to evaluate which ones provide us with more information and are the most efficient. Historical Linguistics also allows Linguists to explore languages which do not exist anymore, such as Gothic, Old English, Latin, Sanskrit and so on.
It is fascinating to attempt to reconstruct how these languages might have sounded, and how they would have been written and used. Moreover, studying Historical Linguistics allows Linguists to inevitably learn more about the culture, customs, religion and literature of the language studied in question and to gain a diachronic perspective of such aspects. This is crucial as Languages have been greatly influenced by the culture of their speakers.
Finally, the fact that the field of Historical Linguistics exists is a sign that Linguistics is gradually becoming a very important subject – one which is worthy of attention.
As Robins affirms (1967: v), “the current interest shown by linguists in the past developments and the earlier history of their subject is in itself a sign of the maturity of linguistics as an academic discipline, quite apart from any practical applications of linguistic science”.
