Introduction to Contemporary Linguistics December 30, 1998 Historical linguistics: the change of language over time **** AS USUAL, THE PHONETIC TRANSCRIPTIONS DIDN'T COME OUT, SO I DELETED MOST OF THEM!!!! **** OVERVIEW: 1. Language and history 2. The regularity of change 3. Grammatical changes: phonology, syntax, lexicon 4. Reconstructing the past ============================================================= 1. Language and history >Language is part of society, and when society changes, so does language. Every word has its own historical story to tell: >OK: around 1840, there were two popular language "jokes" in the US: funny misspellings and funny acronyms (words made out of initials). (as in Taiwan today: e.g. LKK) >"OK" stands for "oll korrekt" ("all correct")! >It became popular in the US because it was adopted as a slogan during the 1840 presidential election. >After World War II, "OK" spread across the world. To non-Americans, it sounds very "American". >However, its meaning is often different from the original; e.g. in Germany, it means "very good", while in the US it means "acceptable, but not the best". >©_²§ªG: This comes from English "kiwi fruit". >Why isn't it called [kúiwi] in Mandarin? >[kúi] does not obey the phonology of Mandarin, so a phonological rule is applied: kú ® t‚ú before i. >Characters are chosen to emphasize that the fruit is foreign and "strange". >But why is it called "kiwi" in English? >Because it is imported from New Zealand, where there is a small flightless bird called a "kiwi" that resembles a kiwi fruit in color and shape; also, the kiwi bird is a national symbol of New Zealand, so the name is "patriotic." >But the original English name was "Chinese gooseberry". They had to change the name because the US has stricter regulations for importing "berries" than for "fruit". (A kiwi fruit is not a berry at all.) >But why was it called a "Chinese gooseberry"? >A "gooseberry" is a kind of British berry that tastes similar to a kiwi fruit. >It's "Chinese" because kiwi fruits originally come from CHINA, not New Zealand! >In China, they were sometimes called ônµU®ç because people didn't eat them. >¥Ë´µ : In Taiwan Mandarin, this is pronounced [wa21si55], which doesn't sound like anything. That's because this word is from Taiwanese, where these same characters are pronounced [ga55su32]. Taiwanese got the word from Japanese, who got it from English "gas". >English took "gas" from Dutch. The Dutch spell their word "gas", as in English, but in Dutch spelling, the letter "g" actually represents a voiceless velar fricative [x], so the Dutch word sounds more like [xas]. >The Dutch invented this word since it sounds like the Greek word xaos, which English borrowed separately as "chaos" (²V¶Ã). (The particles in a gas move around chaotically.) >The Greek word comes from Proto-Indo- European *gheu "yawn" (big mouth-> deep hole -> loss of order). This same root also led to the English word "gum" (¾¦Åi).... >As you can see, history can take many strange turns. To try to understand the chaos, historical linguists give names to important stages in a language's history: >Periods in the history of English: Old English: around 700 AD (e.g. Beowulf) Middle English: 1066-1500 (e.g. Chaucer) Modern English: after 1500 (e.g. Shakespeare, me) >Periods in the history of Chinese and Mandarin: Old Chinese: around 1000 BC Middle Chinese: around 600 AD Old Mandarin: around 1450 (©ú¥N) Middle Mandarin: around 1650 (early ²M¥N) Modern Mandarin: now 2. The regularity of change >Like all of history, language changes are not predictable in advance. However, they do often occur in a very regular, systematic way. >For example, look at cognates: words in related languages that have come from a common source in the parent language: >Regular sound correspondences: systematic relationships between sounds in different languages: when you get sound A in one language, you get sound B in the other. >German and English: >Note: sound correspondences depend on many factors (e.g. phonetic context, or when the word entered the language). Thus they may not seem regular unless you study them very carefully: >Cognates showing regular sound correspondences may also differ in meaning, which may make them harder to recognize: >Sound correspondences in Mandarin and Taiwanese: (NOTE: Words for names are often more conservative: they don't change as quickly. This implies that /p/ is an older sound in Taiwanese than /x/.) >These regular correspondences help prove the historical relationships among dialects and languages, and show when the changes occurred. 3. Grammatical changes: phonology, syntax, lexicon >Phonological change: >English: the Great English Vowel Shift (around 1500) >The entire set of vowel phonemes shifted around: long vowels moved upward; short vowels didn't. >Evidence: >Descriptions and poetry in old documents. >Sound correspondences between English dialects (in different parts of the UK). >Modern spelling (which often preserves the old pronunciations): >Allomorphs in Modern English: >Chinese: palatalization of velars (around 1550) >Velars became palatals before front vowels (i, y): >Evidence: >Sound correspondences (as with Mandarin and Taiwanese above) >Borrowings from Old Mandarin into other languages, such as French (by missionaries): Old Mandarin French ¥_¨ [pekiN] [pekiN] >That's why this city name is spelled "Peking"; the "k" is the sound BEFORE palatalization. (Also remember that in French, voiceless consonants are unaspirated.) >Notice that palatalization still occurs when Chinese borrows foreign words (like "kiwi") >Other important evidence for phonological changes in Chinese comes from old rhyme books (OVERHEAD) >Syntactic change: >The ancestor of English had the order Subject-Object-Verb. >Evidence: >Ancient writing, such as that found on a golden horn made around 400 AD: Obj V ek HlewagastiR HoltijaR horna tawido I Hlewagastir of Holt horn made "I, Hlewagastir of Holt, made the horn." >Comparisons with related languages, such as German: Obj V Als er den Mann sah .... when he the man saw "When he saw the man..." >Compound morphology in Modern English may preserve this older syntactic pattern: Obj V truck drive -er >Lexical change: >Lexical changes can involve borrowing (words coming from other langauges) and semantic shifts (changes in meaning). >English: >Borrowing: "cow" is a native English word; "beef" was borrowed from French >Semantic shift: "hound" once meant any kind of dog (as Hund still does in German). >Chinese: >Borrowing: ¸²µå was borrowed in the Old Chinese period from Iranian (as in Modern Persian [ba:da] "wine") >Semantic shift: °¦ originally referred to one bird out of a pair (the character shows a hand holding a bird); it was contrasted with ù (pair of birds). Later °¦ extended its meaning to include more different kinds of animals, so today it is used both for animals (¤@°¦ª¯) and for one of a pair (¤@°¦¾c¤l). [Is this homonymy or polysemy? I don't know!] >Of all these changes, the most regular and systematic are phonological changes. Why? >Phonological changes can occur when children hear their parents' speech incorrectly (perceptual phonetics), or when they articulate incorrectly (articulatory phonetics). These processes are affected by the regular laws of perception and physics. >Syntactic and semantic changes occur at a more abstract psychological level, with factors such as memory or reanalysis of linguistic structures. These processes do not obey regular laws. And of course, borrowings just follow the chaotic nature of history: "OK" is international only because the US is now such a powerful country. 4. Reconstructing the past >In addition to old documents, the most important information about language change comes from the comparative method: comparing related languages to figure out what their common parent language was like. >Compare the initial sounds of the following cognates: English German Latin Greek Sanskrit (Europe) (Europe) (Europe) (Europe) (India) >First observation: Most languages have /p/. This suggests that the parent language had /p/. >Second observation: Two languages have /f/. This suggests that these two languages had their own parent language that changed /p/ into /f/. >Based on this (and much more information), we can draw a family tree for these languages: Proto-Indo-European Germanic Latin Greek Sanskrit English German >Family trees show the genetic relationships among languages in a similar way to family trees for people or for biological species. >A more complete family tree for Indo-European languages, also including geographical information (OVERHEAD). >A tree can also be drawn for the Sinitic languages ("Chinese dialects") (OVERHEAD; plus MAP OVERHEAD) >Sinitic (Chinese) is just one branch of a larger family called Sino-Tibetan, which also includes Tibetan, Burmese and many other languages (OVERHEAD; plus MAP OVERHEAD) >For some languages, the genetic relationships are unknown. >Japanese is a good example of this. It does not show any close relationship with any language in the world. >Yes, the Japanese writing system is based on Chinese characters, and many words were borrowed from Chinese, but that doesn't make them genetically related (just as writing "OK" in Taiwan doesn't make Chinese and English genetically related!) >Many linguists believe that Japanese is genetically related to Korean, which it is believed to be part of the Altaic family (which also includes Mongolian and Turkish). >However, Japanese and Korean only share general grammatical features (e.g. lots of inflection) and about 15% of basic vocabulary, so they are more different from each other than English is from Russian (both Indo-European). >One theory: modern Japanese people descend from a group that left the Korean peninsula around 400 BC. They spoke a language related to the ancestor of Korean, but still quite different from it. Maybe there was also some influence from native languages spoken in Japan (related to modern Ainu). >Thus Japanese and Koreans may turn out to be like Arabs and Jews, who are also ancient enemies who speak related languages! >Anyway, using the comparative method, linguists can try to reconstruct ancient, dead languages whose sounds were not recorded. Such hypothetical reconstructions are marked with a * (not the same as "ungrammatical"!) >What did Old Chinese (1000 BC) sound like? Nobody knows, but here is one reconstruction: Mandarin Middle Chinese Old Chinese §E [y] *jwo *rag ³~ [thu] *dwo *dag °£ [tSu] *djwo *drjag ®} [tsy] *zjwo *rjag >How far back can we go? Can we go all the way back to the first language ever spoken by human beings? >Some linguists say yes: "Proto-World": *menŒ "to think (about)" Cognates? family language word meaning Indo- European Latin mens "mind" isolated Basque munŒk "brains" Finno-Ugric Hungarian mond "say" Dravidian Telugu mŒnŒvi "prayer" Algonquian Shawnee menw "prefer" Niger-Congo Bambara m« "know" >Most linguists say NO!!! >Phonological changes can make cognates unrecognizable in a very short time: Latin French "water" [ŒkwŒ] [o] >Unrelated languages often borrow from each other. For example, Thai and Japanese are genetically unrelated to Chinese, though they have borrowed many Chinese words. >Anyway, new languages are being created out of nothing all the time (pidgins and creoles), so why should there be a single ancestor for all human languages?