Joan E.
Amparo
BSED- English Blk. B
Historical Linguistics
Historical linguistics—traditionally known as philology—is the branch of
linguistics concerned with the development of languages over time (where
linguistics usually looks at one language at a time, philology looks at them all).
The primary tool of historical linguistics is the comparative method, a way
of identifying relations among languages that lack written records. For this
reason, historical linguistics is sometimes called comparative-historical
linguistics. This field of study has been around for centuries.
Linguists Silvia Luraghi and Vit Bubenik point out, "[The] official act of
birth of comparative historical linguistics is conventionally indicated in Sir
William Jones' The Sanscrit Language, delivered as a lecture at the Asiatic
Society in 1786, in which the author remarked that the similarities between
Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit hinted to a common origin, adding that such
languages might also be related to Persian, Gothic and the Celtic languages,"
(Luraghi and Bubenik 2010).
Why Study Linguistic History?
The task of comparing insufficiently recorded languages to each other is
not an easy one, but it is a worthwhile endeavor for those interested in learning
about a group of people. "Linguistic history is basically the darkest of the dark
arts, the only means to conjure up the ghosts of vanished centuries. With
linguistic history, we reach farthest back into the mystery: humankind,"
(Campbell 2013).
Philology, to be useful, must take into account everything contributing to
language changes. Without proper context and without studying the ways in
which language is transmitted from one generation to the next, linguistic shifts
could be grossly over-simplified. "[A] language is not some gradually and
imperceptibly changing object which smoothly floats through time and space,
as historical linguistics based on philological material all too easily suggests.
Rather, the transmission of language is discontinuous, and a language is
recreated by each child on the basis of the speech data it hears," (Kiparsky 1982).
Dealing With Historical Gaps
Joan E. Amparo
BSED- English Blk. B
Of course, with any field of history comes a fair amount of uncertainty. And
with that, a degree of educated guesswork. "[O]ne fundamental issue
in historical linguistics concerns how best to deal with the inevitable gaps and
discontinuities that exist in our knowledge of attested language varieties over
time. ... One (partial) response is that—to put matters bluntly—in order to deal
with gaps, we speculate about the unknown (i.e. about intermediate stages) based
on the known. While we typically use loftier language to characterize this
activity ... the point remains the same.
In this respect, one of the relatively established aspects of language that
can be exploited for historical study is our knowledge of the present, where we
normally have access to far more data than could ever possibly become available
for any previously attested stage (at least before the age of audio and video
recording), no matter how voluminous an earlier corpus may be," (Joseph and
Janda 2003).
The Nature and Causes of Language Change
You might be wondering why language changes. According to William
O'Grady et al., historical language change is distinctly human. As society and
knowledge shift and grow, so, too, does communication. "Historical
linguistics studies the nature and causes of language change. The causes of
language change find their roots in the physiological and cognitive makeup of
human beings. Sound changes usually involve articulatory simplification as in the
most common type, assimilation. Analogy and reanalysis are particularly
important factors in morphological change. Language contact resulting
in borrowing is another important source of language change.
"All components of the grammar, from phonology to semantics, are subject
to change over time. A change can simultaneously affect all instances of a
particular sound or form, or it can spread through the language word by word by
means of lexical diffusion. Sociological factors can play an important role in
determining whether or not a linguistic innovation is ultimately adopted by the
linguistic community at large. Since language change is systemic, it is possible, by
identifying the changes that a particular language or dialect has undergone, to
reconstruct linguistic history and thereby posit the earlier forms from which later
forms have evolved," (O'Grady et al. 2009).
