historical linguistics Flashcards
how do we understand the past?
we use the present
two ways language change may happen
internally motivated or due to language contact, any part of the language may change as well
diachronic assimilation
happens in voicing/ manner or place of articulation where a sound becomes more like another sound nearby, either in the same word or a neighbouring one
analogical leveling
when mutated plurals are altered over time to follow a normal pattern eg
OE bok-bec PDE book-books
dissimilation
when a sound becomes less like another sound in the word nearby or in the same word
eg tree in latin is arbor but in spanish this changes to arbol to become less like the first ‘r’
mergers
two distinct become one, eg in spanish the ‘th’ and ‘s’ became the same phoneme ‘s’
split
the process by which tow distinct phonemes emerge fro,m what used to be a single category
Metathesis
when sounds change places in a wordeg derrumbe- redumbe in rural chilean spanish or pridda to pirdda in eary english meant third
insertion
when a new sound is inserted at the end of a word or the beginning we call this insertion
Epenthesis
when a new sound appears in he middle of a word
deletion
well its when a letter is removed from the end of a word
In a language the languages share a common ancestor
this is called the proto language
The Proto Germanic language is first thought to have appeared
in first millennium BC
Three main branches of Proto Germanic
north, west and east which is now extinct
Which languages are linked to west germanic?
english, german and dutch
The three main forms of early Germanic, which was usually used for rituals and few people knew it
Elder and furthar
Younger Furthark
Anglo-Saxon Runes
What is the comparative method?
Looks at cognates from languages in the family and then deducing where they come from
an example of a word that shows that Germanic was part of an even bigger Language system
father
Uralic involves
Estonian
Hungarian
Finnish
An isolate language
one, like basque, that doesn’t have any languages related to it
How may have PIE looked and when would have it originated?
during the fifth Millennium BC and it would have had nouns that were inflected for gender and case and also verbs inflected for gender and number
what type of words are used in the comparative method?
Basic level words like sun and man
Grimm’s law
observed changes like k-x and p-f
what does the rule for the second shift involve?
voiceless stops changing to affricates or fricatives
Typologically more plausible language changes involve
voicing. assimilation and also affrication, where a plosive turns into an affricate
The Neogrammarian hypothesis states that
sound change is excpetionless
Sturtevant’s Paradox is that
all phonetic laws are regular but produce irregularities
Lexical diffusion
when a change slowly works it’s way through a lexicon in a dialect, the change usually takes place with an S shaped curve
what had previously been spoken before the collapse of the Roman rule and the arrival of anglo saxon invaders?
Mainly celtic languages like Brythonic- mainly place names survived from this
Old english grammar was much more
inflectional, grammatical changes were encoded at the end of words
Nouns, pronouns and adjectives were inflected for case, number and gender
What emerged at the end of the OE period?
a semi standard west saxon based dialect
When did the Vikings arrive and what did they bring?
8th-11th century and they brought the use of the the third pronoun their and they
amongst other words like egg, sister and take
A controversial theory surrounding the arrival of Vikings?
that they induced the loss of inflection
Diglossia
a process by which one language supersedes another language as the main one
This happened after the French invasion
However the nobles children eventually started speaking english whilst French was reserved for Law and learning
After the French Invasion what started to happen
Case marking of OE started to vanish with only the genitive remaining with one form for all others- this was a strong masculine form in a process called analogical levelling
In Middle english
people wrote in their dialects
Vowel shifts took place in the early modern period
where long vowels all rose in height
EModE saw
the language of shakespeare and the Bible whilst Latin remained the language of education
What was significant that happened in the 12th century?
London became the NO. 1 city of Britain and Chaucer developed what would be recognised as the model language for all
