historical linguistics

Question 1

how do we understand the past?

Answer 1

we use the present

Question 2

two ways language change may happen

Answer 2

internally motivated or due to language contact, any part of the language may change as well

Question 3

diachronic assimilation

Answer 3

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

Question 4

analogical leveling

Answer 4

when mutated plurals are altered over time to follow a normal pattern eg
OE bok-bec PDE book-books

Question 5

dissimilation

Answer 5

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’

Question 6

mergers

Answer 6

two distinct become one, eg in spanish the ‘th’ and ‘s’ became the same phoneme ‘s’

Question 7

split

Answer 7

the process by which tow distinct phonemes emerge fro,m what used to be a single category

Question 8

Metathesis

Answer 8

when sounds change places in a wordeg derrumbe- redumbe in rural chilean spanish or pridda to pirdda in eary english meant third

Question 9

insertion

Answer 9

when a new sound is inserted at the end of a word or the beginning we call this insertion

Question 10

Epenthesis

Answer 10

when a new sound appears in he middle of a word

Question 11

deletion

Answer 11

well its when a letter is removed from the end of a word

Question 12

In a language the languages share a common ancestor

Answer 12

this is called the proto language

Question 13

The Proto Germanic language is first thought to have appeared

Answer 13

in first millennium BC

Question 14

Three main branches of Proto Germanic

Answer 14

north, west and east which is now extinct

Question 15

Which languages are linked to west germanic?

Answer 15

english, german and dutch

Question 16

The three main forms of early Germanic, which was usually used for rituals and few people knew it

Answer 16

Elder and furthar
Younger Furthark
Anglo-Saxon Runes

Question 17

What is the comparative method?

Answer 17

Looks at cognates from languages in the family and then deducing where they come from

Question 18

an example of a word that shows that Germanic was part of an even bigger Language system

Answer 18

father

Question 19

Uralic involves

Answer 19

Estonian
Hungarian
Finnish

Question 20

An isolate language

Answer 20

one, like basque, that doesn’t have any languages related to it

Question 21

How may have PIE looked and when would have it originated?

Answer 21

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

Question 22

what type of words are used in the comparative method?

Answer 22

Basic level words like sun and man

Question 23

Grimm’s law

Answer 23

observed changes like k-x and p-f

Question 24

what does the rule for the second shift involve?

Answer 24

voiceless stops changing to affricates or fricatives

Question 25

Typologically more plausible language changes involve

Answer 25

voicing. assimilation and also affrication, where a plosive turns into an affricate

Question 26

The Neogrammarian hypothesis states that

Answer 26

sound change is excpetionless

Question 27

Sturtevant’s Paradox is that

Answer 27

all phonetic laws are regular but produce irregularities

Question 28

Lexical diffusion

Answer 28

when a change slowly works it’s way through a lexicon in a dialect, the change usually takes place with an S shaped curve

Question 29

what had previously been spoken before the collapse of the Roman rule and the arrival of anglo saxon invaders?

Answer 29

Mainly celtic languages like Brythonic- mainly place names survived from this

Question 30

Old english grammar was much more

Answer 30

inflectional, grammatical changes were encoded at the end of words
Nouns, pronouns and adjectives were inflected for case, number and gender

Question 31

What emerged at the end of the OE period?

Answer 31

a semi standard west saxon based dialect

Question 32

When did the Vikings arrive and what did they bring?

Answer 32

8th-11th century and they brought the use of the the third pronoun their and they
amongst other words like egg, sister and take

Question 33

A controversial theory surrounding the arrival of Vikings?

Answer 33

that they induced the loss of inflection

Question 34

Diglossia

Answer 34

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

Question 35

After the French Invasion what started to happen

Answer 35

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

Question 36

In Middle english

Answer 36

people wrote in their dialects

Question 37

Vowel shifts took place in the early modern period

Answer 37

where long vowels all rose in height

Question 38

EModE saw

Answer 38

the language of shakespeare and the Bible whilst Latin remained the language of education

Question 39

What was significant that happened in the 12th century?

Answer 39

London became the NO. 1 city of Britain and Chaucer developed what would be recognised as the model language for all