THARAKA
P.O BOX 193-60215,
MARIMANTI, KENYA
UNIVERSITY
Telephone :|+(254)-0202008549,
+(254)-02020076920
Email:info@tharaka.ac.ke
Website: https://www.tharaka.ac.ke
FACULTY OF EDUCATION, HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES DEPARTMENT OF
ARTS AND SOCIAL SCIENCES
ENGL 351: HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS
STREAMS BACHELOR OF EDUCATION (ARTS)
COPYRIGHT © THARAKA UNIVERSITY COLLEGE
2023
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
TABLE OF CONTENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS .............................................................................................................................. ii
COURSE OUTLINE ................................................................................................................................... iii
PRELIMINARIES ........................................................................................................................................ v
I.
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................ v
II.
COURSE OBJECTIVES .............................................................................................................. v
III.
EXPECTED OUTCOMES ........................................................................................................... v
1.0 SCOPE OF HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS ................................................... 1
1.1 Sources of historical linguistics. ......................................................................................................... 1
1.2 Synchronic vs. diachronic linguistics................................................................................................. 4
1.3 The notion of Dialect geography ....................................................................................................... 5
2.0 CLASSIFICATIONS OF LANGUAGES .............................................................................................. 6
2.1 Language family ................................................................................................................................ 6
2.2 Proto-languages................................................................................................................................... 7
2.3 Typological classification and genealogical classification of world languages .................................. 8
2.3.1 Genetic/ Genealogical classification ............................................................................................ 8
2.3.2 Typological classification ............................................................................................................ 9
3.0 MODELS OF LANGUAGE FAMILY................................................................................................. 14
3.1 The tree model .................................................................................................................................. 14
3.2 The wave model ................................................................................................................................ 16
4.0 METHODS IN COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS ............................................................................... 19
4.1 Methods............................................................................................................................................. 19
5.0 LANGUAGE CHANGE ....................................................................................................................... 23
5.1 How and why language change. ....................................................................................................... 25
5.2 Types of Change ............................................................................................................................... 28
5.3 Sound Change Laws ......................................................................................................................... 33
5.3.1 Dahl's law ................................................................................................................................... 34
5.3.2 Grimm's law .............................................................................................................................. 34
5.3.3 Verner's law ............................................................................................................................... 36
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................................... 39
ii
COURSE OUTLINE
ENGL 351: HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS
CREDIT HOURS; 3.0
Class meetings: As per the Time table/ Online.
Course Purpose
This course aims to introduce learners to the concept that aid in tracing origins comparing various
languages of the world.
Expected Learning Outcomes
By the end of the course, the learner is expected to:
Explain the differences between diachronic and synchronic linguistics.
Carry out a typological classification of languages.
Discuss the major language families of the world.
Explain sound change laws.
Course outline and schedule
WEEK
LECTURE TOPIC
LECTURE CONTENT
Unit introduction
Course expectations
Definition of terms
Scope of historical and
Synchronic vs. diachronic linguistics.
comparative linguistics
Sources of historical
Evidence and role of written records in historical linguistics
linguistics
Classifications of
Typological classification of world languages.
languages
”
A real classification; Genealogical classification.
Major language families of the world.
Models of language and
Family model; Family tree model
linguistics
Wave model. CAT 1
iii
Methods in comparative
Comparative reconstruction method;
linguistics
reconstruction; Glottochronology /Lexicostatistics.
”
Internal
Lexical comparisons between English, Latin and Greek to
demonstrate genetic relatedness
Dialectology
”
Broadening of language materials; Dialect geography.
Short and long distance wh-movements. CAT 2
Causes, processes and
Causes, processes and types of language change at
types of language change
phonological, morphological and syntactic levels.
Theories of language
Sound change laws; Grimm’s, Verner’s & Dahl’s laws
change
13-15
Exams
End of semester examination
Teaching Methodologies
Lectures, Digital platforms, group discussions and presentations.
Course Assessment
Continuous Assessment Tests 30%, Final Examination 70%, Total 100%
iv
PRELIMINARIES
I.
INTRODUCTION
Welcome to a stimulating course designed to help you understand the concept and theoretical basis for
historical and comparative linguistics as well as methods in comparative linguistics. The course will cover
the following broad areas:

Scope of historical and comparative linguistics

Classifications of languages

Models of language and linguistics

Methods in comparative linguistics

Language change
This is a core course, a prerequisite for all learners who are undertaking a Bachelor of Education degree
(English/ Literature) program at the university. You are expected to complete the course in 45 hours
within a period of one semester.
II.
COURSE OBJECTIVES
By the end of this course, you are expected to:
i)
Explain the differences between diachronic and synchronic linguistics.
ii) Carry out a typological classification of languages.
iii) Discuss the major language families of the world.
iv) Explain sound change laws.
III.
EXPECTED OUTCOMES
The learners should be able to answer the following questions by the end of the course:
TOPIC
1. Scope of historical and
comparative linguistics
QUESTIONS
a) Explain the Scope of historical and comparative
linguistics
b) Differentiate synchronic vs. diachronic linguistics.
c) What are the sources of historical linguistics?
d) Explain the role of written records in historical
linguistics
v
e) Explain the notion of Dialect geography
2. Classifications of languages
a) Describe the typological classification and
genealogical classification of world languages.
b) Identify the major language families of the world.
3. Models of language and
linguistics
a) Describe different Models of language family.
b) Compare and contrast Family tree model and
Wave model.
4. Methods in comparative
a) Describe the following methods used in
comparative linguistics; Comparative
linguistics
reconstruction method; Internal reconstruction;
Glottochronology and Lexicostatistics.
b)
Attempt lexical comparisons between English,
Latin and Greek to demonstrate genetic relatedness
5.
Language change
a) Describe the Causes, processes and types of
language change at phonological, morphological
and syntactic levels.
b) Identify theories of language change
c) Explain Sound change laws; Grimm’s, Verner’s &
Dahl’s laws.
vi
1.0 SCOPE OF HISTORICAL AND COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS
Historical linguistics is the scientific study of language change over time in term of sound, analogical,
lexical, morphological, syntactic, and semantic information while Comparative linguistics is a branch of
historical linguistics that is concerned with language comparison to determine their historical relatedness
and to construct language families.
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over
time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include:
1. To reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into
language families (comparative linguistics).
2.
To develop general theories about how and why language changes.
3.
To describe the history of speech communities.
4.
To study the history of words, i.e. etymology.
5.
To describe and account for observed changes in particular languages.
The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses about the groupings and
movements of peoples, particularly in the prehistoric period. In practice, however, it is often unclear how
to integrate the linguistic evidence with the archaeological or genetic evidence. For example, there are
numerous theories concerning the homeland and early movements of the Proto-Indo-Europeans, each
with its own interpretation of the archaeological record.
1.1 Sources of historical linguistics.
There is no period in the history of languages, no element or characteristic of their system, and no aspect
of their use that could fall outside of the domain of the historical study of languages. However, how they
can be studied and to what extent they are knowable depends to a great extent on the nature of the existing
sources, their accessibility and interpretability.
In linguistics the notion of source is used in at least two different senses: first, in the sense of the origin,
starting point, cause or trigger of the linguistic phenomenon and second, in the sense of the texting which
the linguistic phenomenon occurs. Sources of historical linguistics can be divided into two main
categories: Primary and Secondary. Both are vital to linguists as they interpret their topics within the
appropriate historical context. Thorough examination of available primary and secondary sources allows
linguists to construct their own analysis related to the impact and significance of their topics in language.
1
Primary sources contain “firsthand” knowledge of events and linguistic phenomenon. Historical
records, diaries, speeches, oral traditions, interviews and periodical literature are all examples of primary
sources.
Secondary sources are usually created by historians based on the historian's interpretation of primary
sources. Since they are usually created long after the event occurred, secondary sources are influenced by
the passing of time, offering a different vantage point than someone who participated in the event or
directly influenced the issue. Secondary sources help linguists place their topics—and their primary
source research—in historical context.
Similar to primary sources, secondary sources vary in form and may include articles, books, and
interviews with experts. Using a variety of secondary sources provides linguists with multiple
perspectives, exposing them to a variety of opinions and interpretations.
Source Classification Sometimes it is difficult to determine whether a source is primary or secondary—
even historians sometimes disagree and there is not always one right answer. In addition to a linguist’s
interpretation of history, secondary sources may contain primary information such as photographs, speech
transcripts, or images of documents.
The various types of historical documents of historical linguistic nature do occur in all or at least most
written languages, however, which period of the (cultural) history of the people in question these are
produced in is dependent on the culture itself. This requires data reconstruction. The reason why it is
necessary to talk about reconstruction in a discussion leading to the issue of data is simple: diachrony
cannot exist without reconstruction. Reconstruction is based on data just like any form of linguistic
analysis is, and its end products can be expressed in the form of statements or metalinguistic forms as in
the case of any other description.
ORAL TRADITION;
It is the information transmitted orally from one generation to another generation. Those who provide
such information they are called informers.
FUNCTION OF ORAL TRADITION:
a. To preserves historical information of language and society.
b. To collects and pass historical and linguistic information between generations in the society.
c. To helps researchers in data collection.
2
d. To provide education.
ADVANTAGES/IMPORTANCE OF ORAL TRADITION
1. They are only sources that can be used to reconstruct history of illiterate society.
2. Oral sources give chances for researchers to gather additional information. (To collect additional
information).
3. Oral sources allow historical knowledge to be produced from below (from the common people).
4. Oral sources give opportunities for African historiography to be rewritten in African perspectives.
5. Oral sources are used to correct other perspectives.
6. Its cheapest method to obtain historical knowledge.
WRITTEN RECORDS
This is the source of history linguistics which different events recorded in term of writing either in
magazine, newspaper, journals, pamphlets, books, letters, maps,
Written records can be found in libraries, universities, schools, colleges, etc.
FUNCTIONS OF WRITTEN RECORDS
I. Written records provides graphic pictures of language and society
II. These records reflect public opinion at the time of writing.
III. Written records used to preserve potential information like discoveries, government policies,
speeches, statement, religion as well as agreement.
ADVANTAGES OF WRITTEN RECORD
(a) Written record is cheap.
(b) Written records are most reliable and accurate more than oral tradition.
(c) They can be kept for long time.
(d) It can be translated into different languages.
(e) it’s easy to get information
LIMITATION OF WRITTEN RECORDS
3
1. It can give false information if they are biased by the author.
2. Illiterate people cannot get information.eg those who don’t know how to read and write.
3. Some written materials are very expensive.
4. Time consuming, reading written records can take time
1.2 Synchronic vs. diachronic linguistics.
Synchrony and diachrony are two different and complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A
synchronic approach considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account.
Synchronic linguistics aims at describing a language at a specific point of time, usually the present. By
contrast, a diachronic approach considers the development and evolution of a language through history.
Historical linguistics is typically a diachronic study. It has five main concerns:
 to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages;
 to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their relatedness, grouping them into
language families
 to develop general theories about how and why language changes;
 to describe the history of speech communities;
 to study the history of words.
Initially, all of modern linguistics was historical in orientation. Even the study of modern dialects
involved looking at their origins.
Ferdinand de Saussure's distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics is fundamental to the
present-day organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to synchronic linguistics, and diachronic
linguistics is defined as the study of successive synchronic stages. Saussure's clear demarcation, however,
has had both defenders and critics.
In linguistics, a synchronic analysis is one that views linguistic phenomena only at a given time, usually
the present, but a synchronic analysis of a historical language form is also possible. It may be
distinguished from diachronic, which regards a phenomenon in terms of developments through time.
Diachronic analysis is the main concern of historical linguistics; however, most other branches of
linguistics are concerned with some form of synchronic analysis. The study of language change offers a
valuable insight into the state of linguistic representation, and because all synchronic forms are the result
of historically-evolving diachronic changes, the ability to explain linguistic constructions necessitates a
focus on diachronic processes.
4
In practice, a purely-synchronic linguistics is not possible for any period before the invention of the
gramophone, as written records always lag behind speech in reflecting linguistic developments. Written
records are difficult to date accurately before the development of the modern title page. Often, dating
must rely on contextual historical evidence such as inscriptions, or modern technology, such as carbon
dating, can be used to ascertain dates of varying accuracy. Also, the work of sociolinguists on linguistic
variation has shown synchronic states are not uniform: the speech habits of older and younger speakers
differ in ways that point to language change. Synchronic variation is linguistic change in progress.
Synchronic and diachronic approaches can reach quite different conclusions. For example, a Germanic
strong verb like English sing – sang – sung is irregular when it is viewed synchronically: the native
speaker's brain processes them as learned forms, but the derived forms of regular verbs are processed
quite differently, by the application of productive rules (for example, adding -ed to the basic form of a
verb as in walk – walked). However, a diachronic analysis shows that the strong verb is the remnant of a
fully regular system of internal vowel changes, in this case the Indo-European ablaut; historical linguistics
seldom uses the category "irregular verb".
The principal tools of research in diachronic linguistics are the comparative method and the
method of internal reconstruction. Less-standard techniques, such as mass lexical comparison,
are used by some linguists to overcome the limitations of the comparative method, but most
linguists regard them as unreliable.
1.3 The notion of Dialect geography
Dialect geography is a subfield of dialectology. In its broader sense, it covers all studies concerned with
spatial variations of linguistic phenomena. More specifically it refers to studies utilizing linguistic maps
or atlases.
Dialectology is the study of the way sounds, words and grammatical forms vary within a language. The
term is usually used to describe the study both of accents (the varying sounds used within a language) and
dialects (the differing grammatical structures and words used). On the whole, dialectology has focused on
the geographical distribution of different accents and dialects, though it has begun to investigate social
factors (such as age, gender and position in society) too.
Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. Its studies
variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features.
Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from a common ancestor and
synchronic variation.
5
Dialectologists are ultimately concerned with grammatical, lexical and phonological features that
correspond to regional areas. Thus, they usually deal not only with populations that have lived in certain
areas for generations, but also with migrant groups that bring their languages to new areas (see language
contact).
Commonly studied concepts in dialectology include the problem of mutual intelligibility in defining
languages and dialects; situations of diglossia, where two dialects are used for different functions; dialect
continua including a number of partially mutually intelligible dialects; and pluricentrism, where what is
essentially a single genetic language exists as two or more standard varieties.
2.0 CLASSIFICATIONS OF LANGUAGES
Most languages belong to language families. A language family is a group of related languages that
developed from a common historic ancestor, referred to as protolanguage (proto– means ‘early’ in Greek).
The term "family" reflects the tree model of language origination in historical linguistics, which makes
use of a metaphor comparing languages to people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent
modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the
daughter languages within a language family as being genetically related.
2.1 Language family
According to Ethnologue the 7,111 living human languages are distributed in 141 different language
families. A "living language" is simply one that is currently used as the primary form of communication
of a group of people. There are also many dead languages, or languages which have no native speakers
living, and extinct languages, which have no native speakers and no descendant languages. Finally, there
are some languages that are insufficiently studied to be classified, and probably some which are not even
known to exist outside their respective speech communities.
2.1 Membership of languages families
Membership of languages families in a language family is established by research in comparative
linguistics. Sister languages are said to have a "genetic" or "genealogical" relationship. The latter term is
older. Speakers of a language family belong to a common speech community. The divergence of a protolanguage into daughter languages typically occurs through geographical separation, with the original
speech community gradually evolving into distinct linguistic units. Individuals belonging to other speech
communities may also adopt languages from a different language family through the language shift
process.
6
Genealogically related languages present shared retentions; that is, features of the proto-language (or
reflexes of such features) that cannot be explained by chance or borrowing (convergence). Membership in
a branch or group within a language family is established by shared innovations; that is, common features
of those languages that are not found in the common ancestor of the entire family. For example, Germanic
languages are "Germanic" in that they share vocabulary and grammatical features that are not believed to
have been present in the Proto-Indo-European language. These features are believed to be innovations
that took place in Proto-Germanic, a descendant of Proto-Indo-European that was the source of all
Germanic languages.
Some closely-knit language families, and many branches within larger families, take the form of dialect
continua in which there are no clear-cut borders that make it possible to unequivocally identify, define, or
count individual languages within the family. However, when the differences between the speech of
different regions at the extremes of the continuum are so great that there is no mutual intelligibility
between them, as occurs in Arabic, the continuum cannot meaningfully be seen as a single language.
A speech variety may also be considered either a language or a dialect depending on social or political
considerations. Thus, different sources, especially over time, can give wildly different numbers of
languages within a certain family. Classifications of the Japonic family, for example, range from one
language (a language isolate with dialects) to nearly twenty—until the classification of Ryukyuan as
separate languages within a Japonic language family rather than dialects of Japanese, the Japanese
language itself was considered a language isolate and therefore the only language in its family.
2.2 Proto-languages
A proto-language can be thought of as a mother language being the root which all languages in the family
stem from. The common ancestor of a language family is seldom known directly since most languages
have a relatively short recorded history. For example, the reconstructible common ancestor of the IndoEuropean language family is called Proto-Indo-European.
The Indo-European languages are a language family of several hundred related languages and dialects in
Asia and Europe.
There are about 445 living Indo-European languages, according to the estimate by Ethnologue, with over
two thirds (313) of them belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch. The Indo-European languages with the
greatest numbers of native speakers are Spanish, English, Hindustani (Hindi/Urdu), Portuguese, Bengali,
Punjabi, and Russian, each with over 100 million speakers, with German, French, Marathi, Italian, and
7
Persian also having more than 50 million. Today, 46% of the world's population (3.2 billion) speaks an
Indo-European language as a first language, by far the highest of any language family.
2.3 Typological classification and genealogical classification of world languages
There are two kinds of classification of languages practiced in linguistics: genetic (or genealogical) and
typological.
2.3.1 Genetic/ Genealogical classification
The purpose of genetic classification is to group languages into families according to their degree of
diachronic relatedness. As already noted, the term language family is used to describe a number of related
languages that are believed to share a same common ancestor, or proto-language. Linguists call each
descendant of the same language family a daughter language, and all speakers within a language family
are part of a common speech community. Linguists have identified at least 135 living language families,
and an additional 12 that are now extinct. The Largest Language Families by Number of Speakers
include:
i) Indo-European - 2.910 Billion
The Indo-European language family is the largest in the world. It consists of 437 daughter languages and
has an estimated 2.91 billion speakers across Europe and Asia. This number of speakers represents nearly
half of the total global population. many languages in the Indo-European family are widely used,
including English, Spanish, French, German, Russian, Punjabi, Bengali, and Hindustani. All of these
modern languages descend from Proto-Indo-European, which developed during the Neolithic age. As the
human population dispersed throughout the region, distance and geographic barriers created isolated
pockets of civilizations. Over time, new languages and dialects formed. Some of the most important of
these early languages include Latin, Mycenaean Greek, and Vedic Sanskrit.
ii) Sino-Tibetan Languages - 1.268 Billion
The Sino-Tibetan language family is the second largest in the world. It consists of 453 daughter languages
and has around 1.268 billion speakers throughout Asia. Some of these languages are spoken only by small
populations that live in remote locations. This isolation means that linguists have been unable to
thoroughly research and document these languages. The most widely spoken of the Sino-Tibetan daughter
languages are Tibetan, Burmese, and Chinese. Of these, Chinese and all of its variants and dialects have
1.3 billion speakers, more than any other language in the world. All modern-day Sino-Tibetan languages
have evolved from the Proto-Sino-Tibetan language.
8
iii). Niger-Congo Languages - 437 Million
The third largest language family in the world and the largest in Africa is the Niger-Congo. It consists of
1,524 daughter languages and has around 437 million speakers throughout Africa. This language family is
further divided into 6 subgroups: Katla, Atlantic-Congo, Ijo, Dogon, Mande, and Rashad. Of the NigerCongo languages, Swahili is the most widely used, with between 2 and 15 million native speakers and
between 50 and 100 million second language speakers. It is the official language of Kenya, Tanzania, and
the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Other languages, however, have a larger number of native
speakers, including Igbo, Shona, Yoruba, and Fula.
iv) Austronesian Languages - 386 Million
The Austronesian language family is the fourth largest in the world in terms of the number of speakers. It
is made up of 1,224 daughter languages and has approximately 386 million speakers spread throughout
Oceania, Maritime Southeast Asia, and a few regions of mainland Asia. In terms of the number of
languages, it is the second largest language family in the world and represents 20% of the tongues spoken
in the world today. Some of the most widespread Austronesian languages include Javanese, Tagalog, and
Malay. This language family once covered the largest area on earth, until it was surpassed by the EuroIndonesian family during the era of European colonization.
2.3.2 Typological classification
A typological classification groups language into types according to their structural
characteristics. The most famous typological classification is probably that of isolating,
agglutinating, and inflecting (or fusional) languages, which was frequently invoked in the 19th
century in support of an evolutionary theory of language development. However, languages are
classified broadly as being analytic or synthetic.
1. Synthetic languages combine (synthesize) multiple concepts into each word. Analytic
languages break up (analyze) concepts into separate words.
These classifications comprise two ends of a spectrum along which different languages can be
classified. The present-day English is seen as analytic, but it used to be fusional. Certain
synthetic qualities (as in the inflection of verbs to show tense) were retained.
The distinction is, therefore, a matter of degree. The most analytic languages consistently have
one morpheme per word, while at the other extreme; in polysynthetic languages such as
9
some Native American languages a single inflected verb may contain as much information as an
entire English sentence.
A synthetic language uses inflection or agglutination to express syntactic relationships within a
sentence. Inflection is the addition of morphemes to a root word that assigns grammatical
property to that word, while agglutination is the combination of two or more morphemes into one
word. The information added by morphemes can include indications of a word's grammatical
category, such as whether a word is the subject or object in the sentence. Morphology can be
either relational or derivational.
The two subtypes of synthetic languages are agglutinating languages and fusional languages.
These can be further divided into polysynthetic languages (most polysynthetic languages are
agglutinative, although Navajo and other Athabaskan languages are often classified as fusional)
and oligosynthetic languages.
i)
Agglutinating language
An agglutinating language (e.g., Turkish) is one in which the word forms can be segmented
into morphs, each of which represents a single grammatical category. Agglutinating languages
have a high rate of agglutination in their words and sentences, meaning that the morphological
construction of words consists of distinct morphemes that usually carry a single unique meaning.
These morphemes tend to look the same no matter what word they are in, so it is easy to separate
a word into its individual morphemes. Note that morphemes may be bound (that is, they must be
attached to a word to have meaning, like affixes) or free (they can stand alone and still have
meaning).

Swahili is an agglutinating language. For example, distinct morphemes are used in the
conjugation of verbs:
ii)
o
Ni-na-soma: I-present-read or I am reading
o
U-na-soma: you-present-read or you are reading
o
A-na-soma: s/he-present-read or s/he is reading
An inflecting language
10
An inflecting language is one in which there is no one-to-one correspondence between
particular word segments and particular grammatical categories. The older Indo-European
languages tend to be inflecting in this sense. For example, the Latin suffix -is represents the
combination of categories “singular” and “genitive” in the word form hominis “of the man,” but
one part of the suffix cannot be assigned to “singular” and another to “genitive,” and -is is only
one of many suffixes that in different classes (or declensions) of words represent the combination
of “singular” and “genitive..
iii)
Fusional languages
Fusional languages are similar to agglutinating languages in that they involve the combination of
many distinct morphemes. However, morphemes in fusional languages are often assigned several
different lexical meanings, and they tend to be fused together so that it is difficult to separate
individual morphemes from one another.
iv)
Polysynthetic
Polysynthetic languages are considered the most synthetic of the three types because they
combine multiple stems as well as other morphemes into a single continuous word. These
languages often turn nouns into verbs.. Many Native Alaskan and other Native American
languages are polysynthetic.

Mohawk: Washakotya'tawitsherahetkvhta'se means "He ruined her dress" (strictly, 'He made
the-thing-that-one-puts-on-one's body ugly for her'). This one inflected verb in a
polysynthetic language expresses an idea that can only be conveyed using multiple words in
a more analytic language such as English.
There is, in principle, no limit to the variety of ways in which languages can be grouped
typologically. One can distinguish languages with a relatively rich phonemic inventory from
languages with a relatively poor phonemic inventory, languages with a high ratio of consonants
to vowels from languages with a low ratio of consonants to vowels, languages with a fixed word
order from languages with a free word order, prefixing languages from suffixing languages, and
so on. The problem lies in deciding what significance should be attached to particular typological
characteristics. Although there is, not surprisingly, a tendency for genetically related languages
11
to be typologically similar in many ways, typological similarity of itself is no proof of genetic
relationship. Nor does it appear true that languages of a particular type will be associated with
cultures of a particular type or at a certain stage of development.
2. Analytic languages
In linguistic typology, an analytic language is a language that conveys relationships between
words in sentences primarily by way of helper words (particles, prepositions, etc.) and word
order, as opposed to using inflections (changing the form of a word to convey its role in the
sentence). For example, the English-language phrase "The cat chases the ball" conveys the fact
that the cat is acting on the ball analytically via word order. This can be contrasted to synthetic
languages, which rely heavily on inflections to convey word relationships (e.g., the phrases "The
cat chases the ball" and "The cat chased the ball" convey different time frames via changing the
form of the word chase). Most languages are not purely analytic, but many rely primarily on
analytic syntax.
Typically, analytic languages have a low morpheme-per-word ratio, especially with respect
to inflectional morphemes. A grammatical construction can similarly be analytic if it
uses unbound morphemes, which are separate words, or word order. Analytic languages rely
more heavily on the use of definite and indefinite articles (which tend to be less prominently
used
or
absent
in
strongly
synthetic
languages),
stricter
word
order,
various prepositions, postpositions, particles, modifiers, and context.
3. Isolating languages
A related concept is the isolating language, which is about a low number of any type of
morphemes per word, taking into account derivational morphemes as well. A purely isolating
language would be analytic by necessity and lack inflectional morphemes by definition.
However, the reverse is not necessarily true, and a language can have derivational morphemes
but lack inflectional morphemes. For example, Mandarin Chinese has many compound
words,[2] giving it a moderately high ratio of morphemes per word, but since it has almost no
inflectional affixes at all to convey grammatical relationships, it is a very analytic language.
English is not totally analytic in its nouns since it does use inflections for number (e.g., "one day,
three days; one boy, four boys") and possession ("The boy's ball" vs. "The boy has a ball").
12
Mandarin Chinese, in contrast, has no inflections on its nouns: compare 一天 yī tiān 'one day', 三
天 sān tiān 'three days' (literally 'three day'); 一個男孩 yī ge nánhái 'one boy' (lit. 'one [entity of]
male child'), 四個男孩 sì ge nánhái 'four boys' (lit. 'four [entity of] male child'). Instead, English
is considered to be weakly inflected, and comparatively more analytic than most other IndoEuropean languages.
An isolating language is one in which all the words are morphologically unanalyzable (i.e., in
which each word is composed of a single morph); Chinese and, even more strikingly,
Vietnamese are highly isolating.
There is, in principle, no limit to the variety of ways in which languages can be grouped
typologically. One can distinguish languages with a relatively rich phonemic inventory from
languages with a relatively poor phonemic inventory, languages with a high ratio of consonants
to vowels from languages with a low ratio of consonants to vowels, languages with a fixed word
order from languages with a free word order, prefixing languages from suffixing languages, and
so on. The problem lies in deciding what significance should be attached to particular typological
characteristics.
Although there is, not surprisingly, a tendency for genetically related languages to be
typologically similar in many ways, typological similarity of itself is no proof of genetic
relationship. Nor does it appear true that languages of a particular type will be associated with
cultures of a particular type or at a certain stage of development. From work in typology in the
second half of the 20th century, it emerged that certain logically unconnected features tend to
occur together, so the presence of feature A in a given language will tend to imply the presence
of feature B. The discovery of unexpected implications of this kind calls for an explanation and
gives a stimulus to research in many branches of linguist.
13
3.0 MODELS OF LANGUAGE FAMILY
A language family is a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or
parental language, called the proto-language of that family. The term "family" reflects the tree model of
language origination in historical linguistics, which makes use of a metaphor comparing languages to
people in a biological family tree, or in a subsequent modification, to species in a phylogenetic tree of
evolutionary taxonomy. Linguists therefore describe the daughter languages within a language family as
being genetically related. Apart from the tree model of language family, the other model is the wave
model of language family as described below.
In historical linguistics, the tree model is a model of the evolution of languages analogous to the concept
of a family tree, particularly a phylogenetic tree in the biological evolution of species. As with species,
each language is assumed to have evolved from a single parent or "mother" language, with languages that
share a common ancestor belonging to the same language family.
3.1 The tree model
Popularized by the German linguist August Schleicher in 1853, the tree model has always been a common
method of describing genetic relationships between languages since the first attempts to do so. It is central
to the field of comparative linguistics, which involves using evidence from known languages and
observed rules of language feature evolution to identify and describe the hypothetical proto-languages
ancestral to each language family, such as Proto-Indo-European and the Indo-European languages.
However, this is largely a theoretical, qualitative pursuit, and linguists have always emphasized the
inherent limitations of the tree model due to the large role played by horizontal transmission in language
evolution, ranging from loanwords to creole languages that have multiple mother languages.
The theory assumes that languages change in regular, recognizable ways (the Regularity
Hypothesis) and because of this; similarities among languages are due to a “genetic” relationship
among those languages (the Relatedness Hypothesis).
In order to fill the particulars of such a relationship among those languages, it is necessary to
reconstruct the hypothetical parent language from which the related languages are derived. In
keeping with the analogy of language relationships to human families, the theory makes use of
the terms parent (or mother), daughter, and sister languages. For example, in the family tree of
IE, French and Spanish are sisters, both are daughters of Latin; Germanic is the mother of
English.
14
The family tree model shows the direction of change and the relations among languages; the
older stages of the languages being located higher in the tree and direct descendants being linked
to their ancestors through straight lines (or branches).
Shortcomings of the family tree model resulting from considering a language as a biological
organism:
i) faulty views with regards to language change
ii)
each language forms a uniform speech community without internal
variation and without contact with its neighbor languages (e.g. it was
assumed that all speakers of Latin spoke exactly the same way at the time
when French and Spanish split off)
iii)
The split of a parent language into its daughter languages is an abrupt
occurrence, happening without intermediate stages.
The above two assumptions are false: no language is uniform or isolated from others, and
languages do not split apart abruptly but rather drift apart indiscernibly, starting as dialects and
only ending up as separate languages after years of gradual change. (In fact, the dividing point
between two “dialects” and “two languages” is often impossible to locate and is often obscured
by non-linguistic (social, political) factors.)
iv)
Languages, unlike animals or trees, do not have an independent existence:
they are sets of conventions. Changes are introduced by their speakers and
not by the language itself.
v) Distinct branches or sub-branches of the family tree should not undergo
change caused by another branch (or sub-branch) that separated from the
stem earlier (e.g. English should not be influenced by Latin -- yet, there
are many words borrowed from Latin into English)
Because of its simplicity the family tree has remained a useful model -- all genealogical
relationships have been based on it and terminology associated with this model is widely used.
The tree model also has the same limitations as biological taxonomy with respect to the species problem
of quantizing a continuous phenomenon that includes exceptions like ring species in biology and dialect
continua in language. The concept of a linkage was developed in response and refers to a group of
15
languages that evolved from a dialect continuum rather than from linguistically isolated child languages
of a single language. Below is an illustration of Tree model of historical linguistics.
The links between nodes indicate descent or genetic descent. All the languages in the tree are related.
Nodes 6 and 20 are the daughters of 15, their parent. Nodes 6 and 20 are cognates or sister languages, etc.
The leaf languages must be attested by some sort of documentation, even a lexical list of a few words. All
the proto-languages are hypothetical, or reconstructed languages; however sometimes documentation is
found that supports their former existence.
3.2 The wave model
In historical linguistics, the wave model or wave theory is a model of language change in which a new
language feature (innovation) or a new combination of language features spreads from its region of origin,
affecting a gradually expanding cluster of dialects. The theory was intended as a substitute for the tree
model, which did not seem to be able to explain the existence of some features, especially in the
Germanic languages, by descent from a proto-language. At its most ambitious, it is a wholesale
replacement for the tree model of languages. During the 20th century, the wave model has had little
acceptance as a model for language change overall, except for certain cases, such as the study of dialect
continua and areal phenomena; it has recently gained more popularity among historical linguists, due to
the shortcomings of the Tree mode
The tree model requires languages to evolve exclusively through social splitting and linguistic divergence.
In the “tree” scenario, the adoption of certain innovations by a group of dialects should result immediately
in their loss of contact with other related dialects: this is the only way to explain the nested organization
of subgroups imposed by the tree structure. Such a requirement is absent from the Wave Model, which
can easily accommodate a distribution of innovations in intersected patterns. Such a configuration is
16
typical of dialect continua (and of linkages) that is, historical situations in which dialects share
innovations with different neighbours simultaneously, in such a way that the genealogical subgroups they
define form an intersected pattern. This explains the popularity of the Wave model in studies of
dialectology as show below.
The diagram above is based on the Wave model originally presented by Johannes Schmidt.
In this diagram, the circles are to be regarded as diachronic; that is, they increase in diameter over time,
like the concentric waves on a water surface struck by a stone. The background represents a dialect
continuum of no language boundaries. The circles are stable dialects, characters or bundles of characters
that have been innovated and have become more stable over an originally small portion of the continuum
for socio-political reasons. These circles spread from their small centers of maximum effectiveness like
waves, becoming less effective and then dissipating at maximum time and distance from the center.
Languages are to be regarded as impermanent sets of speech habits that result from and prevail in the
intersections of the circles. The most conservative language is represented by the area not covered by the
circles.
3.3 The phylogenetic vs. areal classification.
In traditional approach to classification of languages placing the languages in the same cluster if
they are demonstrably genetically related by descent according to historical reconstruction. The
areal features, on the other hand, represent the languages by their geographic proximity to one
another. Languages which, according to the phylogenetic view, reside indifferent classification
trees, may end up in the same cluster if considered from an areal perspective.
17
In linguistics, areal features are elements shared by languages or dialects in a geographic area,
particularly when such features are not descended from a proto-language, or, common ancestor
language. That is, an areal feature is contrasted to lingual-genealogically determined similarity
within the same language family. Features may diffuse from one dominant language to
neighbouring languages. Genetic relationships are represented in the family tree model of
language change, and areal relationships are represented in the wave model.
Resemblances between two or more languages (whether in typology or in vocabulary) have been
observed to result from several mechanisms, including lingual genealogical relation (descent
from a common ancestor language, not principally related to biological genetics) ; borrowing
between languages ; retention of features when a population adopts a new language ; and chance
coincidence. When little or no direct documentation of ancestor languages is available,
determining whether the similarity is genetic or merely areal, can be difficult.
18
4.0 METHODS IN COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS
Comparative linguistics, or comparative-historical linguistics is a branch of historical linguistics that is
concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness. Genetic relatedness implies
a common origin or proto-language and comparative linguistics aims to construct language families, to
reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages. To
maintain a clear distinction between attested and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an
asterisk to any form that is not found in surviving texts. A number of methods for carrying out language
classification have been developed, ranging from simple inspection to computerized hypothesis testing.
Such methods have gone through a long process of development
4.1 Methods
The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is to compare phonological systems, morphological
systems, syntax and the lexicon of two or more languages using techniques such as the comparative
method. In principle, every difference between two related languages should be explicable to a high
degree of plausibility and systematic changes, for example in phonological or morphological systems are
expected to be highly regular (i.e. consistent). In practice, the comparison may be more restricted, e.g. just
to the lexicon. In some methods it may be possible to reconstruct an earlier proto-language. Although the
proto-languages reconstructed by the comparative method are hypothetical, a reconstruction may have
predictive power. The most notable example of this is Saussure's proposal that the Indo-European
consonant system contained laryngeals, a type of consonant attested in no Indo-European language known
at the time. The hypothesis was vindicated with the discovery of Hittite, which proved to have exactly the
consonants Saussure had hypothesized in the environments he had predicted.
Linguists rely on systematic sound changes to establish the relationships between languages. The
basic idea is that when a change occurs within a speech community, it gets diffused across the
entire community of speakers of the language. If, however, the communities have split and are
no longer in contact, a change that happens in one community does not get diffused to the other
community. Thus a change that happened between early and late Latin would show up in all the
'daughter' languages of Latin, but once the late Latin speakers of the Iberian peninsula were no
longer in regular contact with other late Latin speakers, a change that happened there would not
spread to the other communities. Languages that share innovations are considered to have
shared a common history apart from other languages, and are put on the same branch of the
language family tree.
Words in two or more daughter languages that derive from the same word in the ancestral
language are known as cognates. Sound changes work to change the actual phonetic form of the
word in the different languages, but we can still recognize them as originating from a common
source because of the regularities within each language. For example, a change happened in
Italian such that in initial consonant clusters, the l that originally followed p and f changed to i.
19
Thus Italian words like fiore 'flower'; fiume 'river'; pioggia 'rain'; and piuma 'feather' are
cognates with the French fleur; fleuve; pluie; and plume, respectively, and with Spanish flora,
fluvial (adj. 'riverine'); lluvia (by a later change); and pluma respectively.
In the Romance languages below, the word for 'mother' is a cognate in all the six contemporary
languages considered, however the word for 'father' is a cognate only in four of the five: in
Rumanian, the original word inherited from Latin pater has been replaced by a completely
different word, tata.
Spanish and Italian are the only two that retain a phonological reflex of the original Latin medial
consonant t, (in both languages, it has been voiced to d, probably a change that occurred in the
common ancestor to all the dialects and languages of the Iberian peninsula. All the other
Romance languages have dropped it. The original r has also suffered different fates: however,
within each language, the same thing happened in both words. Where we find r deleted in final
position in the word for 'mother', we also find it deleted in the same position in the word for
'father'.
English Gloss
French Italian Spanish Portuguese Rumanian Catalan
mother
mer
madre madre
mae
mama
mare
father
per
padre
pae
tata
pare
padre
The same principles are applied in languages that do not have a written history. Several cognate
sets in five languages of the Polynesian family are listed in the next table.
English
Gloss
Tongan Maori Samoan Tahitian Hawai'ian
1. bird
manu
manu manu
manu
manu
2. fish
ika
ika
i?a
i?a
i?a
3. to eat
kai
kai
?ai
?ai
?ai
4. forbidden
tapu
tapu
tapu
tapu
kapu
5. eye
mata
mata
mata
mata
maka
6. blood
toto
toto
toto
toto
koko
We see that no changes happened in the nasal consonants, nor in the vowels, but we can observe
in lines 2 and 3 that wherever Tongan and Maori have /k/, Samoan, Tahitian and Hawai'ian
appear to have /?/ (glottal stop). Apparently there has been an unconditioned change from /k/ to
/?/ in the Eastern branch, or a change from /k/ to /k/ in the Western branch of this family. We
choose the first as more likely, partly because /t/ is a more common phoneme in the world's
languages, partly because backing of consonants is more common than fronting, and partly
because of what we know about the culture history: Polynesia was peopled from west to east,
20
and if the change had occurred in the Western branch, that would have been at a time when all
five languages were still one speech community. Next, we see in lines 4 - 6 that there is a
systematic correspondence between /t/ in the first four languages and /k/ in the easternmost,
Hawai'ian. This looks like another systematic, unconditioned sound change, this time in only one
language. (We can see from this example that when English borrowed the Polynesian word for
"forbidden", we borrowed it from one of the languages west of Hawaii -- we say "taboo", not
"kaboo"). This is what a family tree of the five Polynesian languages would look like, based on
the small data set above (the picture is somewhat more complex when we look at other cognate
sets -- Maori in particular is probably not correctly placed in this diagram, which has been
designed as an illustration of the method):
Where languages are derived from a very distant ancestor, and are thus more distantly related, the
comparative method becomes impracticable. In particular, attempting to relate two reconstructed protolanguages by the comparative method has not generally produced results that have met with wide
acceptance. The method has also not been very good at unambiguously identifying sub-families and
different scholars who have produced conflicting results, for example in Indo-European. A number of
methods based on statistical analysis of vocabulary have been developed to try and overcome this
limitation, such as lexicostatistics and mass comparison. The former uses lexical cognates like the
comparative method but the latter uses only lexical similarity. The theoretical basis of such methods is
that vocabulary items can be matched without a detailed language reconstruction and that comparing
enough vocabulary items will negate individual inaccuracies. Thus, they can be used to determine
relatedness but not to determine the proto-language. The methods include:
a) Comparative Method
The earliest method of this type was the comparative method, which was developed over many years,
culminating in the nineteenth century. This uses a long word list and detailed study. However, it has been
criticized for example as being subjective, being informal, and lacking testability. The comparative
method uses information from two or more languages and allows reconstruction of the ancestral language.
The method of internal reconstruction uses only a single language, with comparison of word variants, to
perform the same function. Internal reconstruction is more resistant to interference but usually has a
limited available base of utilizable words and is able to reconstruct only certain changes (those that have
left traces as morphophonological variations).
b) Lexicostatistics
In the twentieth century an alternative method, lexicostatistics, was developed, which is mainly associated
with Morris Swadesh but is based on earlier work. This uses a short word list of basic vocabulary in the
various languages for comparisons. Swadesh used 100 (earlier 200) items that are assumed to be cognate
21
(on the basis of phonetic similarity) in the languages being compared, though other lists have also been
used. Distance measures are derived by examination of language pairs but such methods reduce the
information.
c) Glottochronology
An outgrowth of lexicostatistics is glottochronology, initially developed in the 1950s, which proposed a
mathematical formula for establishing the date when two languages separated, based on percentage of a
core vocabulary of culturally independent words. In its simplest form a constant rate of change is
assumed, though later versions allow variance but still fail to achieve reliability. Glottochronology has
met with mounting skepticism, and is seldom applied today. Dating estimates can now be generated by
computerised methods that have fewer restrictions, calculating rates from the data. However, no
mathematical means of producing proto-language split-times on the basis of lexical retention has been
proven reliable.
d) Mass Comparison
Another controversial method, developed by Joseph Greenberg, is mass comparison. The method, which
disavows any ability to date developments, aims simply to show which languages are more and less close
to each other. Greenberg suggested that the method is useful for preliminary grouping of languages
known to be related as a first step toward more in-depth comparative analysis. However, since mass
comparison eschews the establishment of regular changes, it is flatly rejected by the majority of historical
linguists.
e) Computerized statistical hypothesis testing methods
Recently, computerized statistical hypothesis testing methods have been developed which are related to
both the comparative method and lexicostatistics. Character based methods are similar to the former and
distanced based methods are similar to the latter (see Quantitative comparative linguistics). The characters
used can be morphological or grammatical as well as lexical. Since the mid-1990s these more
sophisticated tree- and network-based phylogenetic methods have been used to investigate the
relationships between languages and to determine approximate dates for proto-languages. These are
considered by many to show promise but are not wholly accepted by traditionalists. However, they are not
intended to replace older methods but to supplement them. Such statistical methods cannot be used to
derive the features of a proto-language, apart from the fact of the existence of shared items of the
compared vocabulary. These approaches have been challenged for their methodological problems, since
22
without a reconstruction or at least a detailed list of phonological correspondences there can be no
demonstration that two words in different languages are related.
5.0 LANGUAGE CHANGE
The modification of forms of LANGUAGE over a period of time and/or physical distance. Such
change may affect any parts of a LANGUAGE (PRONUNCIATION, ORTHOGRAPHY,
GRAMMAR, VOCABULARY) and is taking place all the time. It may be abrupt (a change in
spelling in a HOUSE STYLE) or gradual (a slight change in the pronunciation of a VOWEL).
During the past nine centuries, English has undergone more dramatic changes than any other
major European language. As a result, OLD ENGLISH or ANGLO-SAXON is not accessible to
the modern English speaker in the way that Medieval Icelandic is to the modern Icelander. When
people do notice change, their reactions are often negative (for example, the use
of disinterested to mean uninterested), and conscious attempts are made to resist it. These are
usually not successful in the long term. Deliberate attempts are sometimes made, however, by
social pressure groups or by governments to change aspects of a language or its use.
Sound change
23
Changes in pronunciation were a primary interest of 19c comparative philologists who studied
the historical relationships among groups of languages such as the Indo-European LANGUAGE
FAMILY, which includes ENGLISH, FRENCH, GERMAN, GREEK, LATIN, and SANSKRIT.
The establishment of regular correspondences among sets of sounds enabled them to reconstruct
genetic relationships and the shifts responsible for the present differentiation of languages
and DIALECTS: for example, a sound change which shifted /p/ to /f/ in some of the INDOEUROPEAN LANGUAGES accounts for some major differences between the GERMANIC
LANGUAGES and ROMANCE LANGUAGES. Compare the initial spoken consonant in
Latin pater and Spanish padre with English father and German Vater. Many of these changes
take a long time to complete and may never cover the entire range of a ‘language’. Thus, one
series of changes, the GREAT VOWEL SHIFT, is responsible for the present-day pronunciations
of English house, mouse, but has never affected SCOTS, in which the pronunciations
are hoose, moose, as was true of all English before the shift occurred.
Grammatical change
Major changes in SYNTAX and MORPHOLOGY have affected English over many centuries to
the extent that speakers of MODERN ENGLISH are not able to understand Old English without
training. The structure of Old English was more like Latin in that words had various inflectional
endings to indicate their grammatical function. This situation has been much simplified: for
example, the form of the definite article the, now invariant, once varied according to case,
number, and gender, as in se mona (the moon: masculine, nominative, singular), seo sunne (the
sun: feminine, nominative, singular), and þæt tungol (the star: neuter, nominative, singular).
Word order in Old English was more flexible because grammatical relations were made clear by
the endings: Se hund seah þone wifmann (The dog saw the woman) could also be expressed
as þone wifmann seah se hund, because the inflected forms of the definite article make it clear
that ‘woman’ is the direct object in both cases. In Modern English, however, grammatical
relations are indicated largely by word order, so that The dog saw the woman and The woman
saw the dog (compare Old English Se wifmann seah þone hund) mean two different things.
Modern English has also lost its system of classifying nouns into three grammatical genders, as
still occurs in German.
Lexical change
Such change is caused by both internal and external factors. Internal change can mean the
adaptation of both the meanings and forms of existing words and phrases through such factors as
assimilation, elision, and reduction, as with the conversion of Saint Audries in Saint Audries
lace into tawdry (cheap and ill-made, originally referring to the quality of the lace sold at St
Audrey's Fair in Ely, England). External change includes the BORROWING of WORDS, which
may be occasional and minimal (as with LOANWORDS taken into English from Turkish) or
frequent and massive (as with the flow into English of French, Latin, and Greek words). All such
24
acquisition results in the introduction of new vocabulary and sometimes new word structures and
patterns of WORD-FORMATION
Language is always changing. Language can change and develop by itself slowly. Language can change
and development because of adaptation of development and pattern change and system of society life,
such as level of education, social, culture and technology mastery. Language change and development
can occur internally and externally. Changes in the external language change and language development
is caused by the contact of a language with other languages, where humans as social beings that have
been cultured either interconnected or inter-ethnic nations in the world in a country.
Language change is variation over time in a language's features. It is studied in several subfields of
linguistics: historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, and evolutionary linguistics. Language is not consistent,
it is changing by its nature, either because of innovation, technology, war or someone’s mistakes.
There is no such thing as a language which is not changing. The rate of change may vary considerably
due to both internal and external factors (see below). English, for example, has changed greatly since Old
English. Other languages, like Finnish and Icelandic, have changed little over the centuries. One can
recognise regularities in the types of change which languages undergo, even if these cannot be
predictedEnglish has developed over more than 1500 years since Anglo-Saxon invasion in AD 450 as
they brought a set of Anglo-Frisian (Anglo-German) dialect, which became known as Old English. This
time was the beginning of the development of English language. The change of English language is
divided into four phases: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English and Late Modern English.
The modification of forms of LANGUAGE over a period of time and/or physical distance. Such change
may affect any parts of a LANGUAGE (PRONUNCIATION, ORTHOGRAPHY, GRAMMAR,
VOCABULARY) and is taking place all the time. It may be abrupt (a change in spelling in a HOUSE
STYLE) or gradual (a slight change in the pronunciation of a VOWEL). In the modern world, language
change is often socially problematic. Long before divergent dialects lose mutual intelligibility completely,
they begin to show difficulties and inefficiencies in communication, especially under noisy or stressful
conditions. Also, as people observe language change, they usually react negatively, feeling that the
language has "gone downhill.
5.1 Routes of language change.
There are many different routes to language change. Changes can originate in language learning, or
through language contact, social differentiation, and natural processes in usage.
25
i)
Language learning
Language is transformed as it is transmitted from one generation to the next. Each individual must recreate a grammar and lexicon based on input received from parents, older siblings and other members
of the speech community. The experience of each individual is different, and the process of linguistic
replication is imperfect, so that the result is variable across individuals. However, a bias in the
learning process -- for instance, towards regularization -- will cause systematic drift, generation by
generation. In addition, random differences may spread and become 'fixed', especially in small
populations.
ii)
Language contact.
Migration, conquest and trade bring speakers of one language into contact with speakers of another
language. Some individuals will become fully bilingual as children, while others learn a second language
more or less well as adults. In such contact situations, languages often borrow words, sounds,
constructions and so on.
iii)
Social differentiation.
Social groups adopt distinctive norms of dress, adornment, gesture and so forth; language is part of the
package. Linguistic distinctiveness can be achieved through vocabulary (slang or jargon), pronunciation
(usually via exaggeration of some variants already available in the environment), morphological
processes, syntactic constructions, and so on.
iv)
Natural processes in usage.
Rapid or casual speech naturally produces processes such
as assimilation, dissimilation, syncope and apocope. Through repetition, particular cases may become
conventionalized, and therefore produced even in slower or more careful speech. Word meaning change
in a similar way, through conventionalization of processes like metaphor and metonymy.
9Some linguists distinguish between internal and external sources of language change, with "internal"
sources of change being those that occur within a single linguistic community, and contact phenomena
being the main examples of an external source of change.
5.2 Causes of language change
26

Economy: Speech communities tend to change their utterances to be as efficient and
effective (with as little effort) as possible, while still reaching communicative goals.
Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.
o
The principle of least effort tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms.
See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After some time a
change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and
may end up treated as standard. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪŋ.tʊ] → gonna
[ˈɡɔnə] or [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision
[nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].

Expressiveness: Common or overused language tends to lose its emotional or rhetorical
intensity over time; therefore, new words and constructions are continuously employed to
revive that intensity

Analogy: Over time, speech communities unconsciously apply patterns of rules in certain
words, sounds, etc. to unrelated other words, sounds, etc.

Language contact: Words and constructions are borrowed from one language into
another.

Geographic separation: When people with one language move away from each other,.

Cultural environment: As a culture evolves, new places, situations, and objects
inevitably enter its language, whether or not the culture encounters different people.

Migration/Movement: Speech communities, moving into a region with a new or more
complex linguistic situation, will influence, and be influenced by, language change; they
sometimes even end up with entirely new languages, such as pidgins and creoles.

Imperfect learning: According to one view, children regularly learn the adult forms
imperfectly, and the changed forms then turn into a new standard. Alternatively,
imperfect learning occurs regularly in one part of society, such as an immigrant group,
where the minority language forms a substratum, and the changed forms can ultimately
influence majority usage.

Social prestige: Language may not only change towards features that have more social
prestige, but also away from ones with negative prestige as in the case of the loss of
rhoticity in the British Received Pronunciation accent. Such movements can go back and
forth.
27
5.5 Types of Change
Language change is the phenomenon by which permanent alterations are made in the features and the use
of a language over time. All-natural languages change, and language change affects all areas of language
use. Types of language change include sound changes, lexical changes, semantic changes, and syntactic
changes.
1. Sound change
The concept of sound change covers both phonetic and phonological developments. The
sociolinguist William Labov recorded the change in pronunciation in a relatively short period in
the American resort of Martha's Vineyard and showed how this resulted from social tensions and
processes.[13] Even in the relatively short time that broadcast media have recorded their work,
one can observe the difference between the pronunciation of the newsreaders of the 1940s and
the 1950s and the pronunciation of today. The greater acceptance and fashionability of regional
accents in media may also reflect a more democratic, less formal society — compare the
widespread adoption of language policies.
The mapping and recording of small-scale phonological changes poses difficulties, especially as
the practical technology of sound recording dates only from the 19th century. Written texts
provide the main (indirect) evidence of how language sounds have changed over the centuries.
But note Ferdinand de Saussure's work on postulating the existence and disappearance of
laryngeals in Proto-Indo-European as an example of other methods of detecting/reconstructing
sound-changes within historical linguistics. Poetic devices such as rhyme and rhythm may
provide clues to previous phonological habits.
The concept of sound change covers both phonetic and phonological developments. All aspects of
language change, and a great deal is known about general mechanisms and historical details of changes at
all levels of linguistic analysis. However, a special and conspicuous success has been achieved in
modeling changes in phonological systems, traditionally called sound change. In the cases where we have
access to several historical stages -- for instance, the development of the modern Romance Languages
from Latin -- these sound changes are remarkably regular. Techniques developed in such cases permit us
to reconstruct the sound system -- and some of the vocabulary -- of unattested parent languages from
information about daughter languages.
28
In some cases, an old sound becomes a new sound across the board. Such a change occurred in Hawai'ian,
in that all the "t" sounds in an older form of the language became "k"s: at the time Europeans encountered
Hawai'ian, there were no "t"s in it at all, though the closely related languages Tahitian, Samoan, Tongan
and Maori all have "t"s.
Another unconditioned sound change that occurred between Middle and Early Modern English (around
Shakespeare's time) is known as the Great Vowel Shift. At that time, there was a length distinction in the
English vowels, and the Great Vowel Shift altered the position of all the long vowels, in a giant rotation.
The nucleus of the two high vowels (front "long i" /i:/, and the back "long u" /u:/) started to drop, and the
high position was retained only in the offglide. Eventually, the original /i:/ became /ai/ - so a "long i"
vowel in Modern English is now pronounced /ai/ as in a word like 'bite': /bait/. Similarly, the "long u"
found its nucleus dropping all the way to /au/: the earlier 'house' /hu:s/ became /haus/. All the other long
vowels rotated, the mid vowels /e:/ and /o:/ rising to fill the spots vacated by the former /i:/ and /u:/
respectively, and so on. That is why the modern pronouns 'he' and 'she' are written with /e/ (reflecting the
old pronunciation) but pronounced as /i.
In other cases, a sound change may be "conditioned" so as to apply in certain kinds of environments and
not in others. For example, it's very common for tongue-tip ("coronal") consonants to become palatal
when they are followed by high front vowels. The residue of this process can be seen in English pairs like
divide/division, fuse/fusion, submit/submission, oppress/oppression.
2. Lexical changes
The study of lexical changes forms the diachronic portion of the science of onomasiology. The ongoing
influx of new words into the English language (for example) helps make it a rich field for investigation
into language change, despite the difficulty of defining precisely and accurately the vocabulary available
to speakers of English. Throughout its history English has not only borrowed words from other languages
but has re-combined and recycled them to create new meanings, whilst losing some old words.
Dictionary-writers try to keep track of the changes in languages by recording (and, ideally, dating) the
appearance in a language of new words, or of new usages for existing words. By the same token, they
may tag some words eventually as "archaic" or "obsolete".
3. Vocabulary/ Spelling changes
Standardization of spelling originated centuries ago. Differences in spelling often catch the eye of a reader
of a text from a previous century. The pre-print era had fewer literate people: languages lacked fixed
29
systems of orthography, and the handwritten manuscripts that survive often show words spelled according
to regional pronunciation and to personal preference.
4.
Semantic changes
Semantic changes are shifts in the meanings of existing words. Basic types of semantic change include:
pejoration, in which a term's connotations become more negative amelioration, in which a term's
connotations become more positive broadening, in which a term acquires additional potential uses
arrowing, in which a term's potential uses are restricted.
After a word enters a language, its meaning can change as through a shift in the valence of its
connotations. As an example, when "villain" entered English it meant 'peasant' or 'farmhand', but acquired
the connotation 'low-born' or 'scoundrel', and today only the negative use survives. Thus 'villain' has
undergone pejoration. Conversely, the word "wicked" is undergoing amelioration in colloquial contexts,
shifting from its original sense of 'evil', to the much more positive one as of 2009 of 'brilliant'.
Words' meanings may also change in terms of the breadth of their semantic domain. Narrowing a word
limits its alternative meanings, whereas broadening associates new meanings with it. For example,
"hound" (Old English hund) once referred to any dog, whereas in modern English it denotes only a
particular type of canid. On the other hand, the word "dog" has been broadened from its Old English root
'dogge', the name of a particular breed, to become the general term for all canines.
5.
Syntactic change
Syntactic change is the evolution of the syntactic structure of a natural language. Over time, syntactic
change is the greatest modifier of a particular language. Massive changes – attributable either to
creolization or to relexification – may occur both in syntax and in vocabulary. Syntactic change can also
be purely language-internal, whether independent within the syntactic component or the eventual result of
phonological or morphological change.
6. Sociolinguistics change
The sociolinguist Jennifer Coates, following William Labov, describes linguistic change as occurring in
the context of linguistic heterogeneity. She explains that "linguistic change can be said to have taken
place when a new linguistic form, used by some sub-group within a speech community, is adopted by
other members of that community and accepted as the norm."
30
7. Grammatical change
Major changes in SYNTAX and MORPHOLOGY have affected English over many centuries to
the extent that speakers of MODERN ENGLISH are not able to understand Old English without
training. The structure of Old English was more like Latin in that words had various inflectional
endings to indicate their grammatical function. This situation has been much simplified: for
example, the form of the definite article the, now invariant, once varied according to case,
number, and gender, as in se mona (the moon: masculine, nominative, singular), seo sunne (the
sun: feminine, nominative, singular), and þæt tungol (the star: neuter, nominative, singular).
Word order in Old English was more flexible because grammatical relations were made clear by
the endings: (The dog saw the woman) could also be expressed as þone wifmann seah se hund,
because the inflected forms of the definite article make it clear that ‘woman’ is the direct object
in both cases. In Modern English, however, grammatical relations are indicated largely by word
order, so that The dog saw the woman and The woman saw the dog mean two different things.
Modern English has also lost its system of classifying nouns into three grammatical genders, as
still occurs in German.
5.4 Process of language change
Processes of sound change.
Another dimension along which we can look at sound change is by classifying changes
according to the particular process involved.
1. Assimilation
This is the influence of one sound on an adjacent sound, is perhaps the most pervasive process.
Assimilation processes changed Latin /k/ when followed by /i/ or /y/, first to /ky/, then to "ch",
then to /s/, so that Latin faciat /fakiat/ 'would make' became fasse /fas/ in Modern French (the
subjunctive of the verb faire 'to make').Palatalization is a kind of assimilation.
2. Dissimilation, metathesis, and haplology
In contrast to assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, and haplology tend to occur more
sporadically, i.e., to affect individual words. Dissimilation involves a change in one of two
'same' sounds that are adjacent or almost adjacent in a particular word such that they are no
longer the same. Thus the first "l" in English colonel is changed to an "r", and the word is
pronounced like "kernel". Metathesis involves the change in order of two adjacent sounds.
31
Crystal cites Modern English third from OE thrid , and Modern English bird is a parallel
example. But Modern English bright underwent the opposite change, its ancestor being beorht,
and not all "vowel + r" words changed the relative order of these segments as happened with bird
and third . Already by the time of Old English, there were two forms of the word for "ask":
ascian and acsian. We don't know which form was metathesized from the other, but we do know
that ascian won out in the standard language. Haplology is similar to dissimilation, because it
involves getting rid of similar neighboring sounds, but this time, one sound is simply dropped
out rather than being changed to a different sound. An example is the pronunciation of Modern
English probably as prob'ly.
3. Merger, split, loss, Syncope and apocope Prothesis and
epenthesis
Other sound change processes are merger, split, loss, syncope, apocope, prothesis, and
epenthesis. Merger and split can be seen as the mirror image of each other. A merger that is
currently expanding over much of the United States is the merger between "short o" and "long
open o". The following table contains examples of words that you probably pronounce
differently if you are from the Philadelphia - New York - New England area, or if you are from
the South. If you are from Canada, the American Midwest, or from California, you probably find
that the vowels in these pairs sound the same, rather than different. If this is the case, you have a
merger here.
Short "o" Long "Open o"
cot
hot
hock
stock
caught
haughty
hawk
stalk
Splits are rarer than mergers, and usually arise when a formerly conditioned alternation loses the
environment that provided the original conditioning, and the previously conditioned alternation
becomes two independent sounds that contrast with each other. This is basically what happened
when /f/ and /v/ split in English (/v/ having previously been an alternate of /f/ when /f/ occurred
in an intervocalic position).
Loss involves the loss of a sound from a language, as when Hawai'ian lost the /t/ in favor of /k/
(see below).
Syncope and apocope are the loss of medial and final sounds respectively. Middle English 'tame'
in the past tense was /temede/. It lost both its medial and final vowels to become Modern
English /teymd/. These are usually conditioned changes that do not involve loss of the same
sound elsewhere.
Prothesis and epenthesis are the introduction of additional sounds, initially and medially
respectively. The addition of the /e/ that made Latin words like scola 'school' into Portuguese
escola is the only example of prothesis in foure historical linguistics textbooks I consulted. As
32
for epenthesis, an example other than the one Crystal cites was the /d/ inserted into ME thunrian
to give us the Modern English thunder.
5.5 Sound Change Laws
Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation (phonetic change) or
sound system structures (phonological change).
Sound change can consist of the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic
feature value) by another, the complete loss of the affected sound, or even the introduction of a new sound
in a place where there had been none. Sound changes can be environmentally conditioned, meaning that
the change only occurs in a defined sound environment, whereas in other environments the same speech
sound is not affected by the change. The term "sound change" refers to diachronic changes—that is,
changes in a language's sound system over time; "alternation", on the other hand, refers to changes that
happen synchronically (i.e. within the language of an individual speaker, depending on the neighboring
sounds) and which do not change the language's underlying system (for example, the -s in the English
plural can be pronounced differently depending on what sound it follows, as in bet[s], bed[z]; this is a
form of alternation, rather than sound change).
However, since "sound change" can refer to the historical introduction of an alternation (such as postvocalic /k/ in Tuscan—once [k] as in di [k]arlo 'of Carlo', but now [h] di [h]arlo, alternating with [k] in
other positions: con [k]arlo 'with Carlo')—the label is inherently imprecise and often must be clarified as
referring to phonemic change or restructuring.
Research on sound change is usually conducted on the working assumption that it is regular, which
means that it is expected to apply mechanically whenever its structural conditions are met, irrespective of
any non-phonological factors (such as the meaning of the words affected). However, apparent exceptions
to regular change can occur—due to dialect borrowing, grammatical analogy, or other causes known and
unknown—and some changes are described as "sporadic", meaning that they affect only one particular
word or a few words, without any apparent regularity.
The Neogrammarian linguists of the 19th century introduced the term "sound law" to refer to rules of
regular change, perhaps in imitation of the laws of physics, and the term "law" is still used in referring to
specific sound rules named after their authors, such as Grimm's Law, Dahl's law etc. Real-world sound
changes often admit exceptions; nevertheless, the expectation of their regularity or absence of exceptions
33
is of great heuristic value, since it allows historical linguists to define the notion of regular
correspondence .
Each sound change is limited in space and time. This means it functions within a limited area (within
certain dialects) and during a limited period of time. For these (and other) reasons, the term "sound law"
has been criticized for implying a universality that is unrealistic with regard to sound change. Sound
change laws include:
5.3.1 Dahl's law
Dahl's law is a sound rule in some of the Northeast Bantu languages, a case of voicing dissimilation. In
the history of these languages, a voiceless stop, such as /p t k/, became voiced (/b d ɡ/) when immediately
followed by a syllable with another voiceless stop. For example, Nyamwezi has -datu "three"
where Swahili, a Bantu language that did not undergo Dahl's law, has -tatu,
and Shambala has mgate "bread" where Swahili has mkate. Dahl's law is the reason for the
name Gikuyu when the language prefix normally found in that language is ki- .
The law was named in 1903 by Carl Meinhof after the missionary Edmund Dahl, who had discovered it.
It is productive in most E50 languages (such as Kikuyu, Embu, Meru/Chuka) and some J languages (such
as Rwanda, Gusii, Kuria).
In other languages the law is no longer productive, but there are indications that it once was (such as in
Taita, Kamba/Daisũ, Taveta, Luhya/Logoli). In some neighboring languages (and in other dialects of
Nyamwezi) words reflecting Dahl's law are found, but they appear to be transfers from languages in
which the law is productive.
Dahl's law is often portrayed as the African equivalent of Grassmann's law in Indo-European languages.
However, an analogue of Grassmann's law (which is aspiration, not voicing, dissimilation) has taken
place in the Bantu language. For more research read; DAHL’S LAW IN KITHARAKA on:
46b078c35d9df5218aca901d27f5f4e75ecf.pdf
5.3.2 Grimm's law
Grimm's law is a set of statements named after Jacob Grimm and Rasmus Rask describing the Proto-IndoEuropean (PIE) stop consonants as they developed in Proto-Germanic (the common ancestor of the
Germanic branch of the Indo-European family) in the 1st millennium BC. It establishes a set of regular
correspondences between early Germanic stops, fricatives and the stop consonants of certain other centum
Indo-European languages.
34
Grimm's law was the first discovery of a systematic sound change, and it led to the creation of historical
phonology as a separate discipline of historical linguistics. The correspondence between Latin p and
Germanic f was first noted by Friedrich von Schlegel in 1806. In 1818, Rasmus Rask extended the
correspondences to other Indo-European languages such as Sanskrit and Greek, and to the full range of
consonants involved.
In 1822, Jacob Grimm put forth the rule in his book Deutsche Grammatik and extended it to include
standard German. He noticed that there were many words which had different consonants from what his
law predicted, and these exceptions defied linguists for a few decades, but they eventually received
explanation from Danish linguist Karl Verner in the form of Verner's law.
Grimm's law consists of three parts which form consecutive phases in the sense of a chain shift. The
phases are usually constructed as follows:
1.
Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops change into voiceless fricatives.
2.
Proto-Indo-European voiced stops become voiceless stops.
3.
Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops become voiced stops or fricatives (as allophones).
The term law (German Lautgesetz) is used to stress the regularity of the change. The classic example of a
sound law is the so-called Germanic sound shift or Grimm’s law. This states that in the early stage when
Germanic was differentiating itself from the remaining dialects of Indo-Germanic, all voiceless stops
were shifted to voiceless fricatives, i.e. /p/ became /f/, /t/ became /θ/ and /k/ became /x/ (among other
shifts).
Latin
English
Old English
pes
foot (p ~ f)
fot
tres
three (t ~ þ)
þreo
collis
hill (k ~ x)
hyl
quod
what (kw ~ xw)
hwæt
With hill and what one must consider the development of the /x/-sound in the history of English. Within
the Old English period /x/ was weakened to /h/ in word position and represented as h in writing. From this
fact one can conclude that those words which have been inherited from Germanic and which are written
with initial h originally had /x-/. The sequence /xw/ in Germanic later developed analogically to /hw/.
Through assimilation of the /w/ to the preceding voiceless glottal fricative the voiceless [ʍ] which was
voiced in the early modern period in southern English but which is retained in many conservative dialects.
35
Additionally, a change from aspirated stops to fricatives is known to have happened in the transition
between Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Italic, so represents a plausible potential change from ProtoIndo-European to Proto-Germanic.
5.3.3 Verner's law
Verner's law described a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants
that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives *f, *þ, *s, *h, *hʷ, following an unstressed syllable,
became the voiced fricatives *β, *ð, *z, *ɣ, *ɣʷ.[1] The law was formulated by Karl Verner, and first
published in 1877.
Verner’s sound law was the central theoretical concept in comparative philology so that exceptions to
laws represented a considerable difficulty to linguistic interpretation within this model. The results of a
sound law could be veiled by later analogy which did away with irregularity in morphological paradigms
but still, for Germanic, there were disturbing exceptions to the operation of established sound laws which
could not be explained by an appeal to analogy.
In 1877 the Danish scholar Karl Verner published an article entitled "Eine Ausnahme der germanischen
Lautverschiebung" ('An exception to the Germanic sound shift'), in which he demonstrated that the
apparent irregularity here constituted in fact a clear rule. Since then this phenomenon bears his name. In
essence Verner’s Law runs as follows: If a voiceless consonant occurred in a syllable which was preceded
by another which did not carry the main accent then this consonant was voiced unless the phonetic
environment blocked this. Now because accent was relatively free in Indo-European (as still to be seen in
Russian) there were many words which were affected by Verner’s Law, for instance in the preterite of
strong verbs (but not in the first and third person singular) the accent was on the second syllable. Later
with the rise of initial accent in Germanic the environment for Verner’s Law was no longer available but
there were reflexes of the earlier situation.
Indo-European
Old English
*pətér
fæder ‘father’
With the original word for ‘father’ the accent occurred after the /t/. This was changed as part of the
Germanic sound shift to /θ/ and underwent Verner’s Law because the accent was not on the preceding
syllable, yielding /ð/ which was later fortified to a plosive.
36
Another major sound shift in Germanic is the High German sound shift which explains many differences
between English and German. The changes can be shown in a table with sample words as follows.
word initially
word medially
/p/
/pf/
/p/
/f/
/t/
/ts/
/t/
/s/
/k/
/kx/
/k/
x/
English
German
English
German
path
Pfad
open
offen
tooth
Zahn
eat
essen
church
Kirche
make
machen
A seminal insight into how the Germanic languages diverged from their Indo-European ancestor had been
established in the early nineteenth century, and had been formulated as Grimm's law. Amongst other
things, Grimm's law described how the Proto-Indo-European voiceless stops *p, *t, *k, and *kʷ regularly
changed into Proto-Germanic *f (bilabial fricative [ɸ]), *þ (dental fricative [θ]), *h (velar fricative [x]),
and *hʷ (velar fricative [xw]).
However,
there
appeared
to
be
a
large
set
of
words
in
which
the
agreement
of Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Baltic, Slavic etc. guaranteed Proto-Indo-European *p, *t or *k, and yet the
Germanic reflex was not the expected, unvoiced fricatives *f, *þ, *h, *hʷ but rather their voiced
counterparts *β, *ð, *ɣ, *ɣʷ. A similar problem obtained with Proto-Indo-European *s, which sometimes
appeared as Proto-Germanic *z.[3]
At first, irregularities did not cause concern for scholars since there were many examples of the regular
outcome. Increasingly, however, it became the ambition of linguists like the Neogrammarians to
formulate general and exceptionless rules of sound change that would account for all the data (or as close
to all the data as possible), not merely for a well-behaved subset of it.
One classic example of Proto-Indo-European *t → Proto-Germanic *d is the word for 'father'. Proto-IndoEuropean *ph₂tḗr (here, the macron marks vowel length) → Proto-Germanic *faðēr (instead of expected
*faþēr. In the structurally similar family term bʰréh₂tēr 'brother', Proto-Indo-European *t did indeed
develop as predicted by Grimm's Law (Germanic *brōþēr). Even more curiously, scholars often
found both *þ and *d as reflexes of Proto-Indo-European *t in different forms of one and the same root,
37
e.g. *werþaną 'to turn', preterite third-person singular *warþ 'he turned', but preterite third-person plural
*wurdun and past participle *wurdanaz.
Karl Verner is traditionally credited as the first scholar to note the factor governing the distribution of the
two outcomes. Verner observed that the apparently unexpected voicing of Proto-Indo-European voiceless
stops occurred if they were non-word-initial and if the vowel preceding them carried no stress in ProtoIndo-European. The original location of stress was often retained in Greek and early Sanskrit; in
Germanic, though, stress eventually became fixed on the initial (root) syllable of all words.
5.6 Theories of language change
There are different theories that account for language change. They include;
i)
Functional theory
States that language changes according to the needs of its users
Words become obsolete and drop out of usage, and the changing worlds of industry and
technology reveal this keenly
Terms from the age of sailing ships, like oakum, have all but gone
Even 20th-century words like vinyl, LP, cassette and 12 inch are on the wane as music
technology advances
ii)
iii)
iv)
v)
Lexical gap theory
Substratum theory
David crystal theory
Random fluctuation
38
REFERENCES
Brian D & Richard D The handbook of Historical Linguistics
Campbell, Lyle, and William J. Poser. 2008. Language classification: History and method. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
Henrich H & Brian D , Language History, Language change and Language Relationships
39