Introduction to Linguistics
Language Change
Yun-Pi Yuan
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I. Introduction: change=a fact; attitudes towards change
II. Examples of change at all levels
A. sound (phonetic and phonological)
B. morpho-syntactic
C. lexical changes
III. Reasons for change
A. External (social) reasons)
B. Internal reasons: natural linguistic processes
a. child language acquisition
b. speaker errors
c. preference for regular systems
d. competing pressures
IV. Historical linguistics
A. comparative reconstruction
a. cognates
b. non-cognates
c. general principles
B. results of comparative reconstruction: lang. families
C. language classification:
a. genetic
b. typological
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I . Introduction (1)
Language change is an undeniable fact:
look at ancient Chinese, at Beowulf, at
rapid changes in slang.
Some people object to language change;
they want to protect and preserve “pure”
and “correct” language.
Examples (Nash 105): French law (in 1975)
prevents the use of borrowed words (especially
from English) in advertising: le club, le bar, le hit
parade, le weekend, les hot dog.
But, fighting a losing battle, since fighting a
natural process
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I . Introduction (2)
All languages change; all parts of the
grammar can and do change:
phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon,
semantics, sociolinguistic rules, etc.
Change can involve Addition, Loss and
Shift (including individual elements—
e.g. a word added, lost, or shifts
meaning; and rules, too).
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II. Examples of Change
We’ll talk about changes at three levels:
sound, grammar, and word.
A. Phonetic and Phonological Changes
Post vocalic r
Addition of /ʒ/, /v/ phonemes
Loss of /x/
Great vowel shift
Mandarin consonant split
B. Morpho-Syntactic Changes
C. Lexical Changes
Addition
Loss of words
Change in meaning
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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (1)
A. Phonetic & phonological changes
1. post vocalic “r” (Labov 1972; Yule 240-41)
 British: no post vocalic “r”; American: with
post vocalic “r” in general
Some British and American varieties—
British (high class; also Boston, parts of
NYC, parts of the south in the US):
“pronounce /r/ only when it comes before a
vowel”
e.g.: car, farm ↔ red
(spelling shows it “was” there before)
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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (2)
2. Addition of /ʒ /, /v/ phonemes (Nash 106)
a. Before the Norman French invasion of
England in 1066, there was no /ʒ / in
English. /ʒ /―added to English through the
influence of borrowed French.
e.g. pleasure, measure, vision
b. Also before the Norman invasion, Old
English had no /v/ phoneme. French
words that were borrowed into English
(e.g. very, vain, vacation) stimulated the
split of /f/ into two phonemes, /f/ and /v/.
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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (3)
3. loss of sound /x/: (Nash 106)
voiceless velar fricative /x/ was in English,
but disappeared between the times of
Chaucer and Shakespeare.
e.g. night /nIxt/, saw /saux/
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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (4)
4. great vowel shift: (~1400-1600) (Yule 220)
e.g. mouse /maus/← /mus/;
house /haus/ ←/hus/;
/u/  /au/
out /aut/ ← /ut/
 Regular vowel sound change: changes
in a system are not haphazard, but
regular—they occur not in isolated
words, but in all words in a certain
environment (i.e., /u/  /au/)
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Great Vowel Shift (1)
The seven long or tense vowels of
middle English underwent the following
change:
aI
au
u
i
o
e
ɛ


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Great Vowel Shift (2)
Examples from Yule 220:
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Old Eng.
Modern Eng.
hu:s
wi:f
spo:n
brɛ:k
h:m
/e/
/i/
/o/
/u/
//
/e/
haws
wayf
spu:n
bre:k
hom
geese
goose
name
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(‘house’)
(‘wife’)
(‘spoon’)
(‘break’)
(‘home’)
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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (5)
5. Mandarin consonant split (see Nash 106)
 Six of each of the Mandarin consonants
split into two phonemes.
 This split can be described by rule:
before /i/ and /y/ (namely, “ㄩ”), (high
front vowel), each of the original
phonemes became the corresponding +
palatal, - retroflex consonant.
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A Local vs. Widespread Change (1)
These examples are all of widespread
changes—the change spreads
throughout the language; there are also
local changes—which don’t spread so
far—thus regional varieties.
Examples of local change:
Parts of NYC: /з/  /oi/ e.g., third, bird,
heard, first  thoid, boid, hoid, foist
台灣國語
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A Local vs. Widespread Change (2)
 a local change vs. a widespread
change
These two examples, great vowel shift &
台灣國語 example, can help to show
that regional sound differences (accents)
are not bad in any way, but are only
examples of the results of natural sound
changes which did not spread beyond
certain areas. Thus, no dialect or variety
of a language can claim to be superior
to or purer than some other variety.
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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (1)
Question formation
Negative sentence formation
Case endings
Verbs
Other examples
Mandarin
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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (2)
B. Morpho- syntactic changes
(Nash 108-11; Yule 221)
1. Q formation (Nash 108)
2. negative sentence formation (Nash 109)
3. case endings (Nash 109-110)


Nouns (marked with suffixes)
who/ whom questions: (Nash 108)
e.g. I don’t know who/whom to give it to.
(“whom”: mainly in formal speech and writing)
A remnant still in the
process of changing
Other remnants: other pronoun
forms (e.g., I/me, he/ him, she/her),
plural forms.
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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (3)
4. verbs:
examples: (from Elgin 211)
ic cepe
ðu cepest
he
heo
cepeð
hit
we cepað
ge cepað
hi cepað
“I keep”
“you keep”
he
she keeps
it
“we keep”
“you keep”
“they keep”
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Note: Historical
development of
English
Old English: ~7th
century to end of
11th century
Middle English:
~1100-1500
Modern English:
after 1500
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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (4)
5. Other examples:
Old English about 7th century to 11th century (1066)
1. 8 forms of “the” (Nash 110):
2. example (Framkin and Rodman)
“The Man Slew the King” (6 possible word order in Old Eng.)
a. se man sloh ðone cyning.
b. ðone cyning sloh se man.
c. se man ðone cyning sloh.
d. ðone cyning se man sloh.
e. sloh se man ðone cyning.
f. sloh ðone cyning se man.
se: definite article only with
subject
ðone: definite article only with
object. So, with the article (&
suffixes), word order wasn’t
so important— but now word
order (and preposition, too) is
crucial in modern English.
Comparisons:
The man slew the king.
Therefore, word order matters now.
The king slew the man.
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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (5)
This change (reduction of Eng. inflections)
related to Great Vowel Shift (phonological
change)—which made it hard to distinguish
the endings—necessitated other changes
in order for the lang. to remain clear &
processible, also quick & easy, &
expressive (which could also be related to
processes of child lang. acquisition) so,
suffixes dropped out, Eng. word order
becomes stricter and prepositions become
more important.
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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (6)
6. Mandarin:
related to monosyllabic questions—ancient
Mandarin: monosyllabic; but phonological
changes caused many formerly distinct syllables
(morphemes) to become homophonous (e.g. 要,
藥). “Threat of too many homophonous
morphemes forced Mandarin to dramatically
increase the proportion of polysyllabic words.” (Li
and Thompson 14)
Homophone: a word that sounds the
same as another, but is different in
spelling, meaning, and origin. e.g.
“knew” and “new” are homophones.
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Polysyllable: a word that
contains more than 2 or 3
syllables. e.g. “unnecessary”
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Lexical Changes (1)
Lexical Changes (Nash 111-14; Yule 221-22)
It’s not difficult to add words to a language (as
seen in “Morphology,” many derivational
processes); Words can be added, lost, or
changed.
Addition
Loss of words
Change in meaning
Broadening
Narrowing
Shifting
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Lexical Changes (2)
1. Addition
a. derivational
processes
b. borrowing (a process, not a reason)
Majority of English words (as in a dictionary)
are borrowed. But, most of the most
frequently used words are native to English
(100 most frequent words—all native; of
next 100, 83—native  out of corpus of
50,000 words).
Why so many borrowed words?  History
of Eng. language.
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Lexical Changes (3)
Historical development of English:
Old English (OE): ~7th century to end of 11th
century (or 450 ~1150)
Angles, Saxons, Jutes from northern Europe
invaded the British Isles in 5th century spoke
Germanic languages developed into earliest
form of English. 6th to 8th centuries converted
to Christianity—this brought Latin influence
alphabet, many borrowed words. 8th to 9th
centuries Viking invaders brought another
language influence: old Norse. (many settled
there).
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Lexical Changes (4)
Middle English (ME): ~1100-1500 (or 1150 ~1500)
Norman invasion in 1066: ruling class used
French—the nobility, government, law, church
leaders. But, the language of common people:
still English.
e.g. (low-class and high-class people used
different words) cow/beef; pig/pork;
sheep/mutton; calf/veal; deer/venison.
Colonial/imperial periods: (economic imperialism now)
e.g. curry, tea, pajama (from India).
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Lexical Changes (5)
Renaissance: 14th~17th century
 Greek and Latin represented LEARNING (still an
influence in scientific terminology)
 Borrowed words also got lost: “Of the more than ten
thousand new words brought into English during the
16th and 17th centuries, only about half are still in use”
(Clairborne 162).
Note: half doesn’t mean bad at all.
 Borrowing can be “direct” or “indirect”
“algebra”: Arabic  Spanish  English
“grammar”: Greek  Latin  French  English
Any Eng. Japanese Taiwanese?
e.g. tomato, beer, truck, 秀逗 , lighter, slippers
Modern English: after 1500
Economic domination ofYun-Pi
US:
McDonald’s, microsoft,25
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Costco, etc.
Lexical Changes (6)
2. Loss of words:
Borrowed words also got lost: “Of the more than
ten thousand new words brought into English
during the 16th and 17th centuries, only about half
are still in use” (Clairborne 162).
usually not as noticeable as borrowing—gradual
e.g. 1. from Shakespeare (Nash 113)
2. Hebrew—lost curse words, had to
borrow form Arabic (Nash 113)
3. avoidance of “bad words”: cock in
American English (Nash 113)
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Change in Meaning (1)
3. Change in meaning:
a. Broadening
holiday: “holy day”—now any day
without work (social change, too)
picture: now including “photograph”
sail: now a spaceship sails, too (Nash 114)
dog: used to mean a certain breed
of dog; now dogs in general (also
see “hound” below)
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Change in Meaning (2)
b. Narrowing
girl original: “young person of either
sex”
meat (Bible) = food; now animal flesh
used as food (Nash 114)
hound original: “dog of any type”;
now usually “hunting dog”
wife original: “any woman”
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Change in Meaning (3)
c. Shifting
nice original: “ignorant”
bead original: “prayer”
silly original: “happy” (OE)  ”naïve”
(ME) “foolish” (Modern English)
Shift through borrowing:
“footing” (borrowed from English) in
Spanish = “jogging”
“lady-like” (in English): 她很 “lady”
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III. Reasons for Change (1)
External (social) reasons:
Socio-political upheavals
New ideas, inventions, new things from
other countries
Other social reasons
Internal reasons: natural ling. processes
Child language acquisition
Speaker errors
Preference for regular systems
Competing pressures
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III. Reasons for Change (2)
A. Social Reasons (external reasons)
1. Socio-political upheavals:


Wars, invasions: such as Norman invasion
of England in 1066; Japanese occupation
of Taiwan; religious conversions
Chinese civil war (geographical/physical
separation): differences in Mandarin
between Taiwan and Mainland China
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III. Reasons for Change (3)
2. New ideas, inventions, new things
from other countries
Television, computer, (set off whole big
range of changes: “window,” “modem,”
“hard copy,” “mouse”), technological
development, tea (words plus whole
associated list of tea utensils, tea-making
processes), toufu, pizza, 比薩, 漢堡, etc.
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III. Reasons for Change (4)
3. other social reasons:
social gender/class/status differences:
female: leads to standard, prestigious use
male: vernacular, non-standard lang. use
social interaction:
tightly knitted community, few interaction
with outside world fewer changes
population:
multilingual more changes
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III. Reasons for Change (5)
B. Internal reasons: natural linguistic processes:
1. child language acquisition:
 No one teaches them. Children build their own
grammar from what they hear; it gradually
becomes more and more similar to adult
grammar, but never exactly like adult grammar.
Moreover, they hear many different speakers,
who each have a slightly different grammar.
 A “tenuous transmission process”–each new
user of the language “has to ‘recreate’ for himor herself the language of the community.”
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Speaker Errors (1)
2. speaker errors:
 assimilation


as a speaker error (Nash 107)
sound change:
e.g. gamel gamble; thuner thunder;
tener tender
release /m/ as a stop,
both bilabial (/m/ and
/b/)
alveolar (both /n/ and /d/ )
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Speaker Errors (2)
 reversal of position of phonemes
e.g. “comfortable” very often pronounced
/kΛ mftɚ bl/ (Nash 107)
e.g. metathesis (OE Modern E): involves
a reversal in position of two adjoining
sounds. For example, bridd  bird; hros
horse; frist first (a similar e.g. of
metathesis by modern cowboy as a
dialect variant within modern Eng.: purty
good pretty good); in some American
English dialects: ask  aks (Yule 220)
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Speaker Errors (3)
 spelling pronunciations: (Nash 107)
Pronunciations have been affected
by word spellings.
 e.g.
often /ftən/, sword, singer
[Note: Chinese examples should be
called a “writing pronunciation,” not a
spelling pronunciation. e.g. 太空
“梭”“俊“; 癌 vs. 炎; 床笫之事; 莘
莘學子; 龜裂; 占卜; 病入膏肓; 一丘之貉]
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III. Reasons for Change (5)
3. preference for regular systems: (Nash 117)
(Universal Operating Principle—“Avoid exceptions”)
 e.g. 1. Singular/plural nouns
cow—kine (pl.) cows
bandit—banditti (pl. Italian) bandits
agendum (sing.)—agenda (pl.) agenda
(singular)--agendas (plural)
pizza—pizze (pl.) pizzas (pl.)
syllabus—syllabi (pl.)  syllabuses
 e.g. 2. Irregular past tense forms:
sweep—swept  sweeped
light—lit lighted
dream—dreamt dreamed
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III. Reasons for Change (6)
4. competing pressures: (the 4 Rules)
 e.g. involved in case endings change
(one change leading to another)

sound change: first affected endings, then
something had to happen to maintain
processibility and expressiveness  strict
word order and more prepositions)
 e.g., for “quick and easy”:

abbreviations replace longer original forms

e.g., laser
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IV. Historical Linguistics (1)
A. Comparative reconstruction (Yule 213-17)


“Linguistic investigation of this type…focuses on the
historical development of languages, and attempts to
characterize the regular processes which are involved in
language change.” (Yule 213 bottom)
Note: regular processes = rule governed
Scholars noted certain similarities between different
languages (e.g. Sanskrit—Latin—Greek), some very
far apart geographically (see Yule 214 chart). Linguists
studied these similarities; examined older written
materials (when available); hypothesized a common
ancestor—on the basis of the similar features and the
development that would be traced through older
records.
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IV. Historical Linguistics (2)
Cognates:
(1) words that have descended from a common
source (as shown by systematic phonetic and
often semantic similarities) are called cognates.
(2) (2) possible family connection between different
languages within groups (Yule 215).
(3) (3) A word in one lang. which is similar in form
and meaning to a word in another lang.
because both langs. are related.
e.g. (Eng.) brother vs. (German) bruder
(Note: sometimes words in 2 languages are similar
in forms and meaning, but are borrowings and not
cognate forms. e.g. (Swahili) kampuni= a borrowing
from (English) “company”)
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Germanic Languages (Cognates)
More closely related : Eng. Dutch, German,
Swedish
English
Dutch
German Swedish Turkish
/mæn/
/mAn/
/mAn/
/mAn/
adam
man
/hænd/ /hAnt/
/hAnt/
/hAnd
el
hand
/fut/
/fu:s/
/vu:t/
/fo:t/
ayak
/brŋ/ /breŋe/ /brŋe /briŋA/ getir
foot
bring
n/
Note: Turkish is not a Germanic language because
vocabulary items fail to show systematic similarities.
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Cognates vs. Non-cognates
Which language is unrelated?
English Russian Turkish
Hindi
two
dva
iki
do
three
tri
üč
tin
brother
brat
kardeš
bhaya
nose
nos
burun
nak
(nahi)
Note: English, Russian, Hindi distantly related because they belong
to different smaller families (i.e. Germanic, Slavic, Sanskrit).
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Some General Principles
So, from this kind of comparison—with
much larger set of cognates (data)—
many regular processes of change
(rules) were figured out. [Note: all this
is sound (phonological) change.]
1. The majority principle (see Yule 216)
2. The most natural development
principle
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The Most Natural Development
Principle







a. final vowels often disappear
b. voiceless sounds become voiced
between vowels and before or after
voiced consonants (“assimilation”)
c. stops become fricatives (“weakening”)
d. consonants become voiceless at the end
of words
e. consonants become palatalized before
front vowels. (relevant to the split of
Mandarin consonants, Nash 106)
f. (other) fricatives become /h/
g. difficult consonant clusters become
simplified.
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Language Families
B. Some results of comparative
reconstruction: (Yule 214 chart)
Language families: about 30 language
families identified so far (+ 4,000 languages)
Family Trees: (see slides #42,43—Language Family Trees)
1. Indo-European
2. Sino-Tibetan
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Indo-European Languages
Proto-Indo-European
Germanic
Celtic
Italic
Hellenic
Balto-Slavic
Baltic
(Latin)
Slavic
(Ancient Greek)
German
English
Dutch
Danish
Swedish
Norwegian
Icelandic
Yiddish
Afrikaans
etc.
IrishGaelic
ScotsGaelic
Welsh
Breton
Italian
Spanish
French
Portuguese
Romanian
Catalan
Romansch
Sardinian
Occitan
Greek
Latvian
Lithuanian
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Indo-Iranian
Indic
Iranian
(Sanskrit)
Russian
Polish
Czech
Bulgarian
SerboCroatian
Slovene
etc.
HindiUrdu
Bengali
Punjabi
Marathi
Gujarati
Romany
etc.
Persian
Pashto
Kurdish
etc.
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Sino-Tibetan Languages
Sino-Tibetan
Tibeto-Burman
Sinitic
Miao-Yao (?)
(# of tones)
Burmese
Szechuan Northern Mandarin
Tibetan
N.
India
Nepal
Burma
Tibet
Sharpa
Central Mandarin
Yunnan
Newari
Shanghai
(4)
Miao Yao
(5)
Southwest Mandarin (5)
Hsiang
(6)
Hakka
(6)
Wu
(7)
Min-pei
(7)
Min-nan
(7)
Cantonese
(8)
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South China,
Vietnam,
Laos,
Thailand
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Language Classification
Genetic vs. typological classification:
Genetic classification
comparative reconstruction: show
historic relationships and changes
Typological classification
another way to classify languages is
by structural similarities
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Typological Classification (1)
Similar word order patterns
SOV: Japanese, Korean, Turkish
SVO: English, Chinese (sort of)
VSO: Hebrew, Welsh, Maasai (language in
Kenya)
Morphology—word structure
Isolating
Agglutinating
Synthetic/inflectional
polysynthetic
Phonological systems
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Isolating Languages
Isolating (analytic) languages:
E.g., Mandarin Chinese (& English to a great
extent), Cantonese, Vietnamese, Laotian,
Cambodian
All of its words consist of a single
morpheme (root), so there’re few bound
morphemes (affixes); e.g., 我的﹐我們
Categories such as number and tense
must therefore be expressed by a free
morpheme (a separate word); e.g. 我有一
本 or 很多本書，他吃飯了 or 他吃了飯
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Agglutinating Languages
Agglutinating languages:
E.g., Turkish (one-to-one correspondences)
Making extensive use of words containing
two or more morphemes (a root and one or
more affixes).
Each affix is clearly identifiable and
characteristically encodes a single
grammatical contrast; e.g., affixes in Turkish:
ev = “house,” ev-ler = “houses” (“ler” marks
plurality), ev-ler-de = “in the houses” (“de” = “in”)
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Synthetic/inflectional Languages
Synthetic/inflectional languages
 Several-to-one correspondences
 Example:
Russian
 Affixes
often mark several grammatical
categories simultaneously.
 e.g. Ptits-i peli (=Birds sang.)
 A single inflectional affix (i.e., “I”) indicates:
 (1)
the noun belongs to the feminine
gender class (i.e., the N’s gender class)
 (2) the noun is plural (its number)
 (3) N functions as subject (its grammatical role)
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Polysynthetic Languages
Polysynthetic languages:
 e.g.
Swahili, native languages of North
America
 Long strings of bound forms (or affixes) are
united into single words (which may be
equal to entire sentence in English).
e.g. ni ta ku penda (Swahili)
I-will-you-love (“I will love you”)
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A Mix Language: English
English: a mix language
1. lots of isolating—free morphemes, function
words
2. also agglutinating—in derivational
morphemes. For example, “unwillingness”
3. some synthetic—pronouns (person, gender,
number, case, all in one form)
e.g. “he”=the third person, singular,
masculine subject
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Phonological Systems
3. Phonological systems
 Tone/intonation language: Chinese/English
 Stress time vs. syllable time language:
 Stress
time: rhythm is based on the
stressed syllable (i.e., Eng. poetry); the
stressed syllable is more important
 Syllable time: syllable = unit of rhythm;
stressed or not, every syllable receives
more or less equal time
 English vs. French, Spanish, (and maybe
Chinese)
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Genetic and Typological Lang (1)
Genetically related languages may be
different typologically.
E.g., Eng. + Russian distantly related
genetically, which are very different
typologically.
Russian: highly inflectional, extensive
case system, free word order
English: few inflections, almost no case
marking, fixed word order
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Genetic and Typological Lang (2)
Typologically similar languages
may be unrelated genetically.
Chinese & Vietnamese: both isolating
languages, but genetically unrelated.
Hebrew & Massai: both VSO languages,
but genetically unrelated.
Chinese & Thai (5 tones): both tone
languages, but genetically unrelated.
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Review
Is language change for better or worse? Is it
inevitable?
Can you give some examples about language
change at phonetic & phonological, morphosyntactic, and lexical level?
What are the reasons for change?
How are languages classified?
Name four Germanic languages.
Define the terms: cognates, isolating
languages, agglutinating languages, and the
majority principle.
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