Historical linguistics
Language classification and
change
Classification
• Genetic
• Typological
• Areal
A very important discovery

Jones [1788] described Sanskrit:

Sanskrit has a wonderful structure; more
perfect than the Greek, more copious
than the Latin, and more exquisitely
refined than either, yet bearing to both of
them a stronger affinity … than could
possibly have been produced by
accident.
Language families
• “Family trees”: linguists love trees!
• The world has many (how many?) languages
• They can be traced back to a small number of
families
– Which families do English and Chinese belong to?
• The word “family” is used to describe different
levels, so it is vague
– The highest level node can also be referred to as the
Proto-language, for example PIE
Cognates
• Words from the same root
– Maternal and madre both come from mater
– (which 3 languages, please?)
• Yule 184-187 show how linguists can
rebuild PIE and other proto-languages
• Read “Word Reconstruction” carefully
• Understand the example
• Do study question 3, including the
reasons
Change in grammar and
vocabulary
• Read about Syntactic changes and
Semantic changes
• Try Research Task D
Typological classification
• SVO SOV…
– 6 possible types
• Pro-drop vs non-pro-drop
– Can you remember this? What is Chinese?
• Accusative (Japanese, Latin) vs ergative (Basque) (from
wikipedia.org) (Japanese? German?)
Areal linguistics
• There is no genetic relationship between
languages, but they still share features,
and they are spoken in the same region
• Balkan linguistic union
– Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian are
all IE languages
– However, they are not closely related
– And yet they share certain grammatical
features (case, tense etc.)
East Asian sprachbund
• Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai
and others are probably unrelated genetically
(like Chinese & English, also unrelated)
• Various shared features
–
–
–
–
Tone
Classifiers
Monosyllabic morphemes
Topic-comment constructions
• こちらは 田中さんです。
• 你的衣服,怎么这么脏? (wiki again)
– Politeness (changing in Chinese)
Lexical borrowing
• Lots of languages borrow extensively from English
• You can probably think of many words in Chinese… how
about the other way round?
• This is not really part of language classification though
• Domain-specific borrowing
– Legal / administrative vocab zh  vn
– Cooking fr  en
– Philosophy de  en
• Calque
– Skyscraper  gratte-ciel (fr), Wolkenkratzer (de), 摩天樓 (zh)
– Brainwash, runway (can you say why?)
English  Chinese loans
• Phonologically similar
– Easy to think of many examples
• Calque/phonological hybrid
– 冰淇淋
• 蹦及
– Cross-straits difference
• 電子郵件, 伊媚兒, EMAIL
• SIZE, CASE
• Taiwan Office English (why??)
– 麻煩你把candidate的resume fax 給我, 我明天要
interview他.
Sociolinguistics
Variation in language
• What are
– Accent?
– Dialect?
– Language?
• Draw a tree
– For English (me)
– For Chinese (students)
• Give some examples of lexical differences,
from English and Chinese.
Social factors in accent
• Differences in accent
– What are the 3 main reasons one accent differs from another?
• Place; ____; ____.
• Accent differences
– Taiwan Mandarin vs standard Mandarin
– English
• Labov (1987) investigated “4th floor” pronunciation, in
NYC
– 3 department stores (Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, and Klein’s)
– “higher class” speakers pronounce the /r/
• Trudgill (1974) in the UK
– Found that “higher class” speakers do not pronounce the /r/
Register: describe the
differences, please
• Would you mind giving me your full
attention please?
– Shut up!
• I am writing to inform you
– Just wanted to let you know
• That is truly marvelous
– That really rocks (what does rock mean?)
• t/v distinctions
Diglossia
• This happens in a bilingual society
• Each variety is used
– With different people
– In different situations
– Or for different purposes
• An easy example of this phenomenon, please?
• Usually there is said to be an H. variety, and an
L. variety. Can you guess what H. and L. mean?
• Also Singapore; Philippines; England in the
Middle Ages; many other examples
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (almost
certainly incorrect, but interesting anyway!
• Sapir and Whorf, in the 1930s, said that
language determines culture
– Hopi (American Indian language) has a feature +/animate
– Hopi words for cloud and stone are animate
– Whorf concluded that clouds and stones are animate
in the Hopi world-view
• Can you disprove the S-W hypothesis, using
the knowledge you have of Spanish, French,
Hungarian or German?
What was that all about?
• Definition of language
• Description of the different levels of
language. Analyzing
– Sounds
– Words
– Sentences
– Meaning
And then…
• Language and the mind
– How language is acquired
– How things sometimes go wrong
• Today’s introduction to historical linguistics
and language in society
• Thanks for coming!