Historical Linguistics

Language change revisited

• What causes or facilitates change
  • Geographical, political, social separation
  • Contact with other languages
  • Pressures favoring production or perception
  • Imperfect learning
  • Innovation
  • Analogy
  • Random fluctuation
• Why languages resemble each other
  • Universals and universal tendencies
  • Contact
    • Influence of one language on another, language areas
    • Language death
    • Pidginization, creolization
  • Chance
  • Genetic relationship

Reconstructing forms: the Comparative Method

• Correspondences between phonemes of related languages, dialects
• Cognate sets
• Reconstruction of sounds
• Example
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  • In looking for correspondences, we ignore the pairs meaning 'body', 'man', and 'where'. The Japanese word for 'west' and the Okinawan word for 'south' also appear to be cognates.
  • Among the correspondences are the following. Arrows show the direction of the change in each case, from the reconstructed form to the changed form.

    

  • Of these changes, we know that 4 must have preceded 2 because otherwise /akiti/ would be .