LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Early Modern English, Historical Linguistics

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8 Jun 2018

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Monday, November 13th, 2017

Language Change:

• All languages change over time – this is an inevitable and constant process

• All aspects of language are subject to this type of change

• Phonetics / phonology

• Morphology

• Syntax

• Lexicon

• Semantics

• Usage

Historical linguistics

• Historical linguistics is the study of how and why languages change

• Diachronic perspective – studies historic development of a language or languages. (compares

the language with itself at different stages of its development)

• diachronic: From Greek: dia (thru, accross) + chronos (time)• Synchronic perspective – Study

of language at one point in time

(usuall o – the modern form of a language). • From Greek: syn (same, together) + chronos

(time)

• Historical linguists may also study changes revealed in the comparison of related languages,

often called comparative linguistics.

• We say that languages are related to one another when they descend from a single original

language, a common ancestor

• Example - the modem Romance languages (which include Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese

and others) descend from earlier Latin

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