A S L 3 Lecture Notes - Lecture 29: Morris Swadesh, Swedish Greeks, Historical Linguistics
Document Summary
Figuring out how human language works was long the province of philosophy, rhetoric, literary analysis. A dhy y formal description of the sanskrit language by. Sanskrit, the sacred language, was changing, but ritual. Rules of grammar were set out for learning and required exact verbal performance. understanding the archaic language. P nini"s description contains rules formulated by his predecessors, in a tradition from the tenth to the seventh centuries bc. Grammar was considered the most scientific of the sciences in india, and the scholars in other areas aspired to the ideal embodied in the hindu grammatical tradition. 1786: discovery of regular sound correspondences among languages spoken in europe, English /f/ sound often corresponds to a /p/ sound in, among others, latin and sanskrit: English latin sanskrit father pater pitar full plenus purnas for per pari. Correspondences found in thousands of words could not be due to chance or to mutual influence.
