ACCTG 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel, Comparative Anatomy, Sociolinguistics
Introduction to Linguistics II History of Linguistics Summer Term 2020
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History of Linguistics
Earliest description of language
4th centry BCE: A description of the Sanskrit language by Indian grammarian Panini.
Comparative reconstruction
1786 Discovery of regular sound correspondences among
languages spoken in Europe, India, and Persia.
Correspondence in thousand of words.
-> Conclusion: Languages are related to one another, because they come from a common ancestor.
To find out What the common ancestor might have been, researchers use the procedure of
comparative reconstruction = Reconstruction of What must have been the original (or 'proto') form
in the ancestral language.
A language family tree
Friedrich von Schlegel [1772 – 1829] drew from comparative anatomy and biology
-> Family tree of grammatical structures
Comparative reconstruction
Cognates: Words of similar structure, of similar or identical meanings in various languages.
Introduction to Linguistics II History of Linguistics Summer Term 2020
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The Swadesh list
A list of words chosen for their assumed universal availability in as many languages as possible.
-> Used to access the genealogical relatedness of languages and the dating of language divergence.
The task of defining (and counting the number) of cognate words in the list is far from trivial,
and often is subject to dispute, because
• cognates do not necessarily look similar for example, English "wheel" and Sanskrit chakra are
cognates, although they are not recognizable as such without knowledge of the history of both
languages.
• recognition of cognates presupposes knowledge of the sound laws of these languages.
• especially Ioan words present a big problem (olive, motor, kangaroo, coffee, etc.).
Methods used in comparative reconstruction
• Majority principle
The majority of words will have retained the original sound.
e.g. ph -> p -> f because more Indo-European languages have a ph-sound.
• Most natural development principle
Certain types of sound change are very common, others are unlikely
(this also applies to the direction: we have loss of final sounds rather than addition)
e.g. ph -> p -> it is much easier for a p to become a f.
• General knowledge of sound change
e.g. The Great Vowel shift in the middle English and early modern English
-> Because Vowels change quickly, comparative reconstruction only works with consonants.
Historical linguistics
• Try to find cognates
• Specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages
• Determine their relatedness
• Group the into language families
