Historical Linguistics

1
Historical Linguistics

• Language history
• drift change by internal development
• contact change by external borrowing
• Possible relations among languages
• family tree
• similarity due to separate development from
  common ancestor
• diffusion of traits
• similarity due to borrowing in period of contact
• or, no provable relationship
• Tasks of historical linguistics
• inference of historical connections
• reconstruction of proto languages

2
Sir William Jones

• Lawyer appointed in 1783 to superintend British
  jurisprudence in India
• Life-long friend of Benjamin Franklin, and
  supporter of the American revolution
• Founded the Asiatic Society in Calcutta for
  Inquiring into the History, Civil and Natural,
  the Antiquities, Arts, Sciences, and Literature,
  of Asia
• Learned Sanskrit because the laws of the natives
  must be preserved inviolate but the learning and
  vigilance of the English judge must be a check
  upon the native interpreters

3

• Known as Oriental Jones
• One of the early European orientalists
• Cross-cultural pioneers?
• Agents of colonial domination?

4
Historical Context

• The British in India
• piecemeal conquest 1750-1900
• began with trade concessions in Calcutta and
  Bombay
• expanded one principality at a time
• mixture of direct and indirect rule
• many Indian institutions left in place
• rule mainly administered and enforced by Indians
• until 1850s, administration was in the hands of
  the East India Company rather than the British
  Crown

5
India in 1785
6
Jones learns Sanskrit (1783-1786)

• Sanskrit
• Language of Hindu holy texts (1000 BC)
• Formalized by grammarians c. 600 BC
• Preserved to the present day as a language of
  religion and learning
• No Brahman would teach a foreigner
• Jones hired a vaidya (doctor) as tutor while the
  Brahmanic scholars were away on a religious
  retreat

7
Jones Third Discourse (1786)

• Anniversary addresses to the Asiatic Society
• First Discourse purposes and procedures of the
  Society
• Second Discourse a detailed research program
• Third Discourse on the nations of Asia

The five principal nations, who have in different
ages divided among themselves, as a kind of
inheritance, the vast continent of Asia, with the
many islands depending on it, are the Indians,
the Chinese, the Tartars, the Arabs, and the
Persians who they severally were, whence and
when they came, where they now are settled, and
what advantage a more perfect knowledge of them
all may bring to our European world, will be
shown, I trust, in five distinct essays the last
of which will demonstrate the connexion or
diversity between then, and solve the
great problem, whether they had any common
origin, and whether that origin was the same,
which we generally ascribe to them.
8
Historical context II

• In 1786, scholars were still trying to locate the
  Garden of Eden, date Jasons expedition for the
  golden fleece, etc.
• But the idea of language comparison as historical
  evidence was in the air
• Catherine the Great (Empress of Russia) made up a
  list of 286 words, which was sent in 1784 to
  leaders around the world (including Washington
  and Franklin) for assistance in gathering
  translations
• In Notes on the State of Virginia (written
  1781-82)Thomas Jefferson cited language
  comparison as the best proof of the affinity of
  nations which ever can be referred to

9

• How many ages have elapsed since the English,
  Dutch, the Germans, the Swiss, the Norwegians,
  Danes and Swedes have separated from their common
  stock? Yet how many more must elapse before the
  proofs of their common origin, which exist in
  their several languages, will disappear? It is to
  be lamented then that we have suffered so many
  of the Indian tribes already to extinguish,
  without our having previously collected and
  deposited in the records of literature, the
  general rudiments at least of the languages they
  spoke. Were vocabularies formed of all the
  languages spoken in North and South America,
  preserving their appellations of the most common
  objects in nature, of those which must be present
  to every nation barbarous or civilised, with the
  inflections of their nouns and verbs, their
  principles of regimen and concord, and these
  deposited in all the public libraries, it would
  furnish opportunities to those skilled in the
  languages of the old world to compare them with
  these, now or at a future time, and hence to
  construct the best evidence of the derivation of
  this part of the human race.

Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of
Virginia. London 1787.
10

• Methods of comparison were not established
• accidental or spurious similarities can be taken
  out of context to show any desired
  relationship
• Hypotheses were often fanciful
• e.g. Welsh as one of the Lost Tribes of Israel
• Jones was careful about conclusions and evidence
• since I have no system to maintain, and have not
  suffered imagination to delude my judgment since
  I have habituated myself to form opinions of men
  and things from evidence I will assert nothing
  positively, which I am not able satisfactorily to
  demonstrate.
• But his hypotheses were revolutionary!

11
Jones Indo-European Hypothesis

• The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity,
  is of 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, both in the
  roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than
  could possibly have been produced by accident so
  strong indeed, that no philologer could examine
  them all three, without believing them to have
  sprung from some common source, which, perhaps,
  no longer exists there is a similar reason,
  though not quite so forcible, for supposing that
  both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended
  with a very different idiom, had the same origin
  with the Sanskrit, and the old Persian might be
  added to the same family.

12
Indo-European Examples
English Latin Greek Sanskrit
father pater patêr pitar
brother frater phrater (fellow tribesman) bhratar
two duo duo dva
three tres treis tryas
four quattuor tettares catvaras
seven septem hepta sapta
13
Jones methods

• Analyst must be perfectly acquainted with the
  languages compared
• Meanings of proposed cognates must be nearly
  identical
• Vowels should not be disregarded
• No metathesis or unexplained consonant insertions
• Transliterations must be systematic and careful
• Use basic vocabulary, not exotic words more
  likely to be borrowed

14
Others were not so careful

• By a careful inspection of the vocabularies, the
  reader will find no difficulty in discovering
  that in Asia the languages of the tribes of the
  Delaware-stock may be all traced to ONE COMMON
  SOURCE. Nor do I limit this observation to the
  languages of the American tribes just mentioned
  HITHERTO, WE HAVE NOT DISCOVERED IN AMERICA ANY
  TWO, OR MORE LANGUAGES BETWEEN WHICH WE ARE
  INCAPABLE OF DETECTING AFFINITIES (AND THOSE VERY
  OFTEN STRIKING) EITHER IN AMERICAN, OR IN THE OLD
  WORLD.

New Views of the Origin of the Tribes and Nations
of America Benjamin Smith Barton M.D., Professor
of Materia Medica, Natural History and Botany,
in the University of Pennsylvania (1798)
15

• Thomas Jefferson disagreed

imperfect as is our knowledge of the tongues
spoken in America, it suffices to discover the
following remarkable fact. Arranging them under
the radical ones to which they may be palpably
traced, and doing the same by those of the red
men of Asia, there will be found probably twenty
in America, for one in Asia, of those radical
languages, so called because, if they were ever
the same, they have lost all resemblance to one
another. A separation into dialects may be the
work of a few ages only, but for two dialects to
recede from one another till they have lost all
vestiges of their common origin, must require an
immense course of time perhaps not less than
many people give to the age of the earth. A
greater number of those radical changes of
language having taken place among the red men of
America, proves them of greater antiquity than
those of Asia.
Notes on the State of Virginia, 1787
16
The controversy continues

• (Like Barton) Joseph Greenberg (1987)
• All American languages in three groups
• Eskimo-Aleut
• Na-Dene
• Amerind
• (Like Jefferson) Other scholars
• The Amerind category is a fiction
• There are
• 60 unrelated families in N. America
• 19 unrelated families in C. America
• 80 unrelated families in S. America

17
Different methods

• Mass comparison
• Cognate ratios (lexicostatistics)
• Glottochronology
• Typological features
• e.g. classifier systems
• Comparative reconstruction
• Determination of systematic sound laws
• Lexical and morphological reconstruction

18
Laws of sound change

• Meaning change is usually sporadic
• Sound change is usually systematic, e.g.
• t/d deletion (best, past, lost, etc.)
• short a raising (camera, man, vanish, etc.)
• Neogrammarian hypothesis (1870)
• All sound change is systematic
• Apparent exceptions analysis is incomplete
• Article of faith with scholars known asthe
  young grammarians

19
Grimms Law

• Jakob Grimm (1822)
• Gradation of consonant manner
• bh dh gh -gt b d g
• b d g -gt p t k
• p t k -gt f th h
• pater father labium lip
• tres three duo two
• canis hound ager acre
• bhratar brother
• dha do
• vah wagon

20
Verners Law

• Karl Adolf Verner (1875)
• Fixes gaps in Grimms Law
• voicing after accentless vowels
• applies to non-Grimms Law cases as well
• from PIE to Gothic in four algorithmic steps
• PIE p_at_tér
• GL f_at_thér
• (vowels) fathár
• VL fadár
• AS fádar

21
More on sound change

• Well attested in recent history
• I.e. English Great Vowel Shift

• Can study sound change in progress today
• Tends to produce tree-like histories.
• operates on the system as a whole
• isnt easily borrowed across languages

22
Problems with comparative reconstruction

• Requires detailed knowledge of languages involved
• Must be enough cognates for patterns to emerge
• and layers of borrowing to be identified and
  discarded
• Maximum time depth of 5-10K years
• (Jefferson was right)

23
Cognate percentages

• Catherine the Greats method
• make a list of appellations of the most common
  objects in nature, of those which must be present
  to every nation barbarous or civilised
• Standard lists devised by Morris Swadesh around
  1950
• For each pair of languages, estimate the
  proportion of cognate words
• Raw result is a table of percentages
• like a table of trip distances

24
Example
Central Yambasa languages (Cameroon)
25
Questions about lexicostatistics

• Genetic descent vs. borrowing
• borrowing creates non-tree structures
• Variability of rate of change
• Swadesh 14 per millenium
• Expected rate of false cognates
• How to combine with other evidence
• Inference of tree structure
• from cognate percentages
• from detailed account of shared traits