Historical linguistics

1
Historical linguistics

• Language contains the traces of historical events
• loanwords
• innovation and obsolescence
• shifts in word meaning

2
Loanwords

• We borrow (to put it nicely) words from other
  languages
• food/entertainment/animals
• What limits borrowing?
• A perfectly good existing word
• Institutional constraint upon borrowing
• Tendency to create neologisms

3

• Loanwords reflect
• situations of cultural contact
• linguistic fashions (who is it cool to copy
  from?)
• The degree to which a culture is open to new
  influences and phenomena, and the words to go
  with them

4
Innovations

• Neologisms -- making up new words out of known
  elements
• scientific language/medicine
• use of Sanskrit neologisms in India
• slang
• English derivational morphology means that
  innovations are rife in this language
  (eye-candy/pre-loved)

5
Obsolescence

• Experience / semantic domain
• decline of one means the loss of the other
  (technical language to do with archaic
  activities)
• Loss or replacement
• slang can be volatile
• need to translate Shakespeare

6
Exciting words weve lost...

• hoddypeak
• fadoodle
• glop
• ug
• quim

7
Other kinds of change...

• Extension - virtue
• Narrowing - mete deor
• Shift - word is applied to new contexts -
  navigator
• Amelioration - nice, mischievous
• Pejoration - hag notorious

8

• Innovations fit well into system
• Loanwords
• come in at once, as unique event
• conform to phonological and morphological rules
  of existing system (tarantula)
• we eventually forget that theyre there ...

9
Sound change

• A slower, internal change to system
• Over time, consistent changes in the phonemic
  system create changes in language
• Look at the more stable semantic domains
• body parts/numbers/kin terms

10

• Language and culture?
• Several languages may exist within a national
  entity, even a cultural entity
• Any given language may be spoken by culturally
  diverse people (French is spoken in France,
  Africa, Caribbean and parts of SE Asia)