Language History, Language Change, and Language Relationship: An Introduction to Historical and Comparative Linguistics

Language ◽  
1998 ◽  
Vol 74 (3) ◽  
pp. 642
Author(s):  
Joseph F. Eska ◽  
Hans Henrich Hock ◽  
Brian D. Joseph
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Comparative Linguistics ◽  
Language History

Language Change and Movement as Seen by Historical Linguistics

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Nurse
Keyword(s):  
West Africa ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Historical Linguistics ◽  
Linguistic Features ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Change Over Time ◽  
Comparative Linguistics ◽  
Language Boundaries ◽  
Over Time

The focus of this chapter is on how languages move and change over time and space. The perceptions of historical linguists have been shaped by what they were observing. During the flowering of comparative linguistics, from the late 19th into the 20th century, the dominant view was that in earlier times when people moved, their languages moved with them, often over long distances, sometimes fast, and that language change was largely internal. That changed in the second half of the 20th century. We now recognize that in recent centuries and millennia, most movements of communities and individuals have been local and shorter. Constant contact between communities resulted in features flowing across language boundaries, especially in crowded and long-settled locations such as most of Central and West Africa. Although communities did mix and people did cross borders, it became clear that language and linguistic features could also move without communities moving.

scholarly journals Comparative sociolinguistic perspectives on the rate of linguistic change

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Terttu Nevalainen ◽  
Tanja Säily ◽  
Turo Vartiainen
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Sociocultural Factors ◽  
Specific Topic ◽  
Linguistic Change ◽  
Comparative Linguistics ◽  
Historical Sociolinguistics ◽  
Contact Linguistics ◽  
Historical Comparative ◽  
Social And Cultural Factors

AbstractThis issue of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics aims to contribute to our understanding of language change in real time by presenting a group of articles particularly focused on social and sociocultural factors underlying language diversification and change. By analysing data from a varied set of languages, including Greek, English, and the Finnic and Mongolic language families, and mainly focussing their investigation on the Middle Ages, the authors connect various social and cultural factors with the specific topic of the issue, the rate of linguistic change. The sociolinguistic themes addressed include community and population size, conflict and conquest, migration and mobility, bi- and multilingualism, diglossia and standardization. In this introduction, the field of comparative historical sociolinguistics is considered a cross-disciplinary enterprise with a sociolinguistic agenda at the crossroads of contact linguistics, historical comparative linguistics and linguistic typology.

scholarly journals Explorative Journey Through Hadith Collections

2021 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Orhan Elmaz
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Linguistics ◽  
Late Antiquity ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Geographical Area ◽  
Comparative Linguistics ◽  
Concrete Objects ◽  
Middle Persian ◽  
Southern Arabia ◽  
Early Islamic

The article offers insight into a fresh way to utilise hadith collections beyond criticising their material in terms of their authenticity or discussing their implications for Islamic law. It builds on a digital corpus of collections to represent the wealth of canonical Sunni, Shia and Ibadite traditions. In this first exploration of this corpus, the interconnectedness of early Islamic Arabia with other parts of world is highlighted through an analysis of travelling words, proper names, and concrete objects in a few case studies organised into five sections by geographical area. These include translation, a Wanderwort, and contact through commerce and trade. The methods applied to analyse the material are those of historical and comparative linguistics. The results indicate that exploring linguistic aspects of hadith collections—notwithstanding editorial revision and their canonisation—can inform studies of language change in Arabic and set the course to research the standardisation of Arabic. Key words:      Hadith Studies, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, Middle Persian, Southern Arabia, Late Antiquity

scholarly journals GAYO LANGUAGE IS OLD MALAY (A DIALECTOLOGY STUDY: THE LANGUAGE CHANGE)

2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Abdussalam Abdussalam ◽  
Salami Mahmud
Keyword(s):  
Social Environment ◽  
Language Change ◽  
Native Speakers ◽  
Language Variation ◽  
Research Subjects ◽  
Language History ◽  
Data Error ◽  
Bahasa Indonesia

An interdisciplinary linguistic which studies the problem on language variation is so called Dialectology. The variation of language happens on the usage that is caused by the change of social environment and place for ages. Language variation can be found in the form of accent, sub dialect, dialect, or that of language. Studying a language variation means also to trace the language history. Geographically, language variation can show where the speaker comes from. Linguistics distinctions analyzed in dialectology are phonetics, morphemic, and lexical variations. However, in this study, phonological and lexical variations are discussed. Glosses used are Ogden's 850 basic words which have been translated into Bahasa. The research subjects are 18 Gayo native speakers. Six of them become primary informants and the rests are as secondary ones. Methods of acquiring data used are cakap-simak (speak and listen) as well as tulis-rekam (write and record). The discovered data from the informants are crosschecked with the standardized words of Kamus Besar Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian Great Dictionary). Then, the distance of word variations are determined by using dialectometry formula. The result are: 165 words = 19,41% lexical differences, 305 words = 35,88% phonetically differences, and 380 words = 44,71% without difference, neutral or zero. By regarding 1% data error tolerant, it can be concluded that Gayo language is Old Malay that has “accent variation = 20,41%" compared to New Malay or Bahasa Indonesia.

scholarly journals Le discours médiatique parlé et la norme en français

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-50
Author(s):  
Primož Vitez
Keyword(s):  
Language Change ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Language History ◽  
Television Shows ◽  
Short Period ◽  
Single Speaker ◽  
The Media ◽  
Vocal Intensity ◽  
Language Strategies ◽  
The Impact

The system of French accentuation is a relevant case of a language change, observable in a relatively short period of time in a stable synchrony. Since the mid-twentieth century, the formation of linguistic norms has largely depended on a specific type of utterance, media discourse, continually available in spoken audio-visual media. The impact of spoken media on the development of linguistic expression in the last few decades is unprecedented in language history. It is based on a communicational model in which speech is produced by a single speaker and instantly perceived by a multitude of receivers who have no possibility of intervening in the communicational process. Thus the receivers are passively exposed to an exclusive speaker and to language strategies conceived by the media and its linguistic authority. The analysis of two professional spoken interventions, uttered on French television, shows an important modification of the traditional accentual system: conserving the final accent (FA), the speakers systematically introduce an initial accent (IA), a landmark in the evolution of the French language and its normative features. The IA affects the first syllable of a stressed lexeme or the first syllable of an extended accentual unit, regardless of the syntactic function of the stressed morpheme. The FA is operated by the intonational action, while the IA seems to be realized by an accentual augmentation of vocal intensity. The automatism of lexical stressing is generating a systematic accentuation of the first syllable of the accentual unit. The IA mostly affects lexemes that speakers insist on because of their informative value (numerals, adverbs, proper names), but an important part of IA concerns different proclytics, such as deictic elements, articles and determinants. Accentual limitation of the unit on both sides is a specific feature of the speech in French audio-visual media. In recent decades it has found its echo in the normative speech of French linguistic communities.

Morphology in Dene-Yeniseian Languages

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward Vajda
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Language Contact ◽  
Language Change ◽  
American Southwest ◽  
Comparative Linguistics ◽  
Verb Morphology ◽  
Contact Linguistics ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Northwestern North America ◽  
Finite Verb

Dene-Yeniseian is a putative family consisting of two branches: Yeniseian in central Siberia and Na-Dene (Tlingit-Eyak-Athabaskan) in northwestern North America. Yeniseian contains a single living representative, Ket, as well as the extinct Yugh, Kott, Assan, Arin, and Pumpokol languages. Na-Dene contains Tlingit, spoken mainly in the Alaskan Panhandle, and a second branch divided equidistantly between the recently extinct Eyak language of coastal Alaska and the widespread Athabaskan subfamily, which originally contained more than 40 distinct languages, some now extinct. Athabaskan was once spoken throughout interior Alaska (Dena’ina, Koyukon) and most of northwestern Canada (Slave, Witsuwit’en, Tsuut’ina), with enclaves in California (Hupa), Oregon (Tolowa), Washington (Kwalhioqua-Clatskanie), and the American Southwest (Navajo, Apache). Both families are typologically unusual in having a strongly prefixing verb and nominal possessive prefixes, but postpositions rather than prepositions. The finite verb arose from the amalgamation of an auxiliary and a main verb, both with its own agreement prefixes and tense-mood-aspect suffixes, creating a rigid, mostly prefixing template. The word-final suffixes largely elided in Yeniseian but merged with the ancient verb root in Na-Dene to create a series of allophones called stem sets. Na-Dene innovated a unique complex of verb prefixes called “classifiers” on the basis of certain inherited agreement and tense-mood-aspect markers; all of these morphemes have cognates in Yeniseian, where they did not innovate into a single complex. Metathesis and reanalysis of old morphological material is quite prevalent in the most ancient core verb morphology of both families, while new prefixal or suffixal slots added onto the verb’s periphery represent innovations that distinguish the individual daughter branches within each family. Other shared Dene-Yeniseian morphology includes possessive constructions, directional words, and an intricate formula for deriving action nominals from finite verb stems. Yeniseian languages have been strongly affected by the exclusively suffixing languages brought north to Siberia by reindeer breeders during the past two millennia. In modern Ket the originally prefixing verb has largely become suffixing, and possessive prefixes have evolved into clitics that prefer to attach to any available preceding word. Na-Dene languages were likewise influenced by traits prevalent across the Americas. Athabaskan, for example, developed a system of obviation in third-person agreement marking and elaborated an array of distinct verb forms reflecting the shape, animacy, number, or consistency of transitive object or intransitive subject. Features motivated by language contact differ between Tlingit, Eyak, and Athabaskan, suggesting they arose after the breakup of Na-Dene, as the various branches spread across northwestern North America. The study of Dene-Yeniseian morphology contributes to historical-comparative linguistics, contact linguistics, and also to the diachronic study of complex morphology. In particular, comparing Yeniseian and Na-Dene verb structure reveals the prominence of metathesis and reanalysis in processes of language change. Dene-Yeniseian is noteworthy not only for its wide geographic spread and for the effects of language contact on each separate family, but also for the opportunity to trace the evolution of uncommon morphological structures.

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