1. Historical linguistics
Language Change over Time

2. Change in Time
• The rate of change varies, but they build up until the "mother
tongue" becomes arbitrarily distant and different (cf. difficulty
in understanding some Brits or even Appalachians)
• After a thousand years, the original and new languages will
not be mutually intelligible (cf. English and German and
Dutch, and even more distantly English and Pashto (language
of Afghanistan))
• After ten thousand years, the relationship will be essentially
indistinguishable from chance relationships between
historically unrelated languages.
• Some changes take place in one generation (the cot-caught
merger), some take over hundreds of years (word order change
in Classic Chinese)

3. Historical Reconstruction
• When considering whether languages are
related, we look for systematic
correspondences between vocabulary items in
different languages
• Since the relationship between sound and
meaning is arbitrary (dog-chein-gou), these
differences aren’t expected accidentally

4. A Note of Caution
• Chance resemblance is possible, just not
common
• English bad, Persian bad “bad”
• Dutch elkaar “each other”, Basque elkar “each
other”
• Examination of the rest of the vocabulary of
these languages reveal that these are accidental

5. Another Note of Caution
• Borrowing
• We need to consider if the word is a new addition to
the language or if it is vocabulary that is native to the
language
• e.g. we don’t want to conclude that English and
Mandarin are related based on:
– English: /kɑfi/ “coffee, Mandarin: /kɑfe/ “coffee”
– Btw, the English term came from Arabic, by way of
Turkish and then Dutch

6. Classifying Languages
• These systematic correspondences (we’ll look at
them more in a moment) are used to classify
languages according to their origins.
• Languages are put into families (and sub-
families)
• the relationships between languages are described
using female terms: most often daughter (and
mother)

7. Indo-European (IE)
• An early sketch from the late 1800s, more or
less accurate even today

8. Italic
• The Romance languages descended from Latin
are the only Italic languages spoken today
• Ibero-Romance: Portuguese, Spanish
• Gallo-Romance: French, Catalan, Romansch
• Italo-Romance: Italian, Sardinian
• Balkano-Romance: Romanian

9. Germanic
• English is part of the Germanic family.

10. Clear Cognates
English Dutch Danish
one een en
two twee to
three drie tre
four vier fire
five vijf fem
six zes seks
seven zeven syv
eight acht otte
nine negen ni
ten tien ti

11. Classifying Languages: Indo-European
• We also notice that there are similarities
between Latin (Romance), English /
German (Germanic) and yet other
languages: Greek and Sanskrit, for
example.
• Sir William Jones, in the 1780s, was the
first to notice them.

12. More Distant Relatives
English Lithuanian Greek
one vienas heis
two du duo
three trys treis
four keturi tettares
five penki pente
six sheshi heks
seven septyni hepta
eight ashtuoni oktô
nine devyni ennea
ten deshimt deka

13. Classifying Languages: Indo-European

14. Language Classification: How?
We rely on two things:
• the Uniformitarian Principle
• The regularity of sound-change

15. The Uniformitarian Principle
‘knowledge of processes that operated in the past
can be inferred by observing ongoing
processes in the present’
or, for language:
‘Language must work now in the same way as it
ever did’

16. Regularity of Sound-Change
• Most of historical linguistics relies on the
assumption that
• sound-change is regular and exceptionless
• That is, any sound-change will affect all the
words that contain that (combination of)
sound(s).

17. “regular and exceptionless’
• Consider:
• OE cnafa /knava/ > ModE knave /nejv/
• OE cniht /knixt/ > ModE knight /najt/
• So what’s the rule?
• And what’s the ModE reflex of OE cyning
/kyniŋ/?

18. “regular and exceptionless’
• OE /kyniŋ/ > ModE /k ŋɪ /
• Why not /n ŋɪ /?
• Because the rule that deletes initial /k/ only
applies before /n/.
• So, the rule getting rid of initial /k/ is
exceptionless, but it has a specific
environment when it applies, just like
phonological rules

19. The Comparative Method
• If we assume that sound-change is regular
and exceptionless in this way, we can use
systematic comparison of languages to see the
relationships between them.
This is known as the Comparative Method.

20. Grimm’s Law
• Important result of the comparative method
• Grimm’s Law: consonant changes between
Proto-Indo-European and Proto-Germanic

21. Grimm’s Law
• p t k > f θ x
• became fricatives in Germanic, but stayed same in
Latin & Greek
• b d g > p t k
• devoiced in Germanic, but stayed same in Latin &
Greek
• bh dh gh > b d g
• deaspirated in Germanic, but fricatives in Latin (f,
f, h), devoiced in Greek (ph, th, kh), retained in
Sanskrit, Hindi

22. p > f
Sanskrit pita padam
Greek pate:r poda
Latin pate:r pedem
Gothic fadar fotu
English father foot
PIE *pǝter- *ped-
(majority rule here in the inference about PIE)

23. Completed Chain Shift
• e.g. The Great Vowel Shift

24. Chain Shift in Progress
• e.g. The Northern City Shift (around the Great Lakes,
esp Syracuse, Rochester, Detroit, Chicago)
• ӕ > ej (ɪj), ɑ > a (ӕ), ᴐ > ɑ, ɛ > ʌ, backing of ʌ
ɪ
a
ɛ →
↘

25. Northern Cities Shift
• ӕ > ej: laughs at it
• ɑ > a: on
• ᴐ > ɑ: all
• ɛ > ʌ: seventeen
• ʌ > ᴐ: fund

26. Phonological and Morphological
Change
• Old English had rich case inflection
• Modern English has almost none
• Phonological change led to morphological
change

27. Case
• Nominative = subject marker
• Accusative = object marker
• Dative = indirect object marker
• Genitive = possessive marker
Se cniht geaf gief-e þӕs hierd-es sun-e
the youth.NOM gave gift-ACC the shepherd-GEN son-DAT
“The youth gave the shepherd’s son a gift.”

28. Old English Case

29. Sound Changes
• Dative: consonant deletion results in loss of
plural –m
• All cases: unstressed vowels reduced to schwa
• All cases: schwa deleted
• So, what’s left?

30. Modern English
SG PL
NOM hound hounds
ACC hound hounds
GEN hound’s hounds’
DAT hound hounds

31. Morphological Change
• Reanalysis (folk etymology) – speakers
provide a morphological analysis that doesn’t
correspond (historically) to the derivation of
the word
• e.g. hamburger

32. Morphological Change
• Reanalysis
• e.g. earwig
• Old English: ēarwicga ear+insect
– would have been earwidge in Modern English
• “widge” is lost as an independent word
• Middle English: arwygyll ear+wiggle
• Modern English: earwig

33. Morpho-Syntactic Change
• e.g. Latin had no pronounced determiners
• the distinction between a and the (new vs old
information) was marked through word order
– latrâvit canis “a dog barked”
– canis latrâvit “the dog barked”

34. Morphological Change
• Over-regularization – irregular morphology becomes
regular
• e.g. Old English Comparatives
– Adjective + ra, with stem change (similar to certain
irregular past tense, e.g., say-said)
• long ~ lengra
– Adjectives + ra, no stem change
• wearm ~ wearmra
• Expected in Modern English:
• warm ~ warmer, long ~ lenger!
• Instead, overregularization yielded longer

35. Semantic Change
• Other examples of semantic change
– Broadening: dogge used to be a specific breed
– Narrowing:
• meat used to be “food” (flesh was “meat”)
• deer originally meant “animal” (cf the related
German word Tier “animal”), but became
restricted
– Shifting: nice used to mean “ignorant”

36. Syntactic Change
• Modern English:
– auxiliary verb raises to Tense
– main verb stays in VP
– result: main verb follows adverbs: John often went
skiing.
• French:
– auxiliary verb raises to Tense
– main verb raises to Tense
– result: verb (aux or main) precedes adverbs: John went
often skiing

37. Syntactic Change
• Old and Middle English:
Here men vndurstonden ofte by this nyght the night of synne
here men understood often by this night the night of sin

38. Syntactic Change
• Modern English
– I to C in questions
– result: aux verb to C in questions
• French
– I to C in questions
– result: verb (aux or main) to C in questions

39. Rise of ModE Patterns

40. Why do Languages Change?
• Natural processes in language use
– rapid or casual speech produces assimilation,
vowel reduction, deletion
– this pronunciation can become conventionalized,
and so end up being produced even in slower,
more careful speech

41. Child Language
• What’s natural for kids was natural for our
ancestors as well.
• “scant” was “skamt”: m became n in the
neighborhood of t (assimilation: K.I.S.S.)
history bug-gug: child

42. Why do Languages Change?
• Language Learning
• The child must construct their language based
on the input received
• This process is imperfect
• Bias towards regularization – learning an
irregular form requires more input
• Also random differences may spread,
especially through a small population

43. Why do Languages Change?
• Language Contact
• Through migration, conquest, trade
• Adults may learn the new language as a
second language
• Children may be fully bilingual
• Results in borrowing of words, sounds, even
syntactic constructions

44. Borrowing
• Borrowed words with sounds not in the
borrowing language may be “nativized”
– e.g. Russian does not have [h]
– German words with [h] borrowed into Russian
change to [g]
– German Hospital -> Russian gospital

45. Borrowing
• Or, the borrowed sounds may be incorporated
into the new language (Bach [x])
• If the borrowing is extensive enough, a new
phoneme may be added to the borrowing
language

47. Language change: good or bad?
• Not an aesthetic question!
• All stages of language are valid expressions of
our language instinct (Universal Grammar)
• Just as all languages and dialects are valid
expressions of our language instinct