historical linguistics
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zompist bboard • View topic - Bizarre Sound Changes
[I was sure there was a thread like this once, but I can't find it] [[the info in this post is mostly from various articles by Robert Blust, as well as a chapter he authored in Linguistic Change and Reconstruction Methodology ]] [[[also note that in some places in this post I've written [j] as "y", but these cases shouldn't cause any confusion]]] Most people here probably know that the regular reflex in Armenian of PIE initial *dw is erk ( *dw → erk /#__ , as in erku "two" from PIE *dwo- ), since it's basically the paradigm example of weird correspondences and/or sound changes (though the individual steps the change went through were probably not terrible weird; there's some evidence it went something like *dw- > *dg- > *tk- > *rk- > erk- ). But there's plenty more examples! A number of Austronesian languages have had weird or even crazy sound changes.
A metaplasm [ 1 ] is a change in the orthography (and hence phonology ) of a word. Originally it referred to techniques used in Ancient Greek and Latin poetry , or processes in those languages' grammar . [ edit ] Sound change
Metaplasm
Grammaticalization
In linguistics , grammaticalization (also known as grammatization , grammaticization ) is a process by which words representing objects and actions (i.e. nouns and verbs ) transform through sound change and language migration to become grammatical markers ( affixes , prepositions , etc.). Grammaticalization is a powerful aspect of language, as it creates new function words within language, by separating functions from their original inflectional and bound constructions (i.e. from content words ). It is a field of research in historical linguistics , in the wider study of language change , which focuses on a particular process of lexical and grammatical change.
Nostratic languages
A phylogenetic representation of Nostratic as proposed by Bomhard (2008). Nostratic is a hypothetical language family (sometimes called a macrofamily or a superfamily ) that includes many of the indigenous language families of Eurasia , including the Indo-European , Uralic and Altaic and Kartvelian languages. Usually also included are the Afroasiatic languages native to the North Africa , the Horn of Africa , the Arabian Peninsula and the Near East , and the Dravidian languages of the Indian Subcontinent (sometimes extended to Elamo-Dravidian , connecting India and the Iranian Plateau ). The exact composition and structure of the family varies among proponents. The hypothetical ancestral language of the Nostratic family is called Proto-Nostratic . [ 1 ] Proto-Nostratic would necessarily have been spoken at an earlier time than the language families descended from it, which would place it in the Epipaleolithic period, close to the end of the last glacial period . [ 2 ]
Harry Bowman a écrit: > (Pour ceux qui se demandent, une date scission de 7000 ans se traduit > Apparenté à 20% en glottochronologie standard, et 10.000 années se traduit > Apparenté à 10%). Pour 20% cognats à rester après 7000 années, le taux moyen de rétention devrait être 89,14% pour 1000 années (0,8914 ^ 14 = 0,20. Maintenant, si par "Glottochronologie standard", on entend que dans IJAL origine de Swadesh Article de 1950, le taux de rétention qu'elle suppose est de 81% calculé sur son 200-élément de la liste. 0.81 ^ 14 = 0,0523, c'est à dire 5%. Ainsi, sur les 200 items la liste que vous êtes susceptible de trouver 10 mots apparentés.
Nostratic - sci.lang
Proto-Human language
The Proto-Human language (also Proto-Sapiens , Proto-World ) is the hypothetical most recent common ancestor of all the world's languages . The concept of "Proto-Human" presupposes monogenesis of all recorded spoken human languages. It does not presuppose monogenesis of these languages with unrecorded languages, such as those of the Paleolithic or hypothetical Neanderthal languages . Advocates of linguistic polygenesis do not accept the notion of a fully developed Proto-Human language and consider the world's language families independent developments of a proto-linguistic form of communication used by archaic Homo sapiens . If the assumption of a "Proto-Human" language is accepted, its date may be set anywhere between 200,000 years ago (the age of Homo sapiens ) and 50,000 years ago (the age of behavioral modernity ). [ citation needed ] [ edit ] TerminologyMost scholars agree that all of today’s languages descend from a common ancestral language, Proto-Human, which was spoken by behaviourally modern humans (BMHs) some time between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago. (Some theories equate BMHs with anatomically modern humans, which developed around 200,000 years ago; others believe that BMHs arose around the time of the “cultural explosion” 50,000 years ago. We might discuss this issue at more length in another posting.)
Was Proto-Human an SOV language? | Historical Linguistics
Pseudoscientific language comparison is a form of pseudo-scholarship that has the objective of establishing historical associations between languages by naive postulations of similarities between them. While comparative linguistics also studies the historical relationships of languages, linguistic comparisons are considered pseudoscientific by linguists when they are not based on the established practices of comparative linguistics, or on the more general principles of the scientific method . Pseudoscientific language comparison is usually performed by persons with little or no specialization in the field of comparative linguistics.
Pseudoscientific language comparison
Mass comparison is a method developed by Joseph Greenberg to determine the level of genetic relatedness between languages. It is now usually called multilateral comparison . The method is rejected by most linguists ( Campbell 2001 , p. 45), though not all. In spite of widespread skepticism about his method, some of the relationships established by Greenberg gradually came to be generally accepted (e.g. Afro-Asiatic and Niger–Congo ). Others are widely accepted though disputed by some (e.g.
Mass comparison
In the previous posting , I outlined the recently proposed theory by Gell-Mann and Ruhlen on the origin and evolution of word order. According to their proposal, the most recent common ancestor of all currently living human languages, Proto-Human, had the SOV order. They reconstruct this by examining word orders in modern languages, as well as in some earlier languages.
The evolution of word order and “free word order” languages | Historical Linguistics
Jespersen's Cycle
Jespersen's Cycle (JC) is a series of processes in historical linguistics , which describe the historical development of the expression of negation in a variety of languages, from a simple pre-verbal marker of negation, through a discontinous marker (elements both before and after the verb) and in some cases through subsequent loss of the original pre-verbal marker. The term originated in the 1979 publication Typology of Sentence Negation by Swedish linguist Östen Dahl . [ 1 ] Dahl coined it in recognition of the pioneering work of Otto Jespersen in identifying this pattern of language change . [ 2 ] [ edit ] IntroductionDeriving Proto-World
Deriving Proto-World with tools you probably have at home Discussions of 'Proto-World' have gotten quite a bit of press lately-- not as much as Di's divorce, but about as much as any topic in historical linguistics ever gets. Is there anything to it? Very probably not-- which is a pity, because getting back to Proto-World sounds like a lot of fun, and now it seems like the only alternative is to wait for aliens to come by who had a tape recorder running one or two hundred thousand years ago. Hans Henrich Hock gave a talk at CLS 29 on Ruhlen and Greenberg's "world etymology" maliq'a 'swallow, throat', pointing out quite a few serious methodological problems. It may be worth repeating some of his points.How likely are chance resemblances between languages?
The first rule is, you must not fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool. --Richard Feynman On sci.lang we are often presented with lists of resemblances between far-flung languages (e.g. Basque and Ainu, Welsh and Mandan, Hebrew and Quechua, Hebrew and every other language, Basque and every other language), along with the claim that such resemblances "couldn't be due to chance", or are "too many" to be due to chance. Linguists dismiss these lists, for several reasons.Most classical greek texts were in the Middle East to begin with, not the West. The Italian penninsula was the only remotely civilized area before the end of antiquity; you can't fault the West for classical Greek texts starting out in Asia Minor, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt. But the West did preserve what the West had before the fall of Rome, and if you've ever looked at any 6th through 11th century texts, you know this. Most Roman texts - Cicero, Catullus, Marcus Aurelius, Pliny, the Stoics generally - were preserved in the West. The Greek texts that the West didn't preserve very well were metaphysical, and included theological texts as well - Aristotle's metaphysics, most of Plato, Greek gnosticism, Clement and Origen of Alexandria, etc.