Historical linguistics

Language classification and change

Classification

• Genetic • Typological • Areal

A very important discovery

 Jones [1788] described Sanskrit:  Sanskrit has 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 … than could possibly have been produced by accident.

Language families

• “Family trees”: linguists love trees!

• The world has many (how many?) languages • They can be traced back to a small number of families – Which families do English and Chinese belong to?

• The word “family” is used to describe different levels, so it is vague – The highest level node can also be referred to as the Proto-language, for example PIE

Cognates

• Words from the same root –

Maternal

and

madre

both come from

mater

– (which 3 languages, please?) • Yule 184-187 show how linguists can

rebuild

PIE and other proto-languages • Read “Word Reconstruction” carefully • Understand the example • Do study question 3, including the

reasons

Change in grammar and vocabulary

• Read about Syntactic changes and Semantic changes • Try Research Task D

Typological classification

• SVO SOV… – 6 possible types • Pro-drop vs non-pro-drop – Can you remember this? What is Chinese?

• Accusative (Japanese, Latin) vs ergative (Basque) (from wikipedia.org) (Japanese? German?)

Areal linguistics

• There is no genetic relationship between languages, but they still share features, and they are spoken in the same region • Balkan linguistic union – Albanian, Greek, Bulgarian and Romanian are all IE languages – However, they are not closely related – And yet they share certain grammatical features (case, tense etc.)

East Asian sprachbund

• Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai and others are probably unrelated genetically (like Chinese & English, also unrelated) • Various shared features – Tone – Classifiers – Monosyllabic morphemes – Topic-comment constructions • • こちらは 田中さんです。 你的衣服 , 怎么这么脏 ? (wiki again) – Politeness (changing in Chinese)

Lexical borrowing

• Lots of languages borrow extensively from English • You can probably think of many words in Chinese… how about the other way round?

• This is not really part of language classification though • Domain-specific borrowing – Legal / administrative vocab zh  – Cooking fr  en – Philosophy de  en vn • Calque – Skyscraper  gratte-ciel (fr), Wolkenkratzer (de), – Brainwash, runway (can you say why?) 摩天樓 (zh)

English



Chinese loans

• • • Phonologically similar – Easy to think of many examples • Calque/phonological hybrid – 冰淇淋 蹦及 – Cross-straits difference 電子郵件 , 伊媚兒 , EMAIL • SIZE, CASE • Taiwan Office English (why??) – 麻煩你把 candidate 的 resume fax 給我 , 我明天要 interview 他 .

Sociolinguistics

Variation in language

• What are – Accent? – Dialect?

– Language?

• Draw a tree – For English (me) – For Chinese (students) • Give some examples of lexical differences, from English and Chinese.

Social factors in accent

• Differences in accent – What are the 3 main reasons one accent differs from another?

• Place; ____; ____.

• Accent differences – Taiwan Mandarin vs standard Mandarin – English • Labov (1987) investigated “4 th floor” pronunciation, in NYC – 3 department stores (Saks Fifth Avenue, Macy’s, and Klein’s) – “higher class” speakers pronounce the /r/ • Trudgill (1974) in the UK – Found that “higher class” speakers do

not

pronounce the /r/

Register: describe the differences, please

• Would you mind giving me your full attention please?

– Shut up!

• I am writing to inform you – Just wanted to let you know • That is truly marvelous – That really rocks (what does

rock

mean?) • t/v distinctions

Diglossia

• This happens in a bilingual society • Each variety is used – With different people – In different situations – Or for different purposes • An easy example of this phenomenon, please?

• Usually there is said to be an H. variety, and an L. variety. Can you guess what H. and L. mean?

• Also Singapore; Philippines; England in the Middle Ages; many other examples

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (almost certainly incorrect, but interesting anyway!

• Sapir and Whorf, in the 1930s, said that language determines culture – Hopi (American Indian language) has a feature +/ animate – Hopi words for

cloud

and

stone

are animate – Whorf concluded that clouds and stones are animate in the Hopi world-view • Can you

disprove

the S-W hypothesis, using the knowledge you have of Spanish, French, Hungarian or German?

What was that all about?

• Definition of language • Description of the different levels of language. Analyzing – Sounds – Words – Sentences – Meaning

And then…

• Language and the mind – How language is acquired – How things sometimes go wrong • Today’s introduction to historical linguistics and language in society • Thanks for coming!