How Has Common Conversations Changed In Terms Of Language And Grammar?

Linguistics 001     Lecture 22    Linguistic communication Change

Types of Language Change

Language is always irresolute. We've seen that language changes beyond space and across social group. Language besides varies across time.

Generation past generation, pronunciations evolve, new words are borrowed or invented, the meaning of old words drifts, and morphology develops or decays. The rate of change varies, merely whether the changes are faster or slower, they build up until the "mother tongue" becomes arbitrarily distant and different. Later on a thousand years, the original and new languages will not be mutually intelligible. Subsequently ten yard years, the relationship will exist substantially duplicate from chance relationships between historically unrelated languages.

In isolated subpopulations speaking the aforementioned language, almost changes will non be shared. As a issue, such subgroups will drift apart linguistically, and eventually will not exist able to understand i another.

In the modernistic globe, language change is oft socially problematic. Long before divergent dialects lose mutual intelligibility completely, they begin to show difficulties and inefficiencies in communication, especially under noisy or stressful weather condition. Also, as people observe language change, they usually react negatively, feeling that the language has "gone down hill". You never seem to hear older people commenting that the language of their children or grandchildren's generation has improved compared to the language of their own youth.

Here is a puzzle: language change is functionally disadvantageous, in that information technology hinders communication, and it is besides negatively evaluated past socially dominant groups. Withal is is a universal fact of human history.

How and why does language change?

There are many different routes to language alter. Changes can take originate in language learning, or through language contact, social differentiation, and natural processes in usage.

Linguistic communication learning: Linguistic communication is transformed equally it is transmitted from 1 generation to the next. Each individual must re-create a grammar and lexicon based on input received from parents, older siblings and other members of the speech customs. The experience of each private is dissimilar, and the process of linguistic replication is imperfect, then that the result is variable across individuals. Nonetheless, a bias in the learning process -- for instance, towards regularization -- will cause systematic drift, generation by generation. In add-on, random differences may spread and become 'fixed', especially in pocket-size populations.

Language contact: Migration, conquest and trade bring speakers of one language into contact with speakers of another linguistic communication. Some individuals will become fully bilingual as children, while others learn a second language more than or less well equally adults. In such contact situations, languages oftentimes borrow words, sounds, constructions so on.

Social differentiation. Social groups prefer distinctive norms of apparel, adornment, gesture and and so forth; language is part of the package. Linguistic distinctiveness can be achieved through vocabulary (slang or jargon), pronunciation (ordinarily via exaggeration of some variants already available in the environs), morphological processes, syntactic constructions, and so on.

Natural processes in usage. Rapid or casual oral communication naturally produces processes such as assimilation, dissimilation, syncope and apocope. Through repetition, item cases may become conventionalized, and therefore produced even in slower or more careful speech. Discussion meaning change in a like way, through conventionalization of processes like metaphor and metonymy.

Some linguists distinguish between internal and external sources of language alter, with "internal" sources of change being those that occur within a single languistic community, and contact phenomena being the main examples of an external source of modify.

The analogy with evolution via natural choice

Darwin himself, in developing the concept of development of species via natural selection, made an analogy to the development of languages. For the analogy to hold, we demand a puddle of individuals with variable traits, a procedure of replication creating new individuals whose traits depend on those of their "parents", and a set of ecology processes that result in differential success in replication for different traits.

We can bandage each of the just-listed types of language alter in such a framework. For instance, in child language acquisition, different grammatical or different lexical patterns may exist more or less easily learnable, resulting in amend replication for grammatical or lexical variants that are "fitter" in this sense.

In that location are some primal differences betwixt grammars/lexicons and genotypes. For one matter, linguistic traits can be acquired throughout i'due south life from many unlike sources, although intitial acquisition and (to a lesser extent) adolescence seem to be crucial stages. Acquired (linguistic) traits can too be passed on to others. One consequence is that linguistic history demand not accept the grade of a tree, with languages splitting but never rejoining, whereas genetic evolution is largely constrained to have a tree-like form (despite the possibility of transfer of genetic textile across species boundaries past viral infection and then on). However, as a practical thing, the supposition that linguistic history is a sort of tree structure has been plant to be a good working approximation.

In detail, the basic sound structure and morphology of languages ordinarily seems to "descend" via a tree-structured graph of inheritance, with regular, lawful relationships between the patterns of "parent" and "child" languages.

Types of Change

Sound change

All aspects of language change, and a great bargain is know near general mechanisms and historical details of changes at all levels of linguistic assay. However, a special and conspicuous success has been achieved in modeling changes in phonological systems, traditionally called sound change. In the cases where we take access to several historical stages -- for instance, the development of the modern Romance Languages from Latin -- these sound changes are remarkably regular. Techniques developed in such cases permit usa to reconstruct the sound organisation -- and some of the vocabulary -- of unattested parent languages from information near daughter languages.

In some cases, an former sound becomes a new sound beyond the board. Such a modify occurred in Hawai'ian, in that all the "t" sounds in an older grade of the language became "k"s: at the time Europeans encountered Hawai'ian, in that location were no "t"south in it at all, though the closely related languages Tahitian, Samoan, Tongan and Maori all have "t"s.

Another unconditioned sound alter that occurred between Heart and Early on Mod English (around Shakespeare'due south fourth dimension) is known equally the Swell Vowel Shift. At that fourth dimension, in that location was a length distinction in the English vowels, and the Dandy Vowel Shift altered the position of all the long vowels, in a giant rotation.

The nucleus of the two loftier vowels (front end "long i" /i:/, and the back "long u" /u:/) started to drop, and the high position was retained but in the offglide. Eventually, the original /i:/ became /ai/ - so a "long i" vowel in Modern English is now pronounced /ai/ every bit in a word like 'bite': /bait/. Similarly, the "long u" found its nucleus dropping all the way to /au/: the before 'house' /hu:s/ became /haus/. All the other long vowels rotated, the mid vowels /eastward:/ and /o:/ rising to fill the spots vacated by the sometime /i:/ and /u:/ respectively, and then on. That is why the modern pronouns 'he' and 'she' are written with /e/ (reflecting the one-time pronunciation) but pronounced as /i/. In the post-obit chart, the words are located where their vowel used to be pronounced -- where they are pronounced today is indicated by the arrows.

In other cases, a sound change may exist "conditioned" so as to utilise in certain kinds of environments and not in others. For example, it's very common for tongue-tip ("coronal") consonants to become palatal when they are followed by high front vowels. The residue of this process tin be seen in English pairs similar divide/division, fuse/fusion, submit/submission, oppress/oppression.

Processes of sound change.

Another dimension along which we can look at sound alter is by classifying changes according to the particular process involved.

Absorption, or the influence of 1 audio on an adjacent sound, is perhaps the almost pervasive process. Assimilation processes inverse Latin /k/ when followed by /i/ or /y/, first to /ky/, then to "ch", and then to /s/, and so that Latin faciat /fakiat/ 'would make' became fasse /fas/ in Mod French (the subjunctive of the verb faire 'to make').Palatalization is a kind of assimilation.

In contrast to assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, and haplology tend to occur more sporadically, i.e., to touch individual words. Dissimilation involves a change in 1 of two 'aforementioned' sounds that are adjacent or almost next in a particular word such that they are no longer the same. Thus the get-go "l" in English colonel is inverse to an "r", and the word is pronounced like "kernel". Metathesis involves the change in order of two adjacent sounds. Crystal cites Modern English third from OE thrid , and Modern English language bird is a parallel case. Just Modern English bright underwent the opposite alter, its antecedent beingness beorht , and non all "vowel + r" words changed the relative social club of these segments equally happened with bird and third . Already by the time of Old English, there were two forms of the word for "ask": ascian and acsian . Nosotros don't know which form was metathesized from the other, but we practice know that ascian won out in the standard language. Haplology is similar to dissimilation, because it involves getting rid of similar neighboring sounds, simply this time, one audio is just dropped out rather than being inverse to a different sound. An example is the pronunciation of Modern English probably equally prob'ly.

Other sound change processes are merger, split, loss, syncope, apocope, prothesis, and epenthesis. Merger and split can be seen equally the mirror image of each other. A merger that is currently expanding over much of the The states is the merger between "short o" and "long open up o". The post-obit table contains examples of words that you probably pronounce differently if you lot are from the Philadelphia - New York - New England expanse, or if you are from the South. If you are from Canada, the American Midwest, or from California, you probably observe that the vowels in these pairs sound the same, rather than different. If this is the case, you accept a merger here.

Short "o"	Long "Open o"
cot hot hock stock	defenseless haughty hawk stalk

Splits are rarer than mergers, and usually arise when a formerly conditioned alternation loses the environment that provided the original conditioning, and the previously conditioned alternation becomes two contained sounds that contrast with each other. This is basically what happened when /f/ and /v/ split in English language (/v/ having previously been an alternating of /f/ when /f/ occurred in an intervocalic position).

Loss involves the loss of a audio from a linguistic communication, equally when Hawai'ian lost the /t/ in favor of /thou/ (meet below).

Syncope and apocope are the loss of medial and final sounds respectively. Middle English 'tame' in the by tense was /temede/. It lost both its medial and final vowels to get Modern English /teymd/. These are ordinarily conditioned changes that practice non involve loss of the same sound elsewhere.

Prothesis and epenthesis are the introduction of additional sounds, initially and medially respectively. The addition of the /e/ that made Latin words like scola 'school' into Portuguese escola is the but instance of prothesis in foure historical linguistics textbooks I consulted. As for epenthesis, an instance other than the one Crystal cites was the /d/ inserted into ME thunrian to give us the Modernistic English thunder.

How do we know how languages are related?

Linguists rely on systematic sound changes to establish the relationships between languages. The bones idea is that when a change occurs within a spoken communication community, it gets diffused across the entire customs of speakers of the linguistic communication. If, however, the communities take split and are no longer in contact, a change that happens in one community does not get diffused to the other community. Thus a alter that happened between early and late Latin would testify up in all the 'girl' languages of Latin, simply once the belatedly Latin speakers of the Iberian peninsula were no longer in regular contact with other tardily Latin speakers, a change that happened at that place would not spread to the other communities. Languages that share innovations are considered to accept shared a mutual history autonomously from other languages, and are put on the same branch of the linguistic communication family tree.

Words in 2 or more daughter languages that derive from the same discussion in the ancestral language are known as cognates. Sound changes work to change the actual phonetic form of the word in the different languages, simply we can still recognize them as originating from a common source considering of the regularities within each language. For example, a alter happened in Italian such that in initial consonant clusters, the l that originally followed p and f inverse to i. Thus Italian words like fiore 'flower'; fiume 'river'; pioggia 'pelting'; and piuma 'feather' are cognates with the French fleur; fleuve; pluie; and plume, respectively, and with Spanish flora, fluvial (adj. 'riverine'); lluvia (past a later alter); and pluma respectively.

In the Romance languages beneath, the word for 'mother' is a cognate in all the six contemporary languages considered, all the same the give-and-take for 'male parent' is a cognate only in iv of the five: in Rumanian, the original word inherited from Latin pater has been replaced past a completely different word, tata.

Spanish and Italian are the but 2 that retain a phonological reflex of the original Latin medial consonant t, (in both languages, it has been voiced to d, probably a change that occurred in the common ancestor to all the dialects and languages of the Iberian peninsula. All the other Romance languages have dropped information technology. The original r has as well suffered dissimilar fates: however, within each language, the same thing happened in both words. Where nosotros find r deleted in final position in the give-and-take for 'mother', we also discover information technology deleted in the aforementioned position in the give-and-take for 'male parent'.

English Gloss		French	Italian	Spanish	Portuguese	Rumanian	Catalan
mother		mer	madre	madre	mae	mama	mare
father		per	padre	padre	pae	tata	pare

The same principles are applied in languages that do not have a written history. Several cognate sets in five languages of the Polynesian family are listed in the next table.

English Gloss		Tongan	Maori	Samoan	Tahitian	Hawai'ian
ane. bird		manu	manu	manu	manu	manu
2. fish		ika	ika	i?a	i?a	i?a
3. to eat		kai	kai	?ai	?ai	?ai
4. forbidden		tapu	tapu	tapu	tapu	kapu
5. middle		mata	mata	mata	mata	maka
6. blood		toto	toto	toto	toto	koko

We meet that no changes happened in the nasal consonants, nor in the vowels, but nosotros can detect in lines ii and 3 that wherever Tongan and Maori have /k/, Samoan, Tahitian and Hawai'ian appear to have /?/ (glottal stop). Apparently there has been an unconditioned change from /grand/ to /?/ in the Eastern branch, or a alter from /k/ to /thou/ in the Western branch of this family. Nosotros cull the kickoff as more than likely, partly because /t/ is a more common phoneme in the globe's languages, partly because backing of consonants is more mutual than fronting, and partly because of what nosotros know about the culture history: Polynesia was peopled from w to east, and if the change had occurred in the Western co-operative, that would have been at a time when all five languages were still i spoken communication community. Side by side, we see in lines 4 - 6 that in that location is a systematic correspondence between /t/ in the offset iv languages and /grand/ in the easternmost, Hawai'ian. This looks similar another systematic, unconditioned sound alter, this time in only one language. (We tin encounter from this example that when English borrowed the Polynesian word for "forbidden", we borrowed information technology from ane of the languages west of Hawaii -- we say "taboo", not "kaboo"). This is what a family tree of the five Polynesian languages would look like, based on the pocket-size data fix above (the picture is somewhat more circuitous when nosotros look at other cognate sets -- Maori in particular is probably not correctly placed in this diagram, which has been designed as an illustration of the method):

Historical Reconstruction vs. Lexicostatistics

In the examples simply discussed, the central enterprise has been to establish a systematic design of change, most ofttimes sound change: every original Malayo-polynesian /t/ becomes /thousand/ in Hawaiian, and we can cite many correspondences of cognate pairs to testify it. This level of agreement is useful for several reasons.

Kickoff, a systematic blueprint of phonological correspondence beyond many words is unlikely to have arisen by risk, whereas completely unrelated languages often develop surprising similarities in particular words, entirely by take a chance.

Second, given systematic patterns of this blazon, we can start to apply the comparative method to reconstruct the parent language. This in turn allows us to examine relationships amongst reconstructed languages at a greater time depth, fifty-fifty if the process of change entirely obscures the relationships among the vocabulary items in the kid languages.

However, establishing patterns of this blazon is hard. It requires a big vocabulary in all the languages being compared, in order to find enough cognates; and it besides requires a deep knowledge of the grammar of each of the languages, in order to run across cognate relationships that might be obscured by morphology and contextual phonological alter -- and non to exist fooled into seeing faux cognates where morphology or phonology accept created chance similarities.

Some other arroyo, pioneered by the American Structuralist linguist Morris Swadesh, is chosen lexicostatistics . For a fix of languages of interest, nosotros get a small vocabulary list of common, basic words (typically 100-200 items). For each pair of languages, nosotros decide the per centum of words on this list that announced to be cognate. Determination of cognation is dependent on the subjective judgment of the linguist, and we expect some errors, especially if the scholar does not know the languages very well, but nosotros hope that the mistake rate will be small enough not to touch the results.

We can then adjust these cognate percentages in a table, from which we draw some conclusions nigh the degree of relationship among the languages involved.

Hither is a recent instance, drawn from Cardinal Yambasa Survey Study, by Boone et al., discussing languages of the Centre Province of Cameroon:

Gunu [2 lists]
82	Elip
85	xc	Mmala [ii lists]
78	ninety	89	Yangben[ii lists]
77	81	81	88	Baca [two lists]
66	72	72	77	78	Mbule [two lists]
58	63	64	66	seventy	69	Bati
42	41	42	42	42	46	45	Hijuk [two lists]
39	38	41	38	37	40	41	88	Basaa

Table 5 New lexical similarity percentages for Central Yambasa
and selected neighbouring tongues

From this table, nosotros can conclude that Elip, Mmala and Yangben are "closely related speech varieties"; that they are somewhat more afar from Gunu, Baca and Mbule; that they are fifty-fifty more than distant from Bati; and that they are farther yet from Hijuk and Basaa. Based on this sort of consideration, we can construct a sort of family tree, only as we might based on patterns of audio change.

There has been a great bargain of controversy about whether family unit trees based on lexicostatistics are reliable. Those who doubt information technology point to the possibility that cognate percentages might be strongly affected by vocabulary borrowing, either in a negative or positive direction. For instance, Japanese borrowed many words from Chinese without becoming a Sino-Tibetan language; it has recently borrowed many words from English without becoming an Indo-European language. Those who favor lexicostatistics contend that this sort of borrowing is less common in the basic-vocabulary wordlists that they use.

At that place are two distinct controversies nearly the use of lexicostatistical methods. Ane result is whether the family trees produced for languages with fairly high cognate percentages (say 60% and higher) are a reliable indication of the detailed structure of "genetic" relationships amongst languages. Everyone accepts that two languages with 85% cognates are certainly related; the merely question is whether they are (necessarily) "more closely related" in a historical sense than either is to a language whose cognate percentages with both are (say) 80%.

For case, we might accept a situation in which proto-linguistic communication A splits into B and C. C in turn splits into D and E. E then undergoes a period of close contact with a completely unrelated language, Z, equally a issue of of which it borrows a lot of new vocabulary. At present E has a lower cognate percent with D than D has with B; only the historical fact is that Eastward is more than closely related to D than D is to B.

The 2d controversy is what to brand of relationships involving very low cognate percentages, say below 10%. Depending on the nature of the languages and the methods used to determine cognation, these percentages are getting into the range that could (it is argued) arise by take a chance, or by superficial or indirect recent contact.

Glottochronology

Swadesh and others took this type of analysis further, based on the idea that the average rate of loss of cognates could be regarded as constant over historical time, only similar the rate of radioactive decay. Swadesh looked at some languages where historical stages are well documented, and concluded that basic vocabulary decays past fourteen percent every millenium. According to the entry on Swadesh in the Encyclopedia of Linguistics:

Thus, if the basic vocabularies of two related languages are found to match by lxx percent, they tin can be assumed to have adult from a single language that existed approximately 12 centuries before.The assumption that basic vocabulary decay is more often than not compatible has been largely rejected. If one allows that languages, just similar societies, may develop at unlike rates at different times, the supposition of steady vocabulary disuse in detail, and the glottochronological method in general, is seriously undermined.

Everyone recognizes that linguistic decay is not completely uniform. Some people still believe that it is sometimes compatible enough for glottochronological methods to be a useful guess guide to linguistic (and thus ethnic) history.

What are the results of language change?

When accompanied by splits of populations, linguistic communication change results beginning in dialect divergence (the kinds of differences nosotros see between British and American English; between the French of French republic and of Quebec; between New Earth and Former Globe Spanish and Portuguese). Over longer time periods, we see the emergence of separate languages as in the gimmicky Romance languages, separated by about 2000 years, and the Germanic languages, whose divergence began perhaps 500 years earlier. Both of these families are part of Indo-European , for which the Ethnologue web page lists 425 languages! Though political considerations ofttimes intervene in whether a particular speech variety is considered to be a language or a dialect, the basic idea behind linguistic classifications is that dialects are mutually intelligible, whereas languages are non.

Of class, the question of intelligibility is always relative. The following phrases taken from the spontaneous voice communication of Chicagoans recorded in the early on 1990s were hard for many non-Chicagoans to sympathize correctly. In "gating" experiments designed to test cross-dialectal comprehension in American English, subjects first heard a word, then a slightly longer segment, then a whole phrase or sentence that may accept disambiguated the original mishearing. These experiments were part of the research project on Cantankerous-Dialectal Comprehension done at the Linguistics Lab hither at Penn (for more data on the Northern Cities Shift, come across "The Organization of Dialect Diversity" on the dwelling page of the Phonological Atlas of Northward America .)

Original segment	Many people misheard as	First expansion	Second expansion
driblet	??? (nonsense word containing vowel in "that")	massive driblet	the aeroplane was steady for a while and then information technology took a massive drop
socks	sacks	y'hadda wear socks	y'hadda article of clothing socks, no sandals
block	black	ane cake	old senior citizens living on one block
met	mutt	they met	my parents went to Cuba and that's where they met
steady	written report	steady for a while	the aeroplane was steady for a while and and then it took a massive drib
head	had	shook 'er caput	this woman in while, who just smiled at her and shook 'er head

These misunderstandings are based on the fact that the Chicago speakers (along with 40 - l million other people in the "Inland North" dialect including Rochester, Buffalo, Detroit, Syracuse, and other cities of that region) accept a rotation of their short vowels such that the low unrounded vowel of the "short o" words like driblet, socks, block, and hot is beingness fronted to the position where other American dialects accept words like that, hat, black, rap, and sacks, , and where "short e" words similar met, steady and head tin audio like mutt, study and thud or mat, static and had.

The Ethnologue data base includes more than 6700 languages spoken in 228 countries. They state that their "benchmark for listing spoken communication varieties separately is low intelligibility, as far as that can be ascertained."

How far back tin nosotros go?

Near linguists agree that our methods for reconstruction will take as only as far dorsum as near 5000 - 7000 years; afterwards that, the number of cognate sets bachelor for reconstruction becomes just too low to give results that tin be reliably distinguished from risk relationships. Although it would exist very satisfying to be able to link upwardly some of the existing families at a college level, the evidence seems as well weak to allow us to do then. A minority of scholars, however, argue that this is possible, and one particularly well-known group of such scholars goes by the proper name of Nostraticists, derived from their views that there exists a super-family of linguistic communication they take called the "Nostratic". A New York Times article from 1995 presents a well-balanced view of the Nostraticist position. Dr. Donald Ringe of the Penn Linguistics Department, himself an expert on the ancient Indo-European language Tocharian, is one of the principal critics of the Nostraticist position.

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Source: https://www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fall_2003/ling001/language_change.html

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