Language Change

1
Introduction to Linguistics

• Language Change

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• I. Introduction changea fact attitudes towards
  change
• II. Examples of change at all levels
• A. sound (phonetic and phonological)
• B. morpho-syntactic
• C. lexical changes
• III. Reasons for change
• A. External (social) reasons)
• B. Internal reasons natural linguistic
  processes
• a. child language acquisition
• b. speaker errors
• c. preference for regular systems
• d. competing pressures
• IV. Historical linguistics
• A. comparative reconstruction
• a. cognates
• b. non-cognates
• c. general principles
• B. results of comparative reconstruction lang.
  families
• C. language classification

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I . Introduction (1)

• Language change is an undeniable fact look at
  ancient Chinese, at Beowulf, at rapid changes in
  slang.
• Some people object to language change they want
  to protect and preserve pure and correct
  language.
• Examples (Nash 105) French law (in 1975)
  prevents the use of borrowed words (especially
  from English) in advertising le club, le bar, le
  hit parade, le weekend, les hot dog.
• But, fighting a losing battle, since fighting a
  natural process

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I . Introduction (2)

• All languages change all parts of the grammar
  can and do change phonology, morphology, syntax,
  lexicon, semantics, sociolinguistic rules, etc.
• Change can involve Addition, Loss and Shift
  (including individual elementse.g. a word added,
  lost, or shifts meaning and rules, too).

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II. Examples of Change

• Well talk about changes at three levels sound,
  grammar, and word.
• A. Phonetic and Phonological Changes
• Post vocalic r
• Addition of /?/, /v/ phonemes
• Loss of /x/
• Great vowel shift
• Mandarin consonant split
• B. Morpho-Syntactic Changes
• C. Lexical Changes
• Addition
• Loss of words
• Change in meaning

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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (1)

• A. Phonetic phonological changes
• 1. post vocalic r (Labov 1972 Yule 240-41)
• British no post vocalic r American with post
  vocalic r in general
• Some British and American varietiesBritish
  (high class also Boston, parts of NYC, parts of
  the south in the US) pronounce /r/ only when it
  comes before a vowel
• e.g. car, farm ? red
• (spelling shows it was there before)

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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (2)

• 2. Addition of /? /, /v/ phonemes (Nash 106)
• a. Before the Norman French invasion of
  England in 1066, there was no /? / in English.
  /? /?added to English through the influence of
  borrowed French.
• e.g. pleasure, measure, vision
• b. Also before the Norman invasion, Old English
  had no /v/ phoneme. French words that were
  borrowed into English (e.g. very, vain,
  vacation) stimulated the split of /f/ into two
  phonemes, /f/ and /v/.

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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (3)

• 3. loss of sound /x/ (Nash 106)
• voiceless velar fricative /x/ was in English,
  but disappeared between the times of Chaucer and
  Shakespeare.
• e.g. night /nIxt/, saw /saux/

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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (4)

• 4. great vowel shift (1400-1600) (Yule 220)
• e.g. mouse /maus/? /mus/
• house /haus/ ?/hus/ /u/ ? /au/
• out /aut/ ? /ut/
• Regular vowel sound change changes in a system
  are not haphazard, but regularthey occur not in
  isolated words, but in all words in a certain
  environment (i.e., /u/ ? /au/)

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Great Vowel Shift (1)

• The seven long or tense vowels of middle English
  underwent the following change

aI
au
u
i
o
e
?
?
?
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Great Vowel Shift (2)

• Examples from Yule 220
• Old Eng. Modern Eng.
• hus haws (house)
• wif wayf (wife)
• spon spun (spoon)
• br?k brek (break)
• h?m hom (home)
• /e/ /i/ geese
• /o/ /u/ goose
• /?/ /e/ name

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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (5)

• 5. Mandarin consonant split (see Nash 106)
• Six of each of the Mandarin consonants split into
  two phonemes.
• This split can be described by rule before /i/
  and /y/ (namely, ?), (high front vowel), each
  of the original phonemes became the corresponding
  palatal, - retroflex consonant.

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A Local vs. Widespread Change (1)

• These examples are all of widespread changesthe
  change spreads throughout the language there are
  also local changeswhich dont spread so farthus
  regional varieties.
• Examples of local change
• Parts of NYC /?/ ? /oi/ e.g., third, bird,
  heard, first ? thoid, boid, hoid, foist
• ????

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A Local vs. Widespread Change (2)

• a local change vs. a widespread change
• These two examples, great vowel shift ????
  example, can help to show that regional sound
  differences (accents) are not bad in any way, but
  are only examples of the results of natural sound
  changes which did not spread beyond certain
  areas. Thus, no dialect or variety of a language
  can claim to be superior to or purer than some
  other variety.

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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (1)

• Question formation
• Negative sentence formation
• Case endings
• Verbs
• Other examples
• Mandarin

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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (2)

• B. Morpho- syntactic changes (Nash 108-11 Yule
  221)
• 1. Q formation (Nash 108)
• 2. negative sentence formation (Nash 109)
• 3. case endings (Nash 109-110)
• Nouns (marked with suffixes)
• who/ whom questions (Nash 108)
• e.g. I dont know who/whom to give it to.
• (whom mainly in formal speech and writing)

Other remnants other pronoun forms (e.g., I/me,
he/ him, she/her), plural forms.
A remnant still in the process of changing
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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (3)

• 4. verbs
• examples (from Elgin 211)
• ic cepe I keep
• ðu cepest you keep
• he he
• heo cepeð she keeps
• hit it
• we cepað we keep
• ge cepað you keep
• hi cepað they keep

Note Historical development of English Old
English 7th century to end of 11th
century Middle English 1100-1500 Modern
English after 1500
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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (4)

• 5. Other examples
• Old English about 7th century to 11th century
  (1066)
• 1. 8 forms of the (Nash 110)
• 2. example (Framkin and Rodman)
• The Man Slew the King (6 possible word order
  in Old Eng.)
• a. se man sloh ðone cyning.
• b. ðone cyning sloh se man.
• c. se man ðone cyning sloh.
• d. ðone cyning se man sloh.
• e. sloh se man ðone cyning.
• f. sloh ðone cyning se man.
• Comparisons
• The man slew the king.
• The king slew the man.

se definite article only with subject ðone
definite article only with object. So, with the
article ( suffixes), word order wasnt so
important but now word order (and preposition,
too) is crucial in modern English.
Therefore, word order matters now.
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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (5)

• This change (reduction of Eng. inflections)
  related to Great Vowel Shift (phonological
  change)which made it hard to distinguish the
  endingsnecessitated other changes in order for
  the lang. to remain clear processible, also
  quick easy, expressive (which could also be
  related to processes of child lang. acquisition)?
  so, suffixes dropped out, Eng. word order becomes
  stricter and prepositions become more important.

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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (6)

• 6. Mandarin
• related to monosyllabic questionsancient
  Mandarin monosyllabic but phonological changes
  caused many formerly distinct syllables
  (morphemes) to become homophonous (e.g. ?, ?).
  Threat of too many homophonous morphemes forced
  Mandarin to dramatically increase the proportion
  of polysyllabic words. (Li and Thompson 14)

Homophone a word that sounds the same as
another, but is different in spelling, meaning,
and origin. e.g. knew and new are homophones.
Polysyllable a word that contains more than 2 or
3 syllables. e.g. unnecessary
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Lexical Changes (1)

• Lexical Changes (Nash 111-14 Yule 221-22)
• Its not difficult to add words to a language
  (as seen in Morphology, many derivational
  processes) Words can be added, lost, or
  changed.
• Addition
• Loss of words
• Change in meaning
• Broadening
• Narrowing
• Shifting

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Lexical Changes (2)

• 1. Addition
• a. derivational processes
• b. borrowing (a process, not a reason)
• Majority of English words (as in a dictionary)
  are borrowed. But, most of the most frequently
  used words are native to English (100 most
  frequent wordsall native of next 100, 83native
  ? out of corpus of 50,000 words).
• Why so many borrowed words? ? History of Eng.
  language.

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Lexical Changes (3)

• Historical development of English
• Old English (OE) 7th century to end of 11th
  century (or 450 1150)
• Angles, Saxons, Jutes from northern Europe
  invaded the British Isles in 5th century? spoke
  Germanic languages? developed into earliest form
  of English. 6th to 8th centuries converted to
  Christianitythis brought Latin influence?
  alphabet, many borrowed words. 8th to 9th
  centuries Viking invaders brought another
  language influence old Norse. (many settled
  there).

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Lexical Changes (4)

• Middle English (ME) 1100-1500 (or 1150 1500)
• Norman invasion in 1066 ruling class used
  Frenchthe nobility, government, law, church
  leaders. But, the language of common people
  still English.
• e.g. (low-class and high-class people used
  different words) cow/beef pig/pork
  sheep/mutton calf/veal deer/venison.
• Colonial/imperial periods (economic imperialism
  now)
• e.g. curry, tea, pajama (from India).

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Lexical Changes (5)

• Renaissance 14th17th century
• Greek and Latin represented LEARNING (still an
  influence in scientific terminology)
• Borrowed words also got lost Of the more than
  ten thousand new words brought into English
  during the 16th and 17th centuries, only about
  half are still in use (Clairborne 162).
• Borrowing can be direct or indirect
• algebra Arabic ? Spanish ? English
• grammar Greek ? Latin ? French ? English
• Any Eng. ?Japanese ?Taiwanese?
• e.g. tomato, beer, truck, ?? , lighter, slippers
• Modern English after 1500
• Economic domination of US McDonalds,
  microsoft, Costco, etc.

Note half doesnt mean bad at all.
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Lexical Changes (6)

• 2. Loss of words
• Borrowed words also got lost Of the more than
  ten thousand new words brought into English
  during the 16th and 17th centuries, only about
  half are still in use (Clairborne 162).
• usually not as noticeable as borrowinggradual
• e.g. 1. from Shakespeare (Nash 113)
• 2. Hebrewlost curse words, had to
  borrow form Arabic (Nash 113)
• 3. avoidance of bad words cock in
  American English (Nash 113)

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Change in Meaning (1)

• 3. Change in meaning
• a. Broadening
• holiday holy daynow any day without
  work (social change, too)
• picture now including photograph
• sail now a spaceship sails, too (Nash
  114)
• dog used to mean a certain breed of
  dog now dogs in general (also see hound
  below)

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Change in Meaning (2)

• b. Narrowing
• girl original young person of either
  sex
• meat (Bible) food now animal flesh
  used as food (Nash 114)
• hound original dog of any type now
  usually hunting dog
• wife original any woman

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Change in Meaning (3)

• c. Shifting
• nice original ignorant
• bead original prayer
• silly original happy (OE) ? naïve
  (ME)? foolish (Modern English)
• Shift through borrowing
• footing (borrowed from English) in Spanish
  jogging
• lady-like (in English) ?? lady

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III. Reasons for Change (1)

• External (social) reasons
• Socio-political upheavals
• New ideas, inventions, new things from other
  countries
• Other social reasons
• Internal reasons natural ling. processes
• Child language acquisition
• Speaker errors
• Preference for regular systems
• Competing pressures

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III. Reasons for Change (2)

• Social Reasons (external reasons)
• 1. Socio-political upheavals
• Wars, invasions such as Norman invasion of
  England in 1066 Japanese occupation of Taiwan
  religious conversions
• Chinese civil war (geographical/physical
  separation) differences in Mandarin between
  Taiwan and Mainland China

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III. Reasons for Change (3)

• 2. New ideas, inventions, new things from other
  countries
• Television, computer, (set off whole big range
  of changes window, modem, hard copy,
  mouse), technological development, tea (words
  plus whole associated list of tea utensils,
  tea-making processes), toufu, pizza, ??, ??, etc.

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III. Reasons for Change (4)

• 3. other social reasons
• social gender/class/status differences
• female leads to standard, prestigious use
• male vernacular, non-standard lang. use
• social interaction
• tightly knitted community, few interaction with
  outside world? fewer changes
• population
• multilingual? more changes

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III. Reasons for Change (5)

• B. Internal reasons natural linguistic
  processes
• 1. child language acquisition
• No one teaches them. Children build their own
  grammar from what they hear it gradually becomes
  more and more similar to adult grammar, but never
  exactly like adult grammar. Moreover, they hear
  many different speakers, who each have a slightly
  different grammar.
• A tenuous transmission processeach new user of
  the language has to recreate for him- or
  herself the language of the community.

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Speaker Errors (1)

• 2. speaker errors
• assimilation as a speaker error (Nash 107)
• sound change
• e.g. gamel? gamble thuner? thunder tener? tender

release /m/ as a stop, both bilabial (/m/ and /b/)
alveolar (both /n/ and /d/ )
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Speaker Errors (2)

• reversal of position of phonemes
• e.g. comfortable very often pronounced /k?
  mft? bl/ (Nash 107)
• e.g. metathesis (OE ?Modern E) involves a
  reversal in position of two adjoining sounds.
  For example, bridd ? bird hros ?horse frist
  ?first (a similar e.g. of metathesis by modern
  cowboy as a dialect variant within modern Eng.
  purty good ?pretty good) in some American
  English dialects ask ? aks (Yule 220)

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Speaker Errors (3)

• spelling pronunciations (Nash 107)
  Pronunciations have been affected by word
  spellings.
• e.g. often /?ft?n/, sword, singer
• Note Chinese examples should be called a
  writing pronunciation, not a spelling
  pronunciation. e.g. ????? ? vs. ? ???? ?
  ??? ?? ?? ???? ????

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III. Reasons for Change (5)

• 3. preference for regular systems (Nash 117)
• (Universal Operating PrincipleAvoid
  exceptions)
• e.g. 1. Singular/plural nouns
• cowkine (pl.)? cows
• banditbanditti (pl. Italian) ?bandits
• agendum (sing.)agenda (pl.) ?agenda
  (singular)--agendas (plural)
• pizzapizze (pl.) ?pizzas (pl.)
• syllabussyllabi (pl.) ? syllabuses
• e.g. 2. Irregular past tense forms
• sweepswept ? sweeped
• lightlit ?lighted
• dreamdreamt ?dreamed

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III. Reasons for Change (6)

• 4. competing pressures (the 4 Rules)
• e.g. involved in case endings change (one change
  leading to another)
• sound change first affected endings, then
  something had to happen to maintain
  processibility and expressiveness ? strict word
  order and more prepositions)
• e.g., for quick and easy
• abbreviations replace longer original forms
• e.g., laser

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IV. Historical Linguistics (1)

• Comparative reconstruction (Yule 213-17)
• Linguistic investigation of this typefocuses on
  the historical development of languages, and
  attempts to characterize the regular processes
  which are involved in language change. (Yule 213
  bottom)
• Note regular processes rule governed
• Scholars noted certain similarities between
  different languages (e.g. SanskritLatinGreek),
  some very far apart geographically (see Yule 214
  chart). Linguists studied these similarities
  examined older written materials (when
  available) hypothesized a common ancestoron the
  basis of the similar features and the development
  that would be traced through older records.

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IV. Historical Linguistics (2)

• Cognates
• words that have descended from a common source
  (as shown by systematic phonetic and often
  semantic similarities) are called cognates.
• (2) possible family connection between different
  languages within groups (Yule 215).
• (3) A word in one lang. which is similar in form
  and meaning to a word in another lang. because
  both langs. are related.
• e.g. (Eng.) brother vs. (German) bruder
• (Note sometimes words in 2 languages are
  similar in forms and meaning, but are borrowings
  and not cognate forms. e.g. (Swahili) kampuni a
  borrowing from (English) company)

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Germanic Languages (Cognates)
More closely related Eng. Dutch, German,
Swedish
English Dutch German Swedish Turkish
/mæn/ /mAn/ /mAn/ /mAn/ adam man
/hænd/ /hAnt/ /hAnt/ /hAnd el hand
/fut/ /vut/ /fus/ /fot/ ayak foot
/br??/ /bre?e/ /br??en/ /bri?A/ getir bring
Note Turkish is not a Germanic language because
vocabulary items fail to show systematic
similarities.
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Cognates vs. Non-cognates

• Which language is unrelated?

English Russian Turkish Hindi
two dva iki do
three tri üc tin
brother brat kardeš bhaya
nose nos burun nak (nahi)
Note English, Russian, Hindi distantly related
because they belong to different smaller families
(i.e. Germanic, Slavic, Sanskrit).
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Some General Principles

• So, from this kind of comparisonwith much larger
  set of cognates (data)many regular processes of
  change (rules) were figured out. Note all this
  is sound (phonological) change.
• 1. The majority principle (see Yule 216)
• 2. The most natural development principle

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The Most Natural Development Principle

• a. final vowels often disappear
• b. voiceless sounds become voiced between vowels
  and before or after voiced consonants
  (assimilation)
• c. stops become fricatives (weakening)
• d. consonants become voiceless at the end of
  words
• e. consonants become palatalized before front
  vowels. (relevant to the split of Mandarin
  consonants, Nash 106)
• f. (other) fricatives become /h/
• g. difficult consonant clusters become
  simplified.

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Language Families

• B. Some results of comparative reconstruction
  (Yule 214 chart)
• Language families about 30 language families
  identified so far ( 4,000 languages)
• Family Trees (see slides 42,43Language Family
  Trees)
• 1. Indo-European
• 2. Sino-Tibetan

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Indo-European Languages


Proto-Indo-European
Germanic
Celtic
Italic
Hellenic
Balto-Slavic
Indo-Iranian
Baltic
Slavic
Indic
Iranian
(Latin)
(Ancient Greek)
(Sanskrit)
German English Dutch Danish Swedish Norwegian Icel
andic Yiddish Afrikaans etc.
Irish- Gaelic Scots- Gaelic Welsh Breton
Italian Spanish French Portuguese Romanian Catalan
Romansch Sardinian Occitan
Greek
Latvian Lithuanian
Russian Polish Czech Bulgarian Serbo-Croatian Slov
ene etc.
Hindi-Urdu Bengali Punjabi Marathi Gujarati Romany
etc.
Persian Pashto Kurdish etc.
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Sino-Tibetan Languages
Sino-Tibetan
Tibeto-Burman
Sinitic
Miao-Yao (?)
( of tones)
Szechuan
Burmese Tibetan Sharpa Newari
Northern Mandarin (4) Central Mandarin
(5) Southwest Mandarin (5) Hsiang
(6) Hakka (6) Wu
(7) Min-pei
(7) Min-nan
(7) Cantonese (8)
Miao Yao
Yunnan
N. India Nepal Burma Tibet
South China, Vietnam, Laos, Thailand
Shanghai
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Language Classification

• Genetic vs. typological classification
• Genetic classification
• comparative reconstruction show historic
  relationships and changes
• Typological classification
• another way to classify languages is by
  structural similarities

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Typological Classification (1)

• Similar word order patterns
• SOV Japanese, Korean, Turkish
• SVO English, Chinese (sort of)
• VSO Hebrew, Welsh, Maasai (language in Kenya)
• Morphologyword structure
• Isolating
• Agglutinating
• Synthetic/inflectional
• polysynthetic
• Phonological systems

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Isolating Languages

• Isolating (analytic) languages
• E.g., Mandarin Chinese ( English to a great
  extent), Cantonese, Vietnamese, Laotian,
  Cambodian
• All of its words consist of a single morpheme
  (root), so therere few bound morphemes
  (affixes) e.g., ?????
• Categories such as number and tense must
  therefore be expressed by a free morpheme (a
  separate word) e.g. ???? or ????,???? or ????

52
Agglutinating Languages

• Agglutinating languages
• E.g., Turkish (one-to-one correspondences)
• Making extensive use of words containing two or
  more morphemes (a root and one or more affixes).
• Each affix is clearly identifiable and
  characteristically encodes a single grammatical
  contrast e.g., affixes in Turkish ev house,
  ev-ler houses (ler marks plurality),
  ev-ler-de in the houses (de in)

53
Synthetic/inflectional Languages

• Synthetic/inflectional languages
• Several-to-one correspondences
• Example Russian
• Affixes often mark several grammatical categories
  simultaneously.
• e.g. Ptits-i peli (Birds sang.)
• A single inflectional affix (i.e., I)
  indicates
• (1) the noun belongs to the feminine gender
  class (i.e., the Ns gender class)
• (2) the noun is plural (its number)
• (3) N functions as subject (its grammatical
  role)

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Polysynthetic Languages

• Polysynthetic languages
• e.g. Swahili, native languages of North America
• Long strings of bound forms (or affixes) are
  united into single words (which may be equal to
  entire sentence in English).
• e.g. ni ta ku penda (Swahili)
• I-will-you-love (I will love you)

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A Mix Language English

• English a mix language
• 1. lots of isolatingfree morphemes, function
  words
• 2. also agglutinatingin derivational morphemes.
  For example, unwillingness
• 3. some syntheticpronouns (person, gender,
  number, case, all in one form)
• e.g. hethe third person, singular, masculine
  subject

56
Phonological Systems

• 3. Phonological systems
• Tone/intonation language Chinese/English
• Stress time vs. syllable time language
• Stress time rhythm is based on the stressed
  syllable (i.e., Eng. poetry) the stressed
  syllable is more important
• Syllable time syllable unit of rhythm
  stressed or not, every syllable receives more or
  less equal time
• English vs. French, Spanish, (and maybe Chinese)

57
Genetic and Typological Lang (1)

• Genetically related languages may be different
  typologically.
• E.g., Eng. Russian distantly related
  genetically, which are very different
  typologically.
• Russian highly inflectional, extensive case
  system, free word order
• English few inflections, almost no case marking,
  fixed word order

58
Genetic and Typological Lang (2)

• Typologically similar languages may be unrelated
  genetically.
• Chinese Vietnamese both isolating languages,
  but genetically unrelated.
• Hebrew Massai both VSO languages, but
  genetically unrelated.
• Chinese Thai (5 tones) both tone languages,
  but genetically unrelated.

59
Review

• Is language change for better or worse? Is it
  inevitable?
• Can you give some examples about language change
  at phonetic phonological, morpho-syntactic, and
  lexical level?
• What are the reasons for change?
• How are languages classified?
• Name four Germanic languages.
• Define the terms cognates, isolating languages,
  agglutinating languages, and the majority
  principle.