Questions tagged [historical-linguistics]
The diachronic study of language and its evolution.
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What is the origin of alpha in the mediopassive indicative?
In greek, the indicative mediopassive in the 3rd person singular and plural are -εται and -ονται, however in PIE, the alpha was originally an o. Additionally, in the imperfect, the endings also have o ...
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What is closer to 16th century Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese or Portuguese from Portugal?
Shouldn't Brazilian Portuguese sound closer to it, as they pronounce more syllables?
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Old English weak noun 'Sweora'
I've been reading about diphthongization and i umlaut of diphthongs and I came across the example of the OE word for 'neck'.
I have been led to understand that:
the original vowel is 'i'.
-rh- ...
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Source of Greek long alpha
I'm reading about the Greek first declension on wikipedia, which mentions that the origin of the first declension originally had long alpha, which then shifted to eta, except when after rho, iota, and ...
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Is "alpha-" and "-bet", in the word "alphabet", related to the first two letters "A" (alpha) and "B" (beta)? [closed]
I was reading the book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood by James Gleick.
Towards the beginning (third paragraph) of chapter three, titled Two Wordbooks, the author writes -
The alphabet, ...
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What is the "principle of uniformity" in historical linguistics?
I feel hopeless asking this. The word in question as I understand it describes that a theory has to account for all observables under discussion without exception.
In historical linguistics it is ...
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Can a strong verb change to weak?
Can a strong verb in the course of time change to weak verb?
MoDu "scheiden" (to seperate) is weak: scheidde, gescheiden.
Its ancestor ODu *skeidan < PWGm *skaiþan < PGm *skaiþana is ...
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State of language in the hunter-gatherer era of Europe / Levant?
I would like to piece together a picture for a blog article (in essence) of what the state of the world was in the "hunter gatherer stage" just before the origin of agriculture. I would like ...
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Why did the consonant clusters /ks/ and /ps/ merit their own designated letters in Ancient Greek?
Ancient Greek had many consonant clusters, like /pn/ in pneuma, /bd/ in bdellion, and /pt/ in pteron. But for some reason, /ks/ (ξ) and /ps/ (ψ) received special real estate in the 24-letter Greek ...
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What influenced the fact in almost all European languages the word human "man" means a male?
Why "werman" (OldEnglish man as male) became simply Man (human) and "wifman" (OldEnglish man as female) became woman?
Man in English (man, human)
Homme in French (man, human)
Mann ...
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Uniquenesses of Hebrew
Franz Philipp Kaulen, S.J. (1827-1907)
was impressed in favor of [ancient] Hebrew by the following facts:
In no other language is there such an intimate relation between nouns and their objects;
the ...
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Etymological link between “govern” and “born”
So my question is two-fold. Specific and more general.
I was doing some genealogy research and I was trying to read some Yiddish (I don’t understand Yiddish), and I thought a line said a certain ...
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What linguistic evidence is there in support of/in opposition to the account of the Tower of Babel?
I do not intend for this question to incite a debate as to the historicity/validity of the account of the Tower of Babel, I am simply interested in seeing how it fits into the framework of modern ...
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Is there any way to describe how languages are typically spoken, like there is a way to describe grammar?
In English, when ordering food, you'd say "I would like x," not "Please let me purchase x," even though both are grammatically correct. You can say that "I would be liking x&...
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Why do languages seem to lose the dual number in particular?
Proto-Indo-European is reconstructed as having a dual number; Ancient Greek and Sanskrit both had one, yet modern Greek and all Indo-Aryan languages have lost it; similar patterns can be observed in ...
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čьrnъ > czarny, čьrvenъ > czervony (Polish)
According to Wiktionary, Polish czarny is from PSl *čьrnъ, and czervony is from *čьrvenъ. At least prima facie the soft yers appears to have become different vowels in Polish.
I'm aware of the ...
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How does historical linguistics reconstruct languages that have no written record?
How are ancient languages like PIE (proto-Indo-European) known?
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Questions about clusters of two dental stops in PIE
Beekes says a sibilant was inserted between two dental stops in PIE, therefore *-tt-, *-dt- > *-tst- and *-d(h)d(h)- > *-d(h)zd(h)- and the cluster is "retained as such in Hittite." ...
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Did Proto-Sino-Tibetan and Proto-Indo-European languages have the same origin?
Did Proto-Sino-Tibetan and Proto-Indo-European languages have the same origin? Did human develop a common language before migrated from Africa, and were most if not all the modern languages ...
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Is Russian the most diverged Slavic language? [closed]
Does the Russian language have more innovations and divergent development from other languages in the Slavic branch?
I am asking, because I always had the feeling, that the tense and pronunciation in ...
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Establishing criteria for sounds likely to facilitate phonological mergers around them
I know extremely little about the history of sound changes in languages other than English, so that will be the source of my examples. However, I’m asking this question for a more general, cross-...
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How to interpret Givón's (1981) implicational scale for indefinite articles developed from numeral 'one'?
I'm having trouble understanding the implicational scale for indefinite articles developed from numeral 'one' given by T Givón (1981: 50-52).
T. Givón in his paper "On the development of the ...
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Why does "s" in Portuguese sound like /z/ between vowels?
I am a native speaker of Portuguese and for a long time I've wanted to know why some of the rules of the language are the way they are. I am very fond of linguistics and of learning languages, but I ...
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Japanese is in its own lingustic family, but it sure seems to have a lot in common with Turkish
I speak Japanese, and recently, I've been exposed to Turkish. There's a good deal of overlap between structure, and some words. An example is "good", where it's "iidesu" in ...
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Origin of ratchasap/ราชาศัพท์ phenomenon in Thai and/or Tai-kadai languages
I am attempting to trace the origin of "rachasap" (Thai: ราชาศัพท์; Lao: ລາດຊະຊັບ).
What is "rachasap"?
Rachasap is an entire body of words that are used with deity, royalty, or ...
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When did people realize French has its root in Latin?
By investigating into historical documents like Oaths of Strasbourg
and applying the comparative method, modern linguists are able to know French is a Romance language. When the components of ...
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Why were vowels secondary citizens in many of the worlds sound-based writing systems?
Not considering logographic systems like Chinese, and outside Cuneiform (not sure if that is a logo system or something else), it appears at first glance that many of the world's writing systems ...
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What happened with the centum words in Bangani?
IE K^ > K has been proposed for Bangani ( http://www-personal.umich.edu/~pehook/bangani.html ) for *g()lak^t > lOktO ‘milk’, etc. Claus Peter Zoller claimed that Bangani was related to Kashmiri,...
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How did so many Arabic letters converge to hold the same shape?
Here one can see that the letter groups خ ح ج and several others are identical if not for the dots. In this pair, two are vaguely H-sounding, the other was formerly some form of palatalised G, which I ...
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Is there a notion of ordering the simple voice sounds a human makes in terms of difficulty, evolutionarily speaking? [closed]
I am working on a conlang amongst other things, and am trying to imagine how the stone-tool-making apes might have slowly figured out they can make certain sounds with their mouths. There's a lot to ...
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How Did the Palatovelar /*ḱ/ Consonant in PIE Become a Sibilant in Satem Languages?
In Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic languages (which are conveniently all Satem languages), there is a sibilant or affricate sound in places where Centum languages usually have a velar consonant. It ...
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Possible influence of Phoenician on local dialects in the British Isles during the Iron Age
I'm very interested in the possible influence of Phoenician, specifically, on local dialects in the British Isles during the Iron Age. I'm curious about any historical and linguistic evidence that may ...
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What is the difference among root, stem and base in English word-formation? Possible answer provided to check
Is the following text correct and updated?? It is based on Bauer (1983) but I don't know if this may have changed recently. Thanks in advance!
A root is the primary lexical unit of a word which is not ...
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On the effects of sound changes on case suffixes
I am working on a conlang and I came up with a question that I can't find a good answer too.
How does sound change effect suffixes, as whenever I work on conlangs with suffixes to mark different cases ...
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Is there a linguistic term for a term in a language refering to a specific technology, outliving said technology?
In language, phrases and various semantic expressions referring to technologies often make their way into the language, even if that technology is mostly obsolete.
Examples of this could include "...
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What happened to Aham and its derivatives in Marathi?
The Sanskrit first person pronoun अहम् (Romanized: Aham) can be found in Maharashtri Prakrit as 𑀅𑀳𑀁 (ahaṃ), 𑀅𑀳𑀅𑀁 (ahaaṃ), 𑀳𑀁 (haṃ).
It is even present in some languages derivative of ...
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How do consonant clusters originate?
I tried finding some information on this topic but there isn't a lot of information out there. The only things I could find is that it could originate from deletion of vowels between consonants. Are ...
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How implausible is it for the name "Oslo" to have come from the Semitic root w-ṣ-l instead of from Proto-Norse *ansuz + *lauhō?
I am aware that this is a controversial topic, but in a universe where around c. 500 BCE a population of Canaanite mariners did manage to set up a trading post in what is now Sweden: how plausible is ...
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How was the Turkification of the Turkish language so successfull in the last 100 years?
Atatürk established the Turkish Language Association in 1934 to study and "purify" the language. According to wikipedia this effort has been extremely successful with many loanwords no ...
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Is there any evidence for PIE *deikW- ‘feast’ to Greek deîp-?
The interpretation of Linear B de-qo-no as ‘main dinner’ and po-ro-de-qo-no as ‘pre-dinner’ would only work if PIE *deikW- ‘feast’ > deîpnon. However, it is cognate with words with -p-:
*deip- >...
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Could the precursor to Pre-Proto-Quechua have been a monosyllabic tonal language?
So this has been intriguing me for years:
In 'Perspectives on the Quechua-Aymara Contact Relationship and the Lexicon and Phonology of Pre-Proto-Aymara', Nicholas Emlen mentions, citing Adelaar (1986) ...
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How did Otto Jespersen figure out the Great Vowel Shift?
How did Otto Jespersen figure out the Great Vowel Shift?
Surely, there were no pronunciation audio recordings available.
How did he know how British people had pronounced vowels centuries ago?
Have ...
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At some point, was г/Г pronounced in Russian like it still is in Ukrainian (somewhat akin to h/H in hotel, i.e. /h/)? Or is it purely regional?
Recently, with a few colleagues moving into our office from Russia, we have a new resident colleague with the first name Герман. Now, being German native speaker, my assumption was that the name ...
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How did the generic masculine emerge?
In an essay for school I recently claimed the generic masculine was caused by sexism, but my teacher complained that I hadn't given a reason for this. Assuming my hypothesis is correct, how did this ...
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The relationship between Mora-timed languages, long vowels and quantitative verse, also the status of Iranian and Balto-Slavo-Germanic?
In an anthropological forum, there was once a view that because Latin, Greek, Sanskrit (also Celtic IIRC) are Mora-timed, they are divided into one subgroup. However, "syllable-timed" ...
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was old Mongolic similar to old Turkic
if Tungusic and Mongolic similarity is just because of adoption, are Mongolic and Turkic related (from one root). But Mongolian changed later and changed much more after Tungusic adoption.
Today ...
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Can Tungusic and Mongolic be a language family that has same root
https://drive.google.com/file/d/16qyiuz4-rFJl0W1BHbFxA2Ujv9Qp7Key/view?usp=share_link Mongolic language family book pdf
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tGPEMAgZRqBiuFT4vJrvf41NXxlANjpg/view?usp=...
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Are there online resources from which I can study ancient Umbrian?
Unfortunately I can not find a substantial resource that can help me in the study of ancient Umbrian. I have tried to search up on the Web, however the only resources I had found were about lexicon.
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What is the history of using the word "right" to describe something we deserve? [duplicate]
Some languages use a the same word to mean both "a fundamental right" and "the opposite of left". (English, German, French, Russian (as a calque from the German))
I am fascinated, ...
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What did the injunctive mood of Sanskrit do?
I have read that Vedic Sanskrit had five grammatical moods a verb could take; indicative, optative, imperative, subjunctive, and injunctive; four of them I understand the function of through other ...
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