Questions tagged [historical-linguistics]
The diachronic study of language and its evolution.
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Are there alternatives to the comparative method in historical linguistics?
As far as I can tell, the comparative method is the most accepted and widely used method in historical linguistics. Often used in conjunction with the internal reconstruction method, it has proved to ...
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Are there papers/books about complex sentence formation in English?
I'd like to transform complex sentences into one set of simple sentences. I can't find any solution, so I want to study formation of complex sentences.
What are the most comprehensive and most ...
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How did Chinese recursion evolve?
The modern Chinese linguistic recursion system is essentially the same as English. If you have a highly embedded sentence, you can translate it word for word, the embedding is very much the same. In ...
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How to represent an English language sentence in a standard data structure for further analysis?
I am working on a project of "AUTOMATED ESSAY EVALUATION". There will be an student answer and a standard/model answer. These two answers are formatted into a standard format. Thereafter these two ...
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Universal Etymology of Words
Where could I find examples of words and their etymologies that occur frequently in many different languages?
For example, I know that the English word "Mother" shares a similar etymology with many ...
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Where did Spanish get its /x/? Arabic influence?
Most Romance languages don't have /x/ (like the j in hijo), nor did Latin. Where did Spanish /x/ come from? Internal development, Arabic influence, or something else? Since Moroccan Arabic also has /x/...
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Is the Dené–Yeniseian hypothesis widely accepted, and has it led to further research?
In 2008 Edward Vajda presented his decade-long research into a connection between the Yeniseian languages of central Siberia (e.g. Ket, Yugh) and the American Na-Dené (Athabaskan–Eyak–Tlingit) family. ...
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Is it possible to determine genetic relations without external historical data?
Spanish and Portuguese, for example, are very similar languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin over the past two thousand years or so. We know a great deal about their histories, the occupation of the ...
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How do linguists tell areal features and genetic relations apart?
Languages belonging to the same family obviously share many features, most of which were inherited from their common ancestor. But, considering that languages of the same family also are usually ...
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When and how did French become a non-null-subject language?
First of all, what does "null-subject" mean? Taken from the Wikipedia page for "Null-subject languages":
[…] a null-subject language is a language whose grammar permits an ...
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Did Hebrew writing evolve from Egyptian hieroglyphs?
I read somewhere that the Hebrew writing system evolved from Egyptian pictographs. If that's the case, have anyone read about records that trace exact evolution from a pictograph to a Hebrew letter, ...
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What caused some IE languages to have consonant inventory sizes different from PIE?
The WALS chapter on consonant inventories shows that the distribution of inventory sizes across languages follows a normal curve, with average size inventories (22 ± 3 consonants) being the most ...
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Did Western European languages change faster during the Renaissance?
I am looking for data that either confirm or refute the following statement:
During the Renaissance (let's say, 14th to 16th centuries), Western European languages changed very rapidly. The pace of ...
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Are English 'butterfly', German 'Butterfliege' and Dutch 'botervlieg' cognates?
Yesterday the question was raised why many languages do not share a root for 'butterfly'. When we look at the etymology of the English word, parallels are drawn to Dutch and German forms (OED):
OE ...
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What is the reason for the semantic change bowl/pot/cup > head?
I was reading about problems with the assumption of basic vocabulary in Lyle Campbell, Historical Linguistics: An Introduction:
Some 'basic vocabulary' appears to change rather easily for cultural
...
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Is there a comprehensive account of the development of laryngeal theory?
The laryngeal theory proposes that Proto-Indo-European contained a number of consonants that are absent in (almost) all daughter languages. Their existence was proposed (by Saussure, under the term ...
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What are the reasons to count Armenian as an Indo-European language?
Often I encounter arguments that Armenian is in fact not an Indo-European language. The claims assert that the regular correspondences between Armenian and PIE are too unrealistic, too rare and too ...
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What are the historical origins of terms for north, south, east and west?
In the course of researching the etymology of the word "Australia", I was trying to find the Latin words for north and south (the cardinal directions). I found some websites that translate north as "...
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How did the Arabic word "allah" come to have an /lˤ/ ("emphatic l")?
In Modern Standard Arabic, phonemic /lˤ/ (a.k.a. "emphatic l") only occurs in one native word: Allah /ʔalˤˈlˤaːh/. (According to the linked article, it also occurs in a few loanwords.)
This seems ...
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What is the history of the sound spelled <â> or <î> (IPA /ɨ/) in Romanian?
I've read that some people attribute it to influence from the Slavic languages. But it doesn't just appear in Slavic loans — it also shows up in obviously Latin-derived words like câine 'dog' (...
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How common is word order change?
During the course of their development, the word order of some languages change. Examples include Latin (SOV) that changed to SVO in the Romance languages, Proto-Austronesian (verb initial) that ...
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Was there a Semitic influence on Proto-Germanic?
One of the hypotheses supported by Theo Vennemann and other linguists is that Proto-Germanic was influenced by some Semitic language. The evidence they present for their case includes:
Loss of some ...
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What makes a language identifiable and distinguishable from other languages and their dialects?
Old English has neither common pronunciation, nor alphabet (written letters), nor most words with modern English.
What made Old English to be identifiable as English?
What separates a language from ...
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Is explanation part of Historical Linguistics?
I am reading John McWhorter’s "Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue". One thing called my attention in the book: he spends a great deal of effort trying to show how scholars have examined the history of ...
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What is necessary to decide if Lusitanian is a Celtic language?
The Lusitanian language was almost certainly an Indo-European language, but whether or not it was a Celtic language is still uncertain. Some features, as the presence of the initial p- (as in porcom '...
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Is anyone studying change in constructed language?
Is there any serious work being done on linguistic change in constructed languages (e.g. Esperanto, Interlingua, Lojban)?
I would imagine it might be difficult given the small population of native ...
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What is the relationship between the PIE roots *dekṃ and *kṃtóm?
It seems that there is a consensus that the PIE roots for ten and hundred are, respectively, *deḱṃ and *ḱṃtóm. There also seems to be a consensus that *ḱṃtóm is a shortened version of *deḱṃtóm. These ...
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Why is it that Latin was more "successful" in the western part of the Empire than in the eastern part?
The Roman empire ruled over the lands around the Mediterranean for hundreds of years, and I imagine imposed its language on its subjects.
But why is it that the western part of the empire (France, ...
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How did Italian manage to stay (mostly) phonetically spelled despite its long written tradition?
Italian is commonly cited as an example of a phonetically spelled language. It is easy to guess how an Italian word is pronounced based on the way it is written, because each written symbol highly ...
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What are some examples of well-known agglutinatve languages moving toward inflecting morphology?
We've had questions about inflected languages moving towards analytic morphology and about isolating languages moving to agglutinating morphology but we haven't yet investigated the third case.
In ...
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What is the origin of non-natural grammatical genders in Indo-European languages?
Non-natural grammatical genders in Indo-European languages:
What is their origin (assuming that there is a single origin, if there are many origins)? Or what are the origins?
How and for what ...
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Is there a single origin for the connection between time and weather?
There are several families of languages where the same word can mean either a concept closely related to time or a concept closely related to weather:
Romance root: French temps, Italian tempo, ...
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Why did early Indo-European languages seem to be morphologically complex?
Apparently there is a general trend that languages lose morphological marking over time. For example, according to this question PIE had 8 noun cases (nominative, accusative, genitive, etc), Latin 5, ...
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True languages that pirates spoke
Ahoy, me hearties!
As many of you may already know, today is Talk Like a Pirate Day. Since I find the historical subject of piracy quite interesting, specially after reading Pirate Utopias, I would ...
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How did Korean become a language isolate?
According to most linguists, Korean is a language isolate. Why doesn't it have any sister languages, like languages usually do? Why didn't it spread to other areas, or split into various languages? ...
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Which Romance languages have reflexes of the Latin nominative in nouns?
It is generally accepted that the nominal forms in the Romance languages represent reflexes of the Latin accusative rather than the nominative. (This is even true for those languages that have ...
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Is Nicaraguan Sign Language the only language born from nothing?
My interest in linguistics was sparked by John McWhorter's popular book The Power of Babel, which, in its section on creoles, includes a small piece on Nicaraguan Sign Language, which really sparked ...
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How the tau gallicum may have been pronounced?
The so-called tau gallicum was a character used in Gaulish, written Đ, ð or even a Θ. Its name comes from the only commentary on it that we have, by Vergil (Appendix Vergiliana, Catalepton II, 4).
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Languages that are gaining morphological distinctions
In diachronic comparison of languages, say PIE to Latin to Romance, it is a classic recognition that the later languages strictly lose some of the morphologically marked categories. PIE had 8 noun ...
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How did the present continuous in English get to be such a dominant present tense?
In French if I write the sentence
Je mange le déjeuner
it would/could be the same as if I am saying I am eating lunch. What is going on in French goes on in a number of the other Romance ...
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