|
Glottochronological
Glottochronology (from Attic Greek γλῶττα ''tongue, language'' and χρόνος ''time'') is the part of lexicostatistics which involves comparative linguistics and deals with the chronological relationship between languages.Sheila Embleton (1992). Historical Linguistics: Mathematical concepts. In W. Bright (Ed.), International Encyclopedia of Linguistics The idea was developed by Morris Swadesh in the 1950s in his article on Salish internal relationships. He developed the idea under two assumptions: there indeed exists a relatively stable ''basic vocabulary'' (referred to as ''Swadesh lists'') in all languages of the world; and, any replacements happen in a way analogous to radioactive decay in a constant percentage per time elapsed. Using mathematics and statistics, Swadesh developed an equation that could determine when languages separated and give an approximate time of when the separation occurred. His methods aid linguistic anthropologists by giving them a definitive ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Quantitative Comparative Linguistics
Quantitative comparative linguistics is the use of quantitative analysis as applied to comparative linguistics. Examples include the statistical fields of lexicostatistics and glottochronology, and the borrowing of phylogenetics from biology. History Statistical methods have been used for the purpose of quantitative analysis in comparative linguistics for more than a century. During the 1950s, the Swadesh list emerged: a standardised set of lexical concepts found in most languages, as words or phrases, that allow two or more languages to be compared and contrasted empirically. Probably the first published quantitative historical linguistics study was by Sapir in 1916, while Kroeber and Chretien in 1937 investigated nine Indo-European (IE) languages using 74 morphological and phonological features (extended in 1939 by the inclusion of Hittite). Ross in 1950 carried out an investigation into the theoretical basis for such studies. Swadesh, using word lists, developed lexicosta ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Attic Greek
Attic Greek is the Greek dialect of the ancient region of Attica, including the '' polis'' of Athens. Often called classical Greek, it was the prestige dialect of the Greek world for centuries and remains the standard form of the language that is taught to students of ancient Greek. As the basis of the Hellenistic Koine, it is the most similar of the ancient dialects to later Greek. Attic is traditionally classified as a member or sister dialect of the Ionic branch. Origin and range Greek is the primary member of the Hellenic branch of the Indo-European language family. In ancient times, Greek had already come to exist in several dialects, one of which was Attic. The earliest attestations of Greek, dating from the 16th to 11th centuries BC, are written in Linear B, an archaic writing system used by the Mycenaean Greeks in writing their language; the distinction between Eastern and Western Greek is believed to have arisen by Mycenaean times or before. Mycenaean Greek ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Danish Language
Danish (; , ) is a North Germanic language spoken by about six million people, principally in and around Denmark. Communities of Danish speakers are also found in Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and the northern German region of Southern Schleswig, where it has minority language status. Minor Danish-speaking communities are also found in Norway, Sweden, the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina. Along with the other North Germanic languages, Danish is a descendant of Old Norse, the common language of the Germanic peoples who lived in Scandinavia during the Viking Era. Danish, together with Swedish, derives from the ''East Norse'' dialect group, while the Middle Norwegian language (before the influence of Danish) and Norwegian Bokmål are classified as ''West Norse'' along with Faroese and Icelandic. A more recent classification based on mutual intelligibility separates modern spoken Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish as "mainland (or ''continental'') Scandinavian", wh ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
George Kingsley Zipf
George Kingsley Zipf (; January 7, 1902 – September 25, 1950), was an American linguist and philologist who studied statistical occurrences in different languages.. Zipf earned his bachelors, masters, and doctoral degrees from Harvard University, although he also studied at the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin. He was Chairman of the German Department and University Lecturer (meaning he could teach any subject he chose) at Harvard University. He worked with Chinese and demographics, and much of his effort can explain properties of the Internet, distribution of income within nations, and many other collections of data. Zipf's law He is the eponym of Zipf's law, which states that while only a few words are used very often, many or most are used rarely, :P_n \sim 1/n^a where ''Pn'' is the frequency of a word ranked ''n''th and the exponent ''a'' is almost 1. This means that the second item occurs approximately 1/2 as often as the first, and the third item 1/3 a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John McWhorter
John Hamilton McWhorter V (; born October 6, 1965) is an American linguist with a specialty in creole languages, sociolects, and Black English. He is currently associate professor of linguistics at Columbia University, where he also teaches American studies and music history. He has also authored books on race relations and African-American culture. Early life McWhorter was born and raised in Philadelphia. His father, John Hamilton McWhorter IV (1927–1996), was a college administrator, and his mother, Schelysture Gordon McWhorter (1937–2011), taught social work at Temple University. He attended Friends Select School in Philadelphia and after tenth grade was accepted to Simon's Rock College where he earned an AA degree. Later, he attended Rutgers University and received a BA degree in French in 1985. He obtained an MA degree in American Studies from New York University and a PhD degree in Linguistics in 1993 from Stanford University. Career McWhorter taught linguistics at ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Knut Bergsland
Knut Bergsland (7 March 1914 – 9 July 1998) was a Norwegian linguist. Working as a professor at the University of Oslo from 1947 to 1981, he did groundbreaking research in Uralic (especially Sami) and Eskaleut languages. Career He was born in Kristiania as a son of engineer Einar Christian Bergsland (1883–1945) and Henriette Louise Krogh Raabe (1883–1958). He was the brother of sports administrator Einar Bergsland. He finished his secondary education in 1932, and enrolled at the University of Oslo. He also studied at the École des Hautes Études and the Institut Catholique from 1935 to 1936. He graduated with the cand.philol. degree in 1940, having specialized in Latin, but now concentrated more on the Sami languages. His first linguistic work was a grammar of the Southern Sámi language, released as ''Røros-lappisk grammatikk'' in 1946. This work earned him the dr.philos. degree, and it is still the reference grammar of this language. In 1947 Bergsland was appointed ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Proto-language
In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattested, or partially attested at best. They are reconstructed by way of the comparative method. In the family tree metaphor, a proto-language can be called a mother language. Occasionally, the German term ''Ursprache'' (from ''Ur-'' "primordial, original", and ''Sprache'' "language", ) is used instead. It is also sometimes called the ''common'' or ''primitive'' form of a language (e.g. Common Germanic, Primitive Norse). In the strict sense, a proto-language is the most recent common ancestor of a language family, immediately before the family started to diverge into the attested ''daughter languages''. It is therefore equivalent with the ''ancestral language'' or ''parental language'' of a language family. Moreover, a group of languages ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mass Lexical Comparison
Mass comparison is a method developed by Joseph Greenberg to determine the level of genetic relatedness between languages. It is now usually called multilateral comparison. The method is rejected by most linguists , though not all. Some of the top-level relationships Greenberg named are now generally accepted, though they had already been posited by others (e.g. Afro-Asiatic and Niger–Congo). Others are accepted by many though disputed by some prominent specialists (e.g. Nilo-Saharan), others are predominantly rejected but have some defenders (e.g. Eurasiatic), while others are almost universally rejected (e.g. Khoisan and Amerind). Methodology The thesis of mass comparison is that a group of languages is related when they show numerous resemblances in vocabulary, including pronouns, and morphemes, forming an interlocking pattern common to the group. Unlike the comparative method, mass comparison does not require any regular or systematic correspondences between the languag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lexicostatistics
Lexicostatistics is a method of comparative linguistics that involves comparing the percentage of lexical cognates between languages to determine their relationship. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language. It is to be distinguished from glottochronology, which attempts to use lexicostatistical methods to estimate the length of time since two or more languages diverged from a common earlier proto-language. This is merely one application of lexicostatistics, however; other applications of it may not share the assumption of a constant rate of change for basic lexical items. The term "lexicostatistics" is misleading in that mathematical equations are used but not statistics. Other features of a language may be used other than the lexicon, though this is unusual. Whereas the comparative method used shared identified innovations to determine sub-groups, lexicostatistics does not identify these. Lexicostatistics is a distance-based ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Leipzig–Jakarta List
The Leipzig–Jakarta list of 100 words is used by linguists to test the degree of chronological separation of languages by comparing words that are resistant to borrowing. The Leipzig–Jakarta list became available in 2009. In the 1950s, the linguist Morris Swadesh published a list of 200 words called the Swadesh list, allegedly the 200 lexical concepts found in all languages that were least likely to be borrowed from other languages. Swadesh later whittled his list down to 100 items. The Swadesh list, however, was based mainly on intuition, according to Martin Haspelmath and Uri Tadmor.Haspelmath & Tadmor, p. 72. The Loanword Typology Project, with the World Loanword Database (WOLD), published by the Max Planck Digital Library, was established to rectify this problem. Experts on 41 languages from across the world were given a uniform vocabulary list and asked to provide the words for each item in the language on which they were an expert, as well as information on how s ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Indo-European Studies
Indo-European studies is a field of linguistics and an interdisciplinary field of study dealing with Indo-European languages, both current and extinct. The goal of those engaged in these studies is to amass information about the hypothetical proto-language from which all of these languages are descended, a language dubbed Proto-Indo-European (PIE), and its speakers, the Proto-Indo-Europeans, including their society and Proto-Indo-European mythology. The studies cover where the language originated and how it spread. This article also lists Indo-European scholars, centres, journals and book series. Naming The term ''Indo-European'' itself now current in English literature, was coined in 1813 by the British scholar Sir Thomas Young, although at that time, there was no consensus as to the naming of the recently discovered language family. However, he seems to have used it as a geographical term, to indicate the newly proposed language family in Eurasia spanning from the Indian subco ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Historical Linguistics
Historical linguistics, also termed diachronic linguistics, is the scientific study of language change over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include: # to describe and account for observed changes in particular languages # to reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping them into language families ( comparative linguistics) # to develop general theories about how and why language changes # to describe the history of speech communities # to study the history of words, i.e. etymology Historical linguistics is founded on the Uniformitarian Principle, which is defined by linguist Donald Ringe as: History and development Western modern historical linguistics dates from the late-18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity. At first, historical linguistics served as the cornerstone of comparative linguistics, primarily as a t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
