![Romance-lg-classification-en](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/99/Romance-lg-classification-en.svg)
In
linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...
, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with
common descent
Common descent is a concept in evolutionary biology applicable when one species is the ancestor of two or more species later in time. All living beings are in fact descendants of a unique ancestor commonly referred to as the last universal com ...
from a shared ancestor and then extrapolating backwards to infer the properties of that ancestor. The comparative method may be contrasted with the method of
internal reconstruction
Internal reconstruction is a method of reconstructing an earlier state in a language's history using only language-internal evidence of the language in question.
The comparative method compares variations between languages, such as in sets of c ...
in which the internal development of a single language is inferred by the analysis of features within that language. Ordinarily, both methods are used together to reconstruct prehistoric phases of languages; to fill in gaps in the historical record of a language; to discover the development of phonological, morphological and other linguistic systems and to confirm or to refute hypothesised relationships between languages.
The comparative method was developed over the 19th century. Key contributions were made by the Danish scholars
Rasmus Rask and
Karl Verner
Karl Adolph Verner (; 7 March 1846 – 5 November 1896) was a Danish linguist. He is remembered today for Verner's law, which he published in 1876.
Biography
Verner's interest in languages was stimulated by reading about the work of Rasmus Chris ...
and the German scholar
Jacob Grimm
Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (4 January 1785 – 20 September 1863), also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He is known as the discoverer of Grimm's law of linguistics, the co-author of t ...
. The first linguist to offer reconstructed forms from a
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 unattes ...
was
August Schleicher, in his ''Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen'', originally published in 1861. Here is Schleicher's explanation of why he offered reconstructed forms:
In the present work an attempt is made to set forth the inferred Indo-European original language side by side with its really existent derived languages. Besides the advantages offered by such a plan, in setting immediately before the eyes of the student the final results of the investigation in a more concrete form, and thereby rendering easier his insight into the nature of particular Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, D ...
, there is, I think, another of no less importance gained by it, namely that it shows the baselessness of the assumption that the non-Indian Indo-European languages were derived from Old-Indian (Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural diffusion ...
).
Definition
Principles
The aim of the comparative method is to highlight and interpret systematic
phonological and
semantic
Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and comput ...
correspondences between two or more
attested language
In linguistics, attested languages are languages (living or dead) that have been documented and for which the evidence (attestation) has survived to the present day. Evidence may be recordings, transcriptions, literature or inscriptions. In ...
s. If those correspondences cannot be rationally explained as the result of
language contact
Language contact occurs when speakers of two or more languages or varieties interact and influence each other. The study of language contact is called contact linguistics. When speakers of different languages interact closely, it is typical for th ...
(
borrowings,
areal influence, etc.) or
linguistic universals, and if they are sufficiently numerous, regular, and systematic that they cannot be dismissed as chance similarities, then it must be assumed that they descend from a single parent language called the '
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 unattes ...
'.
A sequence of regular
sound change
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic chan ...
s (along with their underlying sound laws) can then be postulated to explain the correspondences between the attested forms, which eventually allows for the
reconstruction
Reconstruction may refer to:
Politics, history, and sociology
* Reconstruction (law), the transfer of a company's (or several companies') business to a new company
*''Perestroika'' (Russian for "reconstruction"), a late 20th century Soviet Unio ...
of a proto-language by the methodical comparison of "linguistic facts" within a generalized system of correspondences.
Relation is considered to be "established beyond a reasonable doubt" if a reconstruction of the common ancestor is feasible.
In some cases, this reconstruction can only be partial, generally because the compared languages are too scarcely attested, the temporal distance between them and their proto-language is too deep, or their internal evolution render many of the sound laws obscure to researchers. In such case, a relation is considered plausible, but uncertain.
Terminology
''Descent'' is defined as transmission across the generations: children learn a language from the parents' generation and, after being influenced by their peers, transmit it to the next generation, and so on. For example, a continuous chain of speakers across the centuries links
Vulgar Latin
Vulgar Latin, also known as Popular or Colloquial Latin, is the range of non-formal registers of Latin spoken from the Late Roman Republic onward. Through time, Vulgar Latin would evolve into numerous Romance languages. Its literary counterpa ...
to all of its modern descendants.
Two languages are ''
genetically related'' if they descended from the same
ancestor language. For example,
Italian and
French
French (french: français(e), link=no) may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to France
** French language, which originated in France, and its various dialects and accents
** French people, a nation and ethnic group identified with Franc ...
both come from
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
and therefore belong to the same family, the
Romance languages
The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
. Having a large component of vocabulary from a certain origin is not sufficient to establish relatedness; for example, heavy
borrowing from
Arabic
Arabic (, ' ; , ' or ) is a Semitic language spoken primarily across the Arab world.Semitic languages: an international handbook / edited by Stefan Weninger; in collaboration with Geoffrey Khan, Michael P. Streck, Janet C. E.Watson; Walter ...
into
Persian has caused more of the
vocabulary
A vocabulary is a set of familiar words within a person's language. A vocabulary, usually developed with age, serves as a useful and fundamental tool for communication and acquiring knowledge. Acquiring an extensive vocabulary is one of the ...
of Modern Persian to be from Arabic than from the direct ancestor of Persian,
Proto-Indo-Iranian
Proto-Indo-Iranian, also Proto-Indo-Iranic is the reconstructed proto-language of the Indo-Iranian/Indo-Iranic branch of Indo-European. Its speakers, the hypothetical Proto-Indo-Iranians, are assumed to have lived in the late 3rd millennium ...
, but Persian remains a member of the Indo-Iranian family and is not considered "related" to Arabic.
However, it is possible for languages to have different degrees of relatedness.
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
, for example, is related to both
German
German(s) may refer to:
* Germany (of or related to)
**Germania (historical use)
* Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language
** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law
**Ge ...
and
Russian but is more closely related to the former than to the latter. Although all three languages share a common ancestor,
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo ...
, English and German also share a more recent common ancestor,
Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic br ...
, but Russian does not. Therefore, English and German are considered to belong to a subgroup of Indo-European that Russian does not belong to, the
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, ...
.
The division of related languages into subgroups is accomplished by finding ''shared linguistic innovations'' that differentiate them from the parent language. For instance, English and German both exhibit the effects of a collection of sound changes known as
Grimm's Law, which Russian was not affected by. The fact that English and German share this innovation is seen as evidence of English and German's more recent common ancestor—since the innovation actually took place within that common ancestor, before English and German diverged into separate languages. On the other hand, ''shared retentions'' from the parent language are not sufficient evidence of a sub-group. For example, German and Russian both retain from Proto-Indo-European a contrast between the
dative case
In grammar, the dative case ( abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "Maria Jacobo potum dedit", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob ...
and the
accusative case
The accusative case ( abbreviated ) of a noun is the grammatical case used to mark the direct object of a transitive verb.
In the English language, the only words that occur in the accusative case are pronouns: 'me,' 'him,' 'her,' 'us,' and ‘t ...
, which English has lost. However, that similarity between German and Russian is not evidence that German is more closely related to Russian than to English but means only that the ''innovation'' in question, the loss of the accusative/dative distinction, happened more recently in English than the divergence of English from German.
Origin and development
In
Antiquity
Antiquity or Antiquities may refer to:
Historical objects or periods Artifacts
*Antiquities, objects or artifacts surviving from ancient cultures
Eras
Any period before the European Middle Ages (5th to 15th centuries) but still within the histo ...
, Romans were aware of the similarities between Greek and Latin, but did not study them systematically. They sometimes explained them mythologically, as the result of Rome being a Greek colony speaking a debased dialect.
Even though grammarians of Antiquity had access to other languages around them (
Oscan
Oscan is an extinct Indo-European language of southern Italy. The language is in the Osco-Umbrian or Sabellic branch of the Italic languages. Oscan is therefore a close relative of Umbrian.
Oscan was spoken by a number of tribes, including t ...
,
Umbrian
Umbrian is an extinct Italic language formerly spoken by the Umbri in the ancient Italian region of Umbria. Within the Italic languages it is closely related to the Oscan group and is therefore associated with it in the group of Osco-Umbrian ...
,
Etruscan,
Gaulish
Gaulish was an ancient Celtic language spoken in parts of Continental Europe before and during the period of the Roman Empire. In the narrow sense, Gaulish was the language of the Celts of Gaul (now France, Luxembourg, Belgium, most of Switze ...
,
Egyptian,
Parthian...), they showed little interest in comparing, studying, or just documenting them. Comparison between languages really began after Antiquity.
Early works
In the 9th or 10th century AD,
Yehuda Ibn Quraysh
Judah ibn Kuraish ( he, יהודה אבן קריש, ar, يهوذا بن قريش), was an Algerian-Jewish grammarian and lexicographer. He was born at Tiaret in Algeria and flourished in the 9th century. While his grammatical works advanced little ...
compared the phonology and morphology of Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic but attributed the resemblance to the Biblical story of Babel, with Abraham, Isaac and Joseph retaining Adam's language, with other languages at various removes becoming more altered from the original Hebrew.
![Sajnovics - Demonstratio](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ee/Sajnovics_-_Demonstratio.jpg)
In publications of 1647 and 1654,
Marcus van Boxhorn
Marcus Zuerius van Boxhorn (August 28, 1612 – October 3, 1653) was a Dutch scholar (his Latinized name was Marcus Zuerius Boxhornius). Born in Bergen op Zoom, he was professor at the University of Leiden. He discovered the similarity among Indo- ...
first described a rigorous methodology for historical linguistic comparisons
[George van Drie]
The genesis of polyphyletic linguistics
and proposed the existence of an
Indo-European
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Du ...
proto-language, which he called "Scythian", unrelated to Hebrew but ancestral to Germanic, Greek, Romance, Persian, Sanskrit, Slavic, Celtic and Baltic languages. The Scythian theory was further developed by
Andreas Jäger (1686) and
William Wotton (1713), who made early forays to reconstruct the primitive common language. In 1710 and 1723,
Lambert ten Kate first formulated the regularity of
sound law
A sound change, in historical linguistics, is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic cha ...
s, introducing among others the term
root vowel.
Another early systematic attempt to prove the relationship between two languages on the basis of similarity of
grammar
In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words. The term can also refer to the study of such constraints, a field that includes doma ...
and
lexicon
A lexicon is the vocabulary of a language or branch of knowledge (such as nautical or medical). In linguistics, a lexicon is a language's inventory of lexemes. The word ''lexicon'' derives from Greek word (), neuter of () meaning 'of or fo ...
was made by the Hungarian
János Sajnovics in 1770, when he attempted to demonstrate the relationship between
Sami and
Hungarian. That work was later extended to all
Finno-Ugric languages in 1799 by his countryman
Samuel Gyarmathi.
[.] However, the origin of modern
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
# ...
is often traced back to
Sir William Jones
Sir William Jones (28 September 1746 – 27 April 1794) was a British philologist, a puisne judge on the Supreme Court of Judicature at Fort William in Bengal, and a scholar of ancient India. He is particularly known for his proposition of th ...
, an English
philologist
Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defined ...
living in
India
India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the List of countries and dependencies by area, seventh-largest country by area, the List of countries and dependencies by population, second-most populous ...
, who in 1786 made his famous
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists. There is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothick and the Celtick, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian
Old Persian is one of the two directly attested Old Iranian languages (the other being Avestan) and is the ancestor of Middle Persian (the language of Sasanian Empire). Like other Old Iranian languages, it was known to its native speakers as ( ...
might be added to the same family.
Comparative linguistics
The comparative method developed out of attempts to reconstruct the proto-language mentioned by Jones, which he did not name but subsequent linguists have labelled
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo ...
(PIE). The first professional comparison between the
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, D ...
that were then known was made by the German linguist
Franz Bopp in 1816. He did not attempt a reconstruction but demonstrated that Greek, Latin and Sanskrit shared a common structure and a common lexicon. In 1808,
Friedrich Schlegel first stated the importance of using the eldest possible form of a language when trying to prove its relationships; in 1818,
Rasmus Christian Rask developed the principle of regular sound-changes to explain his observations of similarities between individual words in the Germanic languages and their cognates in Greek and
Jacob Grimm
Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm (4 January 1785 – 20 September 1863), also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He is known as the discoverer of Grimm's law of linguistics, the co-author of t ...
, better known for his ''
Fairy Tales
A fairy tale (alternative names include fairytale, fairy story, magic tale, or wonder tale) is a short story that belongs to the folklore genre. Such stories typically feature magic (paranormal), magic, incantation, enchantments, and mythical ...
'', used the comparative method in ''Deutsche Grammatik'' (published 1819–1837 in four volumes), which attempted to show the development of the
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, ...
from a common origin, which was the first systematic study of
diachronic language change.
Both Rask and Grimm were unable to explain apparent exceptions to the sound laws that they had discovered. Although
Hermann Grassmann
Hermann Günther Grassmann (german: link=no, Graßmann, ; 15 April 1809 – 26 September 1877) was a German polymath known in his day as a linguist and now also as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, general scholar, and publisher. His mat ...
explained one of the anomalies with the publication of
Grassmann's law in 1862,
Karl Verner
Karl Adolph Verner (; 7 March 1846 – 5 November 1896) was a Danish linguist. He is remembered today for Verner's law, which he published in 1876.
Biography
Verner's interest in languages was stimulated by reading about the work of Rasmus Chris ...
made a methodological breakthrough in 1875, when he identified a pattern now known as
Verner's law, the first sound-law based on comparative evidence showing that a
phonological
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
change in one
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
could depend on other factors within the same word (such as neighbouring phonemes and the position of the
accent), which are now called ''conditioning environments''.
Neo-grammarian approach
Similar discoveries made by the ''Junggrammatiker'' (usually translated as "
Neogrammarians
The Neogrammarians (German: ''Junggrammatiker'', 'young grammarians') were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change ...
") at the
University of Leipzig
Leipzig University (german: Universität Leipzig), in Leipzig in Saxony, Germany, is one of the world's oldest universities and the second-oldest university (by consecutive years of existence) in Germany. The university was founded on 2 Decemb ...
in the late 19th century led them to conclude that all sound changes were ultimately regular, resulting in the famous statement by
Karl Brugmann
Karl Brugmann (16 March 1849 – 29 June 1919) was a German linguist. He is noted for his work in Indo-European linguistics.
Biography
He was educated at the universities of Halle and Leipzig. He taught at the gymnasium at Wiesbaden and at Le ...
and
Hermann Osthoff
Hermann Osthoff (18 April 1847, Billmerich – 7 May 1909, Heidelberg) was a German linguist. He was involved in Indo-European studies and the Neogrammarian school. He is known for formulating Osthoff's law, and published widely on Indo-Eur ...
in 1878 that "sound laws have no exceptions". That idea is fundamental to the modern comparative method since it necessarily assumes regular correspondences between sounds in related languages and thus regular sound changes from the proto-language. The ''Neogrammarian hypothesis'' led to the application of the comparative method to reconstruct
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo-E ...
since
Indo-European
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, Du ...
was then by far the most well-studied language family. Linguists working with other families soon followed suit, and the comparative method quickly became the established method for uncovering linguistic relationships.
Application
There is no fixed set of steps to be followed in the application of the comparative method, but some steps are suggested by
Lyle Campbell
Lyle Richard Campbell (born October 22, 1942) is an American scholar and linguist known for his studies of Indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous American languages, especially those of Central America, and on historical linguistics in ...
and
Terry Crowley
Terrence Michael Crowley (born February 16, 1947) is an American former professional baseball player and coach. He played in Major League Baseball as an outfielder and utility player from through , most notably as a member of the Baltimore Oriol ...
, who are both authors of introductory texts in historical linguistics. This abbreviated summary is based on their concepts of how to proceed.
Step 1, assemble potential cognate lists
This step involves making lists of words that are likely cognates among the languages being compared. If there is a regularly-recurring match between the phonetic structure of basic words with similar meanings, a genetic kinship can probably then be established.
[.] For example, linguists looking at the
Polynesian family might come up with a list similar to the following (their actual list would be much longer):
Borrowings or
false cognate
False cognates are pairs of words that seem to be cognates because of similar sounds and meaning, but have different etymologies; they can be within the same language or from different languages, even within the same family. For example, the Engl ...
s can skew or obscure the correct data. For example, English ''taboo'' () is like the six Polynesian forms because of borrowing from Tongan into English, not because of a genetic similarity. That problem can usually be overcome by using basic vocabulary, such as kinship terms, numbers, body parts and pronouns. Nonetheless, even basic vocabulary can be sometimes borrowed.
Finnish
Finnish may refer to:
* Something or someone from, or related to Finland
* Culture of Finland
* Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland
* Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people
* Finnish cuisine
See also ...
, for example, borrowed the word for "mother", ''äiti'', from Proto-Germanic *aiþį̄ (compare to
Gothic
Gothic or Gothics may refer to:
People and languages
*Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes
**Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths
**Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoken b ...
''aiþei'').
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
borrowed the pronouns "they", "them", and "their(s)" from
Norse.
Thai
Thai or THAI may refer to:
* Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia
** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand
** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand
*** Thai script
*** Thai (Unicode block ...
and various other
East Asian languages
The East Asian languages are a language family (alternatively ''macrofamily'' or ''superphylum'') proposed by Stanley Starosta in 2001. The proposal has since been adopted by George van Driem.
Classifications Early proposals
Early proposals of s ...
borrowed their numbers from
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
. An extreme case is represented by
Pirahã, a
Muran language of South America, which has been controversially claimed to have borrowed all of its
pronoun
In linguistics and grammar, a pronoun (abbreviated ) is a word or a group of words that one may substitute for a noun or noun phrase.
Pronouns have traditionally been regarded as one of the parts of speech, but some modern theorists would not co ...
s from
Nheengatu
The Nheengatu language (Tupi: , nheengatu rionegrino: ''yẽgatu'', nheengatu tradicional: ''nhẽẽgatú'' e nheengatu tapajoawara: ''nheẽgatu''), often written Nhengatu, is an indigenous language of the Tupi-Guarani family, being then der ...
.
Step 2, establish correspondence sets
The next step involves determining the regular sound-correspondences exhibited by the lists of potential cognates. For example, in the Polynesian data above, it is apparent that words that contain ''t'' in most of the languages listed have cognates in Hawaiian with ''k'' in the same position. That is visible in multiple cognate sets: the words glossed as 'one', 'three', 'man' and 'taboo' all show the relationship. The situation is called a "regular correspondence" between ''k'' in Hawaiian and ''t'' in the other Polynesian languages. Similarly, a regular correspondence can be seen between Hawaiian and Rapanui ''h'', Tongan and Samoan ''f'', Maori ''ɸ'', and Rarotongan ''ʔ''.
Mere phonetic similarity, as between
English
English usually refers to:
* English language
* English people
English may also refer to:
Peoples, culture, and language
* ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England
** English national ...
''day'' and
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
''dies'' (both with the same meaning), has no probative value.
[.] English initial ''d-'' does not ''regularly'' match since a large set of English and Latin non-borrowed cognates cannot be assembled such that English ''d'' repeatedly and consistently corresponds to Latin ''d'' at the beginning of a word, and whatever sporadic matches can be observed are due either to chance (as in the above example) or to
borrowing (for example, Latin ''diabolus'' and English ''devil'', both ultimately of Greek origin). However, English and Latin exhibit a regular correspondence of ''t-'' : ''d-''
(in which "A : B" means "A corresponds to B"), as in the following examples:
If there are many regular correspondence sets of this kind (the more, the better), a common origin becomes a virtual certainty, particularly if some of the correspondences are non-trivial or unusual.
Step 3, discover which sets are in complementary distribution
During the late 18th to late 19th century, two major developments improved the method's effectiveness.
First, it was found that many sound changes are conditioned by a specific ''context''. For example, in both
Greek
Greek may refer to:
Greece
Anything of, from, or related to Greece, a country in Southern Europe:
*Greeks, an ethnic group.
*Greek language, a branch of the Indo-European language family.
**Proto-Greek language, the assumed last common ancestor ...
and
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural diffusion ...
, an
aspirated stop
Stop may refer to:
Places
* Stop, Kentucky, an unincorporated community in the United States
* Stop (Rogatica), a village in Rogatica, Republika Srpska, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Facilities
* Bus stop
* Truck stop, a type of rest stop for truck d ...
evolved into an unaspirated one, but only if a second aspirate occurred later in the same word; this is
Grassmann's law, first described for
Sanskrit
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan languages, Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had Trans-cultural diffusion ...
by
Sanskrit grammarian
Sanskrit (; attributively , ; nominally , , ) is a classical language belonging to the Indo-Aryan branch of the Indo-European languages. It arose in South Asia after its predecessor languages had diffused there from the northwest in the late ...
Pāṇini
, era = ;;6th–5th century BCE
, region = Indian philosophy
, main_interests = Grammar, linguistics
, notable_works = ' (Sanskrit#Classical Sanskrit, Classical Sanskrit)
, influenced=
, notable_ideas=Descript ...
and promulgated by
Hermann Grassmann
Hermann Günther Grassmann (german: link=no, Graßmann, ; 15 April 1809 – 26 September 1877) was a German polymath known in his day as a linguist and now also as a mathematician. He was also a physicist, general scholar, and publisher. His mat ...
in 1863.
Second, it was found that sometimes sound changes occurred in contexts that were later lost. For instance, in Sanskrit
velars
Velars are consonants articulated with the back part of the tongue (the dorsum) against the soft palate, the back part of the roof of the mouth (known also as the velum).
Since the velar region of the roof of the mouth is relatively extensive an ...
(''k''-like sounds) were replaced by
palatals
Palatals are consonants articulated with the body of the tongue raised against the hard palate (the middle part of the roof of the mouth). Consonants with the tip of the tongue curled back against the palate are called retroflex.
Characteristi ...
(''ch''-like sounds) whenever the following vowel was ''*i'' or ''*e''. Subsequent to this change, all instances of ''*e'' were replaced by ''a''. The situation could be reconstructed only because the original distribution of ''e'' and ''a'' could be recovered from the evidence of other
Indo-European languages
The Indo-European languages are a language family native to the overwhelming majority of Europe, the Iranian plateau, and the northern Indian subcontinent. Some European languages of this family, English, French, Portuguese, Russian, D ...
. For instance, the
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
suffix ''que'', "and", preserves the original ''*e'' vowel that caused the consonant shift in Sanskrit:
Verner's Law
Verner's law describes a historical sound change in the Proto-Germanic language whereby consonants that would usually have been the voiceless fricatives , , , , , following an unstressed syllable, became the voiced fricatives , , , , . The law was ...
, discovered by
Karl Verner
Karl Adolph Verner (; 7 March 1846 – 5 November 1896) was a Danish linguist. He is remembered today for Verner's law, which he published in 1876.
Biography
Verner's interest in languages was stimulated by reading about the work of Rasmus Chris ...
1875, provides a similar case: the
voicing of consonants in
Germanic languages
The Germanic languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family spoken natively by a population of about 515 million people mainly in Europe, North America, Oceania and Southern Africa. The most widely spoken Germanic language, ...
underwent a change that was determined by the position of the old Indo-European
accent. Following the change, the accent shifted to initial position. Verner solved the puzzle by comparing the Germanic voicing pattern with Greek and Sanskrit accent patterns.
This stage of the comparative method, therefore, involves examining the correspondence sets discovered in step 2 and seeing which of them apply only in certain contexts. If two (or more) sets apply in
complementary distribution
In linguistics, complementary distribution, as distinct from contrastive distribution and free variation, is the relationship between two different elements of the same kind in which one element is found in one set of environments and the other ele ...
, they can be assumed to reflect a single original
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
: "some sound changes, particularly conditioned sound changes, can result in a proto-sound being associated with more than one correspondence set".
For example, the following potential cognate list can be established for
Romance languages
The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
, which descend from
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic languages, Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through ...
:
They evidence two correspondence sets, ''k : k'' and ''k : :
Since French ' occurs only before ''a'' where the other languages also have ''a'', and French ''k'' occurs elsewhere, the difference is caused by different environments (being before ''a'' conditions the change), and the sets are complementary. They can, therefore, be assumed to reflect a single proto-phoneme (in this case ''*k'', spelled , c, in
Latin
Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...
). The original Latin words are ''corpus'', ''crudus'', ''catena'' and ''captiare'', all with an initial ''k''. If more evidence along those lines were given, one might conclude that an alteration of the original ''k'' took place because of a different environment.
A more complex case involves consonant clusters in
Proto-Algonquian
Proto-Algonquian (commonly abbreviated PA) is the proto-language from which the various Algonquian languages are descended. It is generally estimated to have been spoken around 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, but there is less agreement on where it was ...
. The Algonquianist
Leonard Bloomfield
Leonard Bloomfield (April 1, 1887 – April 18, 1949) was an American linguist who led the development of structural linguistics in the United States during the 1930s and the 1940s. He is considered to be the father of American distributionalism ...
used the reflexes of the clusters in four of the daughter languages to reconstruct the following correspondence sets:
Although all five correspondence sets overlap with one another in various places, they are not in complementary distribution and so Bloomfield recognised that a different cluster must be reconstructed for each set. His reconstructions were, respectively, ''*hk'', ''*xk'', ''*čk'' (=), ''*šk'' (=), and ''çk'' (in which ''x'' and ''ç'' are arbitrary symbols, rather than attempts to guess the phonetic value of the proto-phonemes).
Step 4, reconstruct proto-phonemes
Typology assists in deciding what reconstruction best fits the data. For example, the voicing of voiceless stops between vowels is common, but the devoicing of voiced stops in that environment is rare. If a correspondence ''-t-'' : ''-d-'' between vowels is found in two languages, the proto-
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
is more likely to be ''*-t-'', with a development to the voiced form in the second language. The opposite reconstruction would represent a rare type.
However, unusual sound changes occur. The
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo ...
word for ''two'', for example, is reconstructed as ''*dwō'', which is reflected in
Classical Armenian
Classical Armenian (, in Eastern Armenian pronunciation: Grabar, Western Armenian: Krapar; meaning "literary anguage; also Old Armenian or Liturgical Armenian) is the oldest attested form of the Armenian language. It was first written down at ...
as ''erku''. Several other cognates demonstrate a regular change ''*dw-'' → ''erk-'' in Armenian. Similarly, in Bearlake, a dialect of the
Athabaskan language
Athabaskan (also spelled ''Athabascan'', ''Athapaskan'' or ''Athapascan'', and also known as Dene) is a large family of indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous languages of North America, located in western North America in three areal ...
of
Slavey
The Slavey (also Slave and South Slavey) are a First Nations indigenous peoples of the Dene group, indigenous to the Great Slave Lake region, in Canada's Northwest Territories, and extending into northeastern British Columbia and northwestern ...
, there has been a sound change of Proto-Athabaskan ''*ts'' → Bearlake '. It is very unlikely that ''*dw-'' changed directly into ''erk-'' and ''*ts'' into ', but they probably instead went through several intermediate steps before they arrived at the later forms. It is not phonetic similarity that matters for the comparative method but rather regular sound correspondences.
By the
principle of economy, the reconstruction of a proto-phoneme should require as few sound changes as possible to arrive at the modern reflexes in the daughter languages. For example,
Algonquian languages
The Algonquian languages ( or ; also Algonkian) are a subfamily of Indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous American languages that include most languages in the Algic languages, Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language f ...
exhibit the following correspondence set:
The simplest reconstruction for this set would be either ''*m'' or ''*b''. Both ''*m'' → ''b'' and ''*b'' → ''m'' are likely. Because ''m'' occurs in five of the languages and ''b'' in only one of them, if ''*b'' is reconstructed, it is necessary to assume five separate changes of ''*b'' → ''m'', but if ''*m'' is reconstructed, it is necessary to assume only one change of ''*m'' → ''b'' and so ''*m'' would be most economical.
That argument assumes the languages other than Arapaho to be at least partly independent of one another. If they all formed a common subgroup, the development ''*b'' → ''m'' would have to be assumed to have occurred only once.
Step 5, examine the reconstructed system typologically
In the final step, the linguist checks to see how the proto-
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
s fit the known
typological constraints. For example, a hypothetical system,
has only one
voiced stop
In phonetics, a plosive, also known as an occlusive or simply a stop, is a pulmonic consonant in which the vocal tract is blocked so that all airflow ceases.
The occlusion may be made with the tongue tip or blade (, ), tongue body (, ), lips ...
, ''*b'', and although it has an
alveolar and a
velar nasal
The voiced velar nasal, also known as agma, from the Greek word for 'fragment', is a type of consonantal sound used in some spoken languages. It is the sound of ''ng'' in English ''sing'' as well as ''n'' before velar consonants as in ''Englis ...
, ''*n'' and ''*ŋ'', there is no corresponding
labial nasal. However, languages generally maintain symmetry in their phonemic inventories. In this case, a linguist might attempt to investigate the possibilities that either what was earlier reconstructed as ''*b'' is in fact ''*m'' or that the ''*n'' and ''*ŋ'' are in fact ''*d'' and ''*g''.
Even a symmetrical system can be typologically suspicious. For example, here is the traditional
Proto-Indo-European
Proto-Indo-European (PIE) is the reconstructed common ancestor of the Indo-European language family. Its proposed features have been derived by linguistic reconstruction from documented Indo-European languages. No direct record of Proto-Indo ...
stop inventory:
An earlier voiceless aspirated row was removed on grounds of insufficient evidence. Since the mid-20th century, a number of linguists have argued that this phonology is implausible and that it is extremely unlikely for a language to have a voiced aspirated (
breathy voice
Breathy voice (also called murmured voice, whispery voice, soughing and susurration) is a phonation in which the vocal folds vibrate, as they do in normal (modal) voicing, but are adjusted to let more air escape which produces a sighing-like ...
) series without a corresponding voiceless aspirated series.
Thomas Gamkrelidze and
Vyacheslav Ivanov provided a potential solution and argued that the series that are traditionally reconstructed as plain voiced should be reconstructed as
glottalized
Glottalization is the complete or partial closure of the glottis during the articulation of another sound. Glottalization of vowels and other sonorants is most often realized as creaky voice (partial closure). Glottalization of obstruent consona ...
: either
implosive
Implosive consonants are a group of stop consonants (and possibly also some affricates) with a mixed glottalic ingressive and pulmonic egressive airstream mechanism.''Phonetics for communication disorders.'' Martin J. Ball and Nicole Müller. Ro ...
or
ejective
In phonetics, ejective consonants are usually voiceless consonants that are pronounced with a glottalic egressive airstream. In the phonology of a particular language, ejectives may contrast with aspirated, voiced and tenuis consonants. Some ...
. The plain voiceless and voiced aspirated series would thus be replaced by just voiceless and voiced, with aspiration being a non-distinctive quality of both. That example of the application of linguistic typology to linguistic reconstruction has become known as the
glottalic theory
The glottalic theory is that Proto-Indo-European had ejective stops, , instead of the plain voiced ones, as hypothesized by the usual Proto-Indo-European phonological reconstructions.
A forerunner of the theory was proposed by the Danish lingu ...
. It has a large number of proponents but is not generally accepted.
The reconstruction of proto-sounds logically precedes the reconstruction of grammatical
morpheme
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology.
In English, morphemes are ...
s (word-forming affixes and inflectional endings), patterns of
declension
In linguistics, declension (verb: ''to decline'') is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns, pronouns, adjectives, adverbs, and ar ...
and
conjugation
Conjugation or conjugate may refer to:
Linguistics
* Grammatical conjugation, the modification of a verb from its basic form
* Emotive conjugation or Russell's conjugation, the use of loaded language
Mathematics
* Complex conjugation, the chang ...
and so on. The full reconstruction of an unrecorded protolanguage is an open-ended task.
Complications
The history of historical linguistics
The limitations of the comparative method were recognized by the very linguists who developed it, but it is still seen as a valuable tool. In the case of Indo-European, the method seemed at least a partial validation of the centuries-old search for an
Ursprache, the original language. The others were presumed to be ordered in a
family tree
A family tree, also called a genealogy or a pedigree chart, is a chart representing family relationships in a conventional tree structure. More detailed family trees, used in medicine and social work, are known as genograms.
Representations of ...
, which was the
tree model
In historical linguistics, the tree model (also Stammbaum, genetic, or cladistic model) is a model of the evolution of languages analogous to the concept of a family tree, particularly a phylogenetic tree in the biological evolution of species. ...
of the
neogrammarians
The Neogrammarians (German: ''Junggrammatiker'', 'young grammarians') were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change ...
.
The archaeologists followed suit and attempted to find archaeological evidence of a culture or cultures that could be presumed to have spoken a
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 unattes ...
, such as
Vere Gordon Childe
Vere Gordon Childe (14 April 189219 October 1957) was an Australian archaeologist who specialised in the study of European prehistory. He spent most of his life in the United Kingdom, working as an academic for the University of Edinburgh and th ...
's ''The Aryans: a study of Indo-European origins'', 1926. Childe was a philologist turned archaeologist. Those views culminated in the ''Siedlungsarchaologie'', or "settlement-archaeology", of
Gustaf Kossinna
Gustaf Kossinna (28 September 1858 – 20 December 1931) was a German philologist and archaeologist who was Professor of German Archaeology at the University of Berlin.
Along with Carl Schuchhardt he was the most influential German prehisto ...
, becoming known as "Kossinna's Law". Kossinna asserted that cultures represent ethnic groups, including their languages, but his law was rejected after World War II. The fall of Kossinna's Law removed the temporal and spatial framework previously applied to many proto-languages. Fox concludes:
The Comparative Method ''as such'' is not, in fact, historical; it provides evidence of linguistic relationships to which we may give a historical interpretation.... ur increased knowledge about the historical processes involvedhas probably made historical linguists less prone to equate the idealizations required by the method with historical reality.... Provided we keep he interpretation of the results and the method itself
He or HE may refer to:
Language
* He (pronoun), an English pronoun
* He (kana), the romanization of the Japanese kana へ
* He (letter), the fifth letter of many Semitic alphabets
* He (Cyrillic), a letter of the Cyrillic script called ''He'' ...
apart, the Comparative Method can continue to be used in the reconstruction of earlier stages of languages.
Proto-languages can be verified in many historical instances, such as Latin. Although no longer a law, settlement-archaeology is known to be essentially valid for some cultures that straddle history and prehistory, such as the Celtic Iron Age (mainly Celtic) and
Mycenaean civilization
Mycenaean Greece (or the Mycenaean civilization) was the last phase of the Bronze Age in Ancient Greece, spanning the period from approximately 1750 to 1050 BC.. It represents the first advanced and distinctively Greek civilization in mainland ...
(mainly Greek). None of those models can be or have been completely rejected, but none is sufficient alone.
The Neogrammarian principle
The foundation of the comparative method, and of comparative linguistics in general, is the
Neogrammarian
The Neogrammarians (German: ''Junggrammatiker'', 'young grammarians') were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change ...
s' fundamental assumption that "sound laws have no exceptions". When it was initially proposed, critics of the Neogrammarians proposed an alternate position that summarised by the maxim "each word has its own history". Several types of change actually alter words in irregular ways. Unless identified, they may hide or distort laws and cause false perceptions of relationship.
Borrowing
All languages
borrow words from other languages in various contexts. They are likely to have followed the laws of the languages from which they were borrowed, rather than the laws of the borrowing language. Therefore, studying borrowed words will probably mislead the investigator since they reflect the customs of the donor language, which is the source of the word.
Areal diffusion
Borrowing on a larger scale occurs in
areal diffusion, when features are adopted by contiguous languages over a geographical area. The borrowing may be
phonological,
morphological or
lexical
Lexical may refer to:
Linguistics
* Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language
* Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification
* Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge
* Lex ...
. A false proto-language over the area may be reconstructed for them or may be taken to be a third language serving as a source of diffused features.
Several areal features and other influences may converge to form a
Sprachbund
A sprachbund (, lit. "language federation"), also known as a linguistic area, area of linguistic convergence, or diffusion area, is a group of languages that share areal features resulting from geographical proximity and language contact. The lang ...
, a wider region sharing features that appear to be related but are diffusional. For instance, the
Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area
The Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area is a sprachbund including languages of the Sino-Tibetan, Hmong–Mien (or Miao–Yao), Kra–Dai, Austronesian and Austroasiatic families spoken in an area stretching from Thailand to China. Neighbou ...
, before it was recognised, suggested several false classifications of such languages as
Chinese
Chinese can refer to:
* Something related to China
* Chinese people, people of Chinese nationality, citizenship, and/or ethnicity
**''Zhonghua minzu'', the supra-ethnic concept of the Chinese nation
** List of ethnic groups in China, people of ...
,
Thai
Thai or THAI may refer to:
* Of or from Thailand, a country in Southeast Asia
** Thai people, the dominant ethnic group of Thailand
** Thai language, a Tai-Kadai language spoken mainly in and around Thailand
*** Thai script
*** Thai (Unicode block ...
and
Vietnamese
Vietnamese may refer to:
* Something of, from, or related to Vietnam, a country in Southeast Asia
** A citizen of Vietnam. See Demographics of Vietnam.
* Vietnamese people, or Kinh people, a Southeast Asian ethnic group native to Vietnam
** Overse ...
.
Random mutations
Sporadic changes, such as irregular inflections, compounding and abbreviation, do not follow any laws. For example, the
Spanish
Spanish might refer to:
* Items from or related to Spain:
**Spaniards are a nation and ethnic group indigenous to Spain
**Spanish language, spoken in Spain and many Latin American countries
**Spanish cuisine
Other places
* Spanish, Ontario, Can ...
words ''palabra'' ('word'), ''peligro'' ('danger') and ''milagro'' ('miracle') would have been ''parabla'', ''periglo'', ''miraglo'' by regular sound changes from the Latin ''parabŏla'', ''perīcŭlum'' and ''mīrācŭlum'', but the ''r'' and ''l'' changed places by sporadic
metathesis.
Analogy
Analogy
Analogy (from Greek ''analogia'', "proportion", from ''ana-'' "upon, according to" lso "against", "anew"+ ''logos'' "ratio" lso "word, speech, reckoning" is a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject ( ...
is the sporadic change of a feature to be like another feature in the same or a different language. It may affect a single word or be generalized to an entire class of features, such as a verb paradigm. An example is the
Russian word for ''nine''. The word, by regular sound changes from
Proto-Slavic
Proto-Slavic (abbreviated PSl., PS.; also called Common Slavic or Common Slavonic) is the Attested language, unattested, linguistic reconstruction, reconstructed proto-language of all Slavic languages. It represents Slavic speech approximately ...
, should have been , but it is in fact . It is believed that the initial ' changed to ' under influence of the word for "ten" in Russian, .
Gradual application
Those who study contemporary language changes, such as
William Labov
William Labov ( ; born December 4, 1927) is an American linguist widely regarded as the founder of the discipline of variationist sociolinguistics. He has been described as "an enormously original and influential figure who has created much of ...
, acknowledge that even a systematic sound change is applied at first inconsistently, with the percentage of its occurrence in a person's speech dependent on various social factors. The sound change seems to gradually spread in a process known as
lexical diffusion Lexical diffusion is the hypothesis that a sound change is an abrupt change that spreads gradually across the words in a language to which it is applicable.
It contrasts with the Neogrammarian view that a sound change results from phonetically-cond ...
. While it does not invalidate the Neogrammarians' axiom that "sound laws have no exceptions", the gradual application of the very sound laws shows that they do not always apply to all lexical items at the same time. Hock notes, "While it probably is true in the long run every word has its own history, it is not justified to conclude as some linguists have, that therefore the Neogrammarian position on the nature of linguistic change is falsified".
Non-inherited features
The comparative method cannot recover aspects of a language that were not inherited in its daughter idioms. For instance, the
Latin declension
Latin declension is the set of patterns according to which Latin words are declined—that is, have their endings altered to show grammatical case, number and gender. Nouns, pronouns, and adjectives are declined (verbs are conjugated), and a gi ...
pattern was lost in
Romance languages
The Romance languages, sometimes referred to as Latin languages or Neo-Latin languages, are the various modern languages that evolved from Vulgar Latin. They are the only extant subgroup of the Italic languages in the Indo-European language ...
, resulting in an impossibility to fully reconstruct such a feature via systematic comparison.
The tree model
The comparative method is used to construct a tree model (German ''Stammbaum'') of language evolution, in which daughter languages are seen as branching from the
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 unattes ...
, gradually growing more distant from it through accumulated
phonological
Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages or dialects systematically organize their sounds or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a ...
,
morpho-syntactic
A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology.
In English, morphemes are ...
, and
lexical
Lexical may refer to:
Linguistics
* Lexical corpus or lexis, a complete set of all words in a language
* Lexical item, a basic unit of lexicographical classification
* Lexicon, the vocabulary of a person, language, or branch of knowledge
* Lex ...
changes.
The presumption of a well-defined node
The tree model features nodes that are presumed to be distinct proto-languages existing independently in distinct regions during distinct historical times. The reconstruction of unattested proto-languages lends itself to that illusion since they cannot be verified, and the linguist is free to select whatever definite times and places seems best. Right from the outset of Indo-European studies, however,
Thomas Young said:
It is not, however, very easy to say what the definition should be that should constitute a separate language, but it seems most natural to call those languages distinct, of which the one cannot be understood by common persons in the habit of speaking the other.... Still, however, it may remain doubtfull whether the Danes and the Swedes could not, in general, understand each other tolerably well... nor is it possible to say if the twenty ways of pronouncing the sounds, belonging to the Chinese characters, ought or ought not to be considered as so many languages or dialects.... But,... the languages so nearly allied must stand next to each other in a systematic order…
The assumption of uniformity in a proto-language, implicit in the comparative method, is problematic. Even small language communities are always have differences in
dialect
The term dialect (from Latin , , from the Ancient Greek word , 'discourse', from , 'through' and , 'I speak') can refer to either of two distinctly different types of Linguistics, linguistic phenomena:
One usage refers to a variety (linguisti ...
, whether they are based on area, gender, class or other factors. The
Pirahã language
Pirahã (also spelled ''Pirahá, Pirahán''), or Múra-Pirahã, is the indigenous language of the isolated Pirahã people of Amazonas, Brazil. The Pirahã live along the Maici River, a tributary of the Amazon River.
Pirahã is the only survivi ...
of
Brazil
Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...
is spoken by only several hundred people but has at least two different dialects, one spoken by men and one by women. Campbell points out:
It is not so much that the comparative method 'assumes' no variation; rather, it is just that there is nothing built into the comparative method which would allow it to address variation directly.... This assumption of uniformity is a reasonable idealization; it does no more damage to the understanding of the language than, say, modern reference grammars do which concentrate on a language's general structure, typically leaving out consideration of regional or social variation.
Different dialects, as they evolve into separate languages, remain in contact with and influence one another. Even after they are considered distinct, languages near one another continue to influence one another and often share grammatical, phonological, and lexical innovations. A change in one language of a family may spread to neighboring languages, and multiple waves of change are communicated like waves across language and dialect boundaries, each with its own randomly delimited range. If a language is divided into an inventory of features, each with its own time and range (
isoglosses), they do not all coincide. History and prehistory may not offer a time and place for a distinct coincidence, as may be the case for
Proto-Italic
The Proto-Italic language is the ancestor of the Italic languages, most notably Latin and its descendants, the Romance languages. It is not directly attested in writing, but has been reconstructed to some degree through the comparative method. P ...
, for which the proto-language is only a concept. However, Hock observes:
The discovery in the late nineteenth century that isoglosses can cut across well-established linguistic boundaries at first created considerable attention and controversy. And it became fashionable to oppose a wave theory to a tree theory.... Today, however, it is quite evident that the phenomena referred to by these two terms are complementary aspects of linguistic change....
Subjectivity of the reconstruction
The reconstruction of unknown proto-languages is inherently subjective. In the
Proto-Algonquian
Proto-Algonquian (commonly abbreviated PA) is the proto-language from which the various Algonquian languages are descended. It is generally estimated to have been spoken around 2,500 to 3,000 years ago, but there is less agreement on where it was ...
example above, the choice of ''*m'' as the parent
phoneme
In phonology and linguistics, a phoneme () is a unit of sound that can distinguish one word from another in a particular language.
For example, in most dialects of English, with the notable exception of the West Midlands and the north-west o ...
is only ''likely'', not ''certain''. It is conceivable that a Proto-Algonquian language with ''*b'' in those positions split into two branches, one that preserved ''*b'' and one that changed it to ''*m'' instead, and while the first branch developed only into
Arapaho
The Arapaho (; french: Arapahos, ) are a Native American people historically living on the plains of Colorado and Wyoming. They were close allies of the Cheyenne tribe and loosely aligned with the Lakota and Dakota.
By the 1850s, Arapaho band ...
, the second spread out more widely and developed into all the other
Algonquian tribes. It is also possible that the nearest common ancestor of the
Algonquian languages
The Algonquian languages ( or ; also Algonkian) are a subfamily of Indigenous languages of the Americas, indigenous American languages that include most languages in the Algic languages, Algic language family. The name of the Algonquian language f ...
used some other sound instead, such as ''*p'', which eventually mutated to ''*b'' in one branch and to ''*m'' in the other.
Examples of strikingly complicated and even circular developments are indeed known to have occurred (such as Proto-Indo-European ''*t'' > Pre-Proto-Germanic ''*þ'' >
Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic br ...
''*ð'' > Proto-West-Germanic ''*d'' >
Old High German
Old High German (OHG; german: Althochdeutsch (Ahd.)) is the earliest stage of the German language, conventionally covering the period from around 750 to 1050.
There is no standardised or supra-regional form of German at this period, and Old High ...
''t'' in ''fater'' > Modern German ''Vater''), but in the absence of any evidence or other reason to postulate a more complicated development, the preference of a simpler explanation is justified by the principle of parsimony, also known as
Occam's razor
Occam's razor, Ockham's razor, or Ocham's razor ( la, novacula Occami), also known as the principle of parsimony or the law of parsimony ( la, lex parsimoniae), is the problem-solving principle that "entities should not be multiplied beyond neces ...
. Since reconstruction involves many such choices, some linguists prefer to view the reconstructed features as abstract representations of sound correspondences, rather than as objects with a historical time and place.
The existence of proto-languages and the validity of the comparative method is verifiable if the reconstruction can be matched to a known language, which may be known only as a shadow in the
loanword
A loanword (also loan word or loan-word) is a word at least partly assimilated from one language (the donor language) into another language. This is in contrast to cognates, which are words in two or more languages that are similar because th ...
s of another language. For example,
Finnic languages
The Finnic (''Fennic'') or more precisely Balto-Finnic (Balto-Fennic, Baltic Finnic, Baltic Fennic) languages constitute a branch of the Uralic language family spoken around the Baltic Sea by the Baltic Finnic peoples. There are around 7 mi ...
such as
Finnish
Finnish may refer to:
* Something or someone from, or related to Finland
* Culture of Finland
* Finnish people or Finns, the primary ethnic group in Finland
* Finnish language, the national language of the Finnish people
* Finnish cuisine
See also ...
have borrowed many words from an early stage of
Germanic, and the shape of the loans matches the forms that have been reconstructed for
Proto-Germanic
Proto-Germanic (abbreviated PGmc; also called Common Germanic) is the reconstructed proto-language of the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages.
Proto-Germanic eventually developed from pre-Proto-Germanic into three Germanic br ...
. Finnish ''kuningas'' 'king' and ''kaunis'' 'beautiful' match the Germanic reconstructions *''kuningaz'' and *''skauniz'' (> German ''König'' 'king', ''schön'' 'beautiful').
Additional models
The
wave model
In historical linguistics, the wave model or wave theory (German ''Wellentheorie'') is a model of language change in which a new language feature (innovation) or a new combination of language features spreads from its region of origin, affecting ...
was developed in the 1870s as an alternative to the tree model to represent the historical patterns of language diversification. Both the tree-based and the wave-based representations are compatible with the comparative method.
By contrast, some approaches are incompatible with the comparative method, including contentious
glottochronology 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 ( ...
and even more controversial
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 to ...
considered by most historical linguists to be flawed and unreliable.
[; .]
See also
*
Comparative linguistics
Comparative linguistics, or comparative-historical linguistics (formerly comparative philology) is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness.
Genetic relatedness ...
*
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
# ...
*
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
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 unattest ...
*
Swadesh list
The Swadesh list ("Swadesh" is pronounced ) is a classic compilation of tentatively universal concepts for the purposes of lexicostatistics. Translations of the Swadesh list into a set of languages allow researchers to quantify the interrelatednes ...
Notes
References
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External links
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{{DEFAULTSORT:Comparative Method
Historical linguistics
Comparative linguistics