Chapter Ten: Semantic Change and Lexical Change
Words can also change their meaning (semantics) with time (which is the main fascination of etymology for most of us).
Types of semantic change
- Widening
- Narrowing
- Metaphor
- Metonymy (naming things after close associations e.g. afternoon tea is both a meal and a drink)
- Synecdoche (part is used to refer to the whole, or vice versa e.g. contacts from contact lenses)
- Degeneration (e.g. villain from villein, serf)
- Elevation (e.g. fond from fonnen, to be foolish)
- Taboo replacement (e.g. bathroom for toilet)
- Hyperbole (e.g. terribly or literally for very)
- Litotes (exaggeration by understatement e.g. "a spot of bother")
- Contact (words extend meaning to new concepts - the examples given in the book seem to me to be a kind of widening, and to do with new objects in general, rather than language contact itself)
Many individual changes belong to one or more of these types; some people claim that they are all subtypes of widening and narrowing.
Generalisations about semantic change
Changes tend to be...
- Via polysemy i.e. they first gain multiple meanings, then lose the old one (note that words can be truly ambiguous - lie to deceive or lie to sleep - or merely vague - a track in a stadium or a track through a field - or somewhere inbetween)
- From concrete to abstract
- From external to internal (I see meaning I understand)
- From external or internal to textual or linguistic (e.g. preposition while to conjunction while)
- Increasingly subjective, based on the speaker's view of a proposition (bitter for the emotion)
New words generally do not appear out of nowhere. Even deliberately invented words are generally taken from combinations of existing words (even if from dead languages). They may also be taken from names (personal, place or brand names).
Chapter Eleven: Explaining Linguistic Change
There are various explainations of linguistic change which range from the silly, to the widely believed, to the well documented. For example, a build-up of wax in the ears of German tribesmen led to them mishearing stops as fricatives. Young people speak differently from old people because they are lazy, and can't be bothered to speak properly. Finnish underwent a change from /ð/ to /d/ because of the imposition of a Swedish reading program in schools.The reasons for linguistic change may be internal or external. Internal factors have to do with, for example, how the vocal apparatus works (e.g voicing stops between vowels is easier than stopping voicing and starting again), or psychological factors such as how sounds are perceived (nasal vowels sound lower than plain vowels, so speakers imitating them pronounce them lower than their previous incarnations).
External factors include things like educational policy (as mentioned for Finnish) and many other social factors. Interestingly, Labov (1994) showed that language change does not come about through lower classes imitating the prestige dialect, and the upper classes altering their speech to remain distinct (as has been fairly widely believed) but instead, is mostly instigated by the middle classes.
Chapter Twelve: Areal Linguistics
Areal linguistics is, as the name suggests, the study of how languages influence one another through contact in an area, as opposed to their historical relation. A linguistic area is also know as a Sprachbund.Some famous linguistic areas include:
- The Balkans
- The Indian subcontinent
- Meso-America
- The Northwest Coast (of North America)
- The Baltic
- Ehtiopia
Chapter Thirteen: Distant Genetic Relationship
This chapter is a review of the various techniques that are or have been used in establishing more distant relationships (i.e. more than 5,000 - 10,000 years old). So far, there are no new techniques that work (reliably) better than the ones we've already discussed, and those have their limitations.
Chapter Fourteen: Philology: The Role of Written Records
As you would expect, written records are quite useful! But the comparative method does not require them; we can make some quite certain discoveries without them.
They do have problems in that, essentially, no-one uses the International Phonetic Alphabet as their writing system, so it's quite hard to tell what speech actually sounded like.
They do have problems in that, essentially, no-one uses the International Phonetic Alphabet as their writing system, so it's quite hard to tell what speech actually sounded like.
Writings systems are more resistant to change than speech, so spellings frequently reflect either an old pronunciation, a foreign language from which the word was borrowed, or even just the spelling conventions of another language. (E.g. "salmon" in English has never been pronounced with an /l/, but it looks more Latin-y like that. Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur, as the saying goes.)
Poetry can tell us which words rhymed - but of course, poets can occasionally decide they want to make this line only a half-rhyme, unlike the rest of the poem, and unless we have extensive records, we won't know that.
Chapter Fifteen: Linguistic Prehistory
Vocabulary describes society
Rather than linguistics before written records, this chapter deals with the application of historical linguistics to the study of pre-historic peoples. There are clues in their vocabulary to which plants and animals they knew about, what tools they had, how their society was structured, etc etc.Now, whilst the existence of a word for "pig" and not for "elephant" does tell us that the Germanic tribes were Europeans and not Africans, I am unsure as to how much such clues should be relied upon. Modern English has a lot of words for things that are not daily occurences for English speakers - elephants included. Why shouldn't people thousands of years ago have talked about foreigners and fiction? And how do we explain words for dragons?
The vocabulary may tell us more about what the descendents of those people thought was important enough to retain than what the people themselves valued.
Finding the homeland
Firstly, geographical origins can be traced through comparing words for animals and plants, and finding where their ranges coincide. This can be problematic, since the ranges shift with time, and the proto-language may not be able to be dated very accurately.
Secondly, we can use linguistic migration theory, which basically says that most languages don't move very far from where the proto-language was spoken. We can trace the origins back to where the oldest splits appear to have occured.
(For example, despite the fact that there are descendents of Latin spoken throughout Latin America, these clearly split off from Peninsular Spanish and Portuguese, whereas Spanish split from French and Italian further back in time, and these languages are all spoken in Europe.)
Borrowings
Loan words provide evidence of contact between two people groups. (Though possibly only sporadic - such as Tibetan gyag, yak - or via another group - such as chocolate, which came via Spanish.)
They also imply that the concept (technology, resource) that the loan word describes was borrowed at the same time. (Note, however, that Finnish borrowed the word "mother" from Germanic, so this is clearly not always the case!)
Words and things
Wörter und Sachen is a technique based on the analysability of words. Basically, the more recent a word is, the easier it is to break down into meaningful parts (e.g. compare skyscraper with house).
This can also be applied to place names, though frequently it is unneccesary since they derive from different languages: English settlements can be dated from their Roman, Anglo-Saxon or Viking names, since most contain varients of words for 'settlement', 'fort', 'hill' or the like.
This can also be applied to place names, though frequently it is unneccesary since they derive from different languages: English settlements can be dated from their Roman, Anglo-Saxon or Viking names, since most contain varients of words for 'settlement', 'fort', 'hill' or the like.
Conclusion
And that is it for Historical Linguistics: An introduction.
I really enjoyed reading this book. As I said, historical linguistics is highly accessible, and the examples are fun to work through. The writing flows fairly smoothly. If you are willing to go quite in depth, I think this is a perfectly good book for the complete beginner to read just for interest. You may occasionally need to look words up, but there's nothing in there that can't be defined in a line or two.
You'd find it helpful to be familiar with the International Phonetic Alphabet, but it is given in the front as a reference, so you don't need to memorise it.