The Bloomsbury Companion to Historical Linguistics

Silvia Luraghi, Vit Bubenik, Silvia Luraghi, Vit Bubenik

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781441149664
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Originally published as the Continuum Companion to Historical Linguistics, this book brings together a number of leading scholars who provide a combination of different approaches to current and new issues in historical linguistics, while supplying an exhaustive and up-to-date coverage of sub-fields traditionally regarded as central to historical linguistics research. The editors aim to build a solid background for further discussion and to indicate directions for new research on relevant open questions. The book includes coverage of key terms, a list of resources, and sections on:
- history of research- methodology- phonology- morphology- grammatical categories- syntax- grammaticalization- semantics - etymology- language contact- sociolinguistics- causes of language change
It is a complete resource for researchers working on historical linguistics.

1	Historical Linguistics: History, Sources and Resources^1 Hans Henrich Hock

Chapter Overview

1. History of Research

2. Sources

3. Writing Systems

4. Corpora

Notes

1. History of Research

1.1 Relevance

In this chapter we start by introducing historical linguistics through its history. Apart from general documentary interest, one may wonder why one should know history of past theories and research when approaching this field: after all, one does not normally begin a book on phonology with a survey of past knowledge. In the field of historical linguistics, however, there are several turning points which make it imperative for the understanding of current issues to have also some knowledge about the historical development of theories which concern them. For instance, when discussing regularities and irregularities in phonological change, the way in which the notion of sound law was implemented by the neogrammarians and criticized later on remains very much an issue.

1.2 The Rise of Comparative Linguistics

The official act of birth of comparative historical linguistics is conventionally indicated in Sir William Jones’ The Sanscrit Language, delivered as a lecture at the Asiatic Society in 1786, in which the author remarked that the similarities between Greek, Latin and Sanskrit hinted to a common origin, adding that such languages might also be related to Persian, Gothic and the Celtic languages. While there is not much really historical in Jones’ notes, it is nonetheless true that later work on historical linguistics developed out of the discovery that some languages had a common ancestor. In any case, during the first few decades of its life, comparative historical linguistics put the emphasis on the first part of its name; the main interest of early historical linguists was not on language history and language change, but rather on comparison and (somewhat later) on reconstruction.

In spite of its birth within the British Empire, historical linguistics was immediately adopted in Germany, where it found its real cradle. Among early stepfathers was philosopher Friedrich Schlegel, whose 1808 book Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier (‘On the speech and wisdom of the Indians’) bridged the gap between his homeland’s orientalists and linguists (Sanskrit had already been studied in the last decades of the eighteenth century in German universities, although the first chair was founded by Schlegel’s elder brother August Wilhelm in 1818).² Schlegel correctly pointed to grammatical, rather than lexical, similarities as evidence for genetic affiliation among the Indo-European languages, including, besides the above-mentioned ones, the Slavic languages and Armenian, and added that complete divergence from the grammar of Sanskrit showed that lexical similarities with Hebrew and Coptic, as well as with Basque, must be considered an accident. According to Schlegel, Sanskrit was either the ancestor of all other Indo-European languages, or at least the closest language to the unknown ancestor, given its higher level of morphological regularity. We can thus date to Schlegel the origin of the Sanskrit-biased model of Proto-Indo-European, which has characterized (or plagued, as some would argue) Indo-European linguistics along its whole history.

The next important step in the development of comparative historical linguistics is the discovery of the first Germanic sound shift, commonly referred to today as ‘Grimm’s Law.’ Indeed, the first scholar to describe the sound shift was Dane Rasmus Rask in his 1818 essay Undersøgelse om det gamle nordiske eller islandske Sprogs Oprindelse (‘Introduction to the grammar of the Icelandic and other ancient northern languages’); Grimm then elaborated on Rask’s findings in the second edition of his Deutsche Grammatik (‘Germanic grammar’), published in 1822. Even though Grimm’s Law represents nowadays the prototype of all sound laws, it was only later, in the second part of the nineteenth century with the work of the neogrammarians, that the concept of sound law (and hence of regularity) came to light, indeed through the explanation of putative irregularities to the first sound shift, which had remained unexplained in Grimm’s work.

Although phonology remained the privileged field of research for nineteenth-century comparative historical linguistics, comparative grammar also had an early birth, which can be dated to the publication of Franz Bopp’s 1816 Über das Konjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenen der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache (‘On the conjugation system of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic’). In this work, Bopp explained his Agglutinationstheorie, or ‘agglutination theory,’ according to which bound morphemes such as verb suffixes and endings originated from earlier free morphemes, notably auxiliaries (which including the verb ‘be’) and personal pronouns. Today, Bopp’s idea of Agglutination can easily be conceived of as a predecessor of grammaticalization, and consequently be taken seriously; it must be said, however, that Bopp’s description of developments due to coalescence of morphemes is far from accurate. This fact, together with a general lack of interest in the reconstruction of the origins of morphology, led his theory to early discredit. Only in the second part of the twentieth century some of his hypotheses have been shown plausible, as is the general idea of the origin of bound from free morphemes.

Among Bopp’s merits, one must further mention his appointment, in 1821, to the first chair of linguistics, then called Orientalische Literatur und allgemeine Sprachkunde (‘Oriental literature and general language studies’), at the university of Berlin. This university had been founded in 1810 by another famous philosopher and linguist, Wilhelm von Humboldt, at that time Prussian minister of education. Humboldt’s interest in language was manifold, and could rely on his knowledge of a wide number of languages, including many exotic ones which had never been described before. He is best known for laying the foundations of linguistic typology in his 1836 book, Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaus und seinen Einfluss auf die geistige Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (‘The heterogeneity of language and its influence on the intellectual development of mankind’), originally intended as an introduction to a grammar of the Kawi language of Java. In this classical work, Humboldt classified languages based on their innere Sprachform, or ‘internal structure,’ and divided them into isolating, agglutinating and fusional.³ Humboldt’s impact on the development of linguistics can hardly be overstated. As far as historical linguistics is concerned, his language typology was later incorporated by Schleicher in his model of language evolution, although it must be said that Humboldt thought that languages could not change type, since this would have meant a change in their internal structure.

In spite of his reassuring remark that any language is equally and fully representative of human spirit, Humboldt still did not fail to indicate that languages ranked differently on a value scale based on their internal structure, which he viewed as molding the mind of each ‘nation’ (conceived of as a cultural and linguistic, rather than political unit). As mentioned above, it was F. Schlegel’s idea that the morphological structure of Sanskrit pointed to its superiority: indeed, both F. Schlegel and his brother, August Wilhelm, conceived of languages, and consequently of their speakers, as ranking differently on a value scale. For most nineteenth-century thinkers, the fusional type represented by Sanskrit constituted the most valuable language type, its trademark being the possibility of expressing grammatical categories through vowel alternation, or apophony (as in English sing / sang). As Humboldt, the Schlegel brothers thought it impossible for a language to change type; they also rejected Bopp’s Agglutinationstheorie, which predicted that fusion could rise out of agglutination.

German linguists and philosophers mentioned thus far, who were active in the first part of the nineteenth century, were deeply influenced by Romanticism. This explains their interest in the reconstruction of early stages of language, as well as in folk traditions (as well known, Jacob Grimm collected various volumes of folk tales together with his brother Wilhelm), which were viewed as building stones of national identity.

The turn of mid century brought along an array of innovations in comparative historical linguistics. One of these was the introduction, in 1853, of the family tree diagram, or Stammbaum, by August Schleicher, who was also the first linguist to seriously attempt a complete reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European (he even wrote a famous tale in Proto-Indo-European, The Sheep and the Horses, which enjoyed several revivals in the twentieth century, including a laryngealistic and a glottalic one). Such a reconstruction called for greater accuracy in the description of sound change, thus opening the way to the work of the neogrammarians. Schleicher was an amateur botanist, and his Stambaummtheorie is often regarded as an attempt to introduce the methods of biology into linguistics.⁴ Indeed, Schleicher also read and commented on Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species and supported an evolutionary view of language development.

Based on Humboldt’s typology, Schleicher argued that Proto-Indo-European was the endpoint of a process in which the final fusional language type had been preceded by an isolating, then by an agglutinative stage. In other words, Schleicher rejected the idea that languages could not change type; moreover, he also thought that Sanskrit was not the common ancestor of all other Indo-European languages, even though his Proto-Indo-European still looked remarkably similar to Sanskrit. Schleicher still saw an increasing scale of value in the evolution that led from the isolating to the fusional stage of Proto-Indo-European and Sanskrit. To his mind, later stages, attested to in the documented history of the Indo-European languages, which partly shifted away from the perfect fusional type, represented an ongoing process of decay. In addition, Schleicher saw language as an organism independent of its speakers, with a life and development of its own, which followed the laws of nature.

The language as an organism metaphor was deeply entrenched in mid nineteenth-century linguistic thought. Even Schleicher’s greatest critic, Max Müller, wrote that linguistics must be considered a natural science, and use the method of natural sciences, rather than adopt a historical perspective, as for the stu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Editors’ Introduction
• 1 Historical Linguistics: History, Sources and Resources
• Part I: Methodology
• Part II: Phonological Change
• Part III: Morphological and Grammatical Change
• Part IV: Syntactic Change
• Part V: Semantico-Pragmatic Change
• Part VI: Explanations of Language Change
• A–Z Historical Linguistics
• References
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Authors
• Index of Languages