Comparative Method
The comparative method in linguistics involves analyzing similarities and differences between languages to uncover their historical relationships and reconstruct their common ancestral forms. By comparing vocabulary, grammar, and phonological features, linguists can trace the evolution of languages and identify their shared origins. This method is essential for understanding language families and the historical development of languages.
7 Key excerpts on "Comparative Method"
eBook - ePub- Kristin Denham, Anne Lobeck(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Researchers took a more scientific approach, comparing sets of data from different languages and formulating and testing hypotheses based on those data. Specifically, during this time scholars developed the Comparative Method, which we discuss in more detail below. Jones’ and others’ research lead to proposing that a number of languages of Europe and India can be traced to a common ancestor, a proto language called Proto Indo-European. Since Jones’ speech, research comparing languages to discover their relationships to each other has continued, and many other language families have been proposed. Ethnologue, a compendium of the world’s languages, lists 152 different language families, some with members as few as two (Yukian) and others with as many as 1539 (Niger-Congo)! The Comparative Method and language family trees By systematically comparing words and sounds in different languages, scholars can determine whether languages are related to each other. Using comparative language data they can reconstruct the common ancestor language of those related languages. Studying the relationships among languages has long been a focus of linguistic science, and here we provide you with a mini-example of how a linguist might use the Comparative Method to study the relationships among languages. Consider the words hand and three from four different Germanic languages (you can refer to the International Phonetic Alphabet in Chapter 3 to understand the pronunciation of each word): English German Dutch Swedish [hænd] [hant] [hant] [hand] ‘hand’ [θri] [dray] [dri] [tre] ‘three’ Words that are systematically similar across languages are called cognates. Cognates exhibit regular sound correspondences, or systematic similarities in pronunciation. It’s fairly easy to see that the words for hand are cognates in the four languages represented here. Notice how different these words are from other words for hand in the other languages below...
eBook - ePub- Robert McColl Millar, R L Trask(Authors)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Third, as a further consequence, we may be able to work out what the entire phonological system of the ancestral language must have been like: what phonemes it had, and what the rules were for combining those phonemes. This process is comparative reconstruction, and the procedure we use for doing it is the Comparative Method. The Comparative Method is the single most important tool in the historical linguist’s toolkit, and we have in many cases enjoyed great success in reconstructing important aspects of unrecorded proto-languages. Informally, the Comparative Method works like this: 1. We first decide by inspection that certain languages are probably genetically related and hence descended from a common ancestor. 2. We place side by side a number of words with similar meanings from the languages we have decided to compare. 3. We examine these for what appear to be systematic correspondences. 4. We draw up tables of the systematic correspondences we find. 5. For each correspondence we find, we posit a plausible-looking sound in the ancestral language, one that could reasonably have developed into the sounds that are found in the several daughter languages, bearing in mind what we know about phonological change. 6. For each word surviving in the various daughters, we look at the results of 5 and thus determine what the form of that word must have been in the ancestral language. 7. Finally, we look at the results of 5 and 6 to find out what system of sounds the ancestral language apparently had and what the rules were for combining these sounds. This, of course, is a vastly oversimplified picture of what happens in practice, but it gives you the general idea of what’s going on. Let’s look at a typical example, but first a warning. In practice, the successful use of the Comparative Method requires the use of large amounts of vocabulary from all the languages being compared. But, in a textbook, I just don’t have the space to provide such huge amounts of data...
eBook - ePubVariationist Sociolinguistics
Change, Observation, Interpretation
- Sali A. Tagliamonte(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...As LVC research has evolved into the twenty-first century the standards for comparison in this enterprise have received increasing attention as researchers have renewed their efforts to establish linguistic links across the globe (e.g. Clarke 1997b; Harris 1986; Rickford 1986b). Ideally, as Schneider (2004: 263) observes, to establish trans-Atlantic connections we should aim for: evidence of historical connections, functional identities, or similar effects … – it is only parallels of such a subtle nature or the joint weight of several sets of data that should allow us to assume direct transmission in select instances. In historical linguistics it is widely held that earlier stages in the history of a language can be observed through comparative analysis of cognate forms (sets of reflexes) in later, sister varieties (Hoenigswald 1960: 119; Meillet 1967). The Comparative Method is “the procedure whereby morphs of two or more sister languages are matched to reconstruct the ancestor language” (Hoenigswald 1960: 119). The Comparative Method in historical linguistics is based on comparative reconstruction, which has as its basis shared correspondences of linguistics features (Hoenigswald 1960; Meillet 1967). The application of these methods to sociolinguistics began with Weinreich et al.’s (1968) introduction of the notion of “structured heterogeneity” in the speech community which was later developed further by Labov (1982). This work laid the foundations of the quantitative variationist approach (Labov 1966, 1970, 1972c; Labov et al. 1968) which elaborated a method of analysis founded on assumptions of accountability, testing hypotheses systematically against data, and building generalizations on well-formed comparative studies. The methods of Variationist Sociolinguistics make it particularly useful for conducting comparisons, where the focus of the comparison is on the patterning of linguistic variables...
eBook - ePubHistorical Linguistics
An Introduction
- Winfred P. Lehmann(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...7 The Comparative Method 7.1 THE Comparative Method: A TRIANGULATION PROCEDURE FOR RECONSTRUCTING EARLIER FORMS The three preceding chapters have presented spheres in which linguists deal with language. In genealogical classification the dimension delimiting the sphere is time; languages are examined for relationships with their earlier stages, and these in turn for their sub-branches. In this way, English is examined for its similarities and differences with regard to Middle English, Old English and Proto-Germanic, from which other sub-branches, such as the Scandinavian languages developed. Proto-Germanic in turn is examined for similarities and differences with regard to Proto-Italic, Proto-Indo-Iranian, etc. and also with Proto-Indo-European. The procedure is comparison for the purpose of determining earlier stages of a language and other languages to which it is related. In typological classification, the dimension of time is disregarded. Turkish today may be compared with Sumerian of 3000 BC, Berber today with Old Irish. All available languages are compared for characteristics that are widespread, in the search for those that are universal. As Meillet pointed out, these “two types of comparison, equally legitimate, differ absolutely…. The agreements which are established result from the general unity of the human mind, and the differences from the variety of types and degrees of civilization” (1925 (1967): 13). While comparing languages to determine “universal laws,” in Meillet’s expression, typological study is also concerned to learn “about the general characteristics of humanity” (ibid.). That aim may be the principal goal of typological study, but the results also serve as guidelines for reconstruction carried out by use of the Comparative Method. For example, on the basis of our knowledge from typological investigations, we would not reconstruct a language consisting solely of vowels, nor one consisting of lists of nouns rather than sentences...
eBook - ePubIndo-European Language and Culture
An Introduction
- Benjamin W. Fortson(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
...1 Introduction: The Comparative Method and the Indo-European Family The Study of Language Relationships and the Comparative Method 1.1. All languages are similar in certain ways, but some similarities are more striking and interesting than others. Consonants, vowels, words, phrases, sentences, and their ilk are fundamental structural units common to all forms of human speech; by contrast, identical or near-identical words for the same concept are not, and when two or more languages share such words, it attracts notice. This kind of resemblance can have several sources, which must be clearly distinguished from one another in order to investigate similarities between languages scientifically. The first source for such resemblance is chance. There are only so many sounds that the human vocal tract can produce, and their possible combinations are also limited. These facts conspire to create a certain number of words that coincidentally resemble one another in any two languages picked at random. The Greek and Latin words for ‘god’, theós and deus, are of this kind; they have no historical relationship with one another. A second source of such similarity is borrowing. People speaking different languages are often in contact with one another, and this contact typically leads to mutual borrowing (adoption) of both cultural and linguistic material. English, for example, has borrowed the Inuit (Eskimo) word iglu ‘house’ for a type of shelter (igloo). A third source of similarity is a sundry collection of language universals ; these are basic characteristics of human linguistic creativity that are found the world over...
eBook - ePubTheory in Social and Cultural Anthropology
An Encyclopedia
- R. Jon McGee, Richard L. Warms(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- SAGE Publications, Inc(Publisher)
...Cecil H. Brown Cecil H. Brown Comparative Linguistics Comparative linguistics 129 133 Comparative Linguistics Approximately, 6,000 languages are currently spoken. One approach to studying them is to compare them for similarities and differences. This can yield insights into the history of the people who speak the languages and into the nature of the human language faculty. Linguists recognize three major structural components of language: (1) phonology (the sounds of language), (2) grammar (the formation of words from sounds and sentences from words), and (3) lexicon/semantics (words and their meanings). Some languages are more similar to one another than to other languages with respect to some or all of these features. Four possible explanations for the observed similarities are recognized: (1) genetic relationship, (2) borrowing, (3) universal tendencies, and (4) chance. Genetic Relationship Languages are genetically related when at least some similarities among them are due to inheritance of those features from a common ancestral or parent language (protolanguage). For example, languages of the Romance family, such as modern French, Italian, Spanish, and Romanian, all developed from Vulgar Latin, the spoken language of the Roman Empire. As a consequence, these languages show various similarities inherited from Latin, involving sounds, grammar, and words. For most of its history, the field of historical/comparative linguistics has primarily focused on similarities due to genetic relationship. This emphasis has been largely motivated by the very early recognition by comparative linguists that the sounds of related languages typically correspond in a highly regular manner. Two sound segments correspond when they occur in cognate words of genetically related languages. Cognates of two or more languages are words similar in sound and meaning due to their development from the same word of a common protolanguage...
- Silvia Luraghi, Vit Bubenik, Silvia Luraghi, Vit Bubenik(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
...Conclusion The past fifty years has seen the creation of modern dictionaries and grammars and other materials for hundreds of languages, information which had not previously been accessible to the scholarly community and the research of linguists. There is an enormous amount of comparative work to be done on the documentation of these languages, and much of the low-level work can now be done by automated methods, based on the regularity of sound change, an empirical fact that has been the foundational principle for the linguistic reconstruction of protolanguages for the better part of two centuries. The computer work is also valuable in research on word formatives. In polysynthetic languages such as those of the Algonkian family, a dictionary of word formatives can be created by placing hyphens between the formatives in the reconstructed forms. A concordance made of all items between hyphens will display the collocations and the range of usage of each word formative, by collating all the words in which each formative element is found. The possibilities of the computer manipulation of data in Comparative and Historical Linguistics is vast...
