Historical Linguistics,
Comparative Linguistics
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The comparative method
• The comparative method in historical linguistics is concerned with the
reconstruction of an earlier language or earlier state of a language on
the basis of a comparison of related words and expressions in
different languages or dialects derived from it.
• The comparative method was developed in the course of the 19th
century for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European and was
subsequently applied to the study of other language families.
• The primary goal of comparative linguistics is to classify the languages
of the world, to sort them out and to assign them to genetic families
according to the existence, either attested or hypothesized, of a more
ancient idiom, of which they are the direct continuation.
• The uninterrupted use of the languages throughout the
generations of locutors may be attested or supposed,
according to whether it is based on historical data or on
a credibly substantiated hypothesis. Another subject of
the field is to determine what the more ancient idioms
should be like.
Historical Linguistics
• According to Richard Nordquist, Hystorical Linguistics
(also called Diachronic linguistics) is one of the two
main temporal dimensions of language study introduced
by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in
General Linguistics.
• The central focus of historical linguistics is the study of language at
different periods in history and as it changes between different
periods of history.
• It grew out of the earlier discipline of philology, the study of ancient
texts and documents dating back to antiquity
• Historical linguistics is directly compared and distinguished from
Synchronic Linguistics which studies language at a single historical
period of time.
• Synchronic linguistics is one that views linguistics phenomena only at
a given time, usually the present.
• Five Concerns about Historical Linguistics
• a) To describe and account for observed changes in particular
languages
• b) To reconstruct the pre-history of languages and determine their
relatedness, grouping them into language families (comparative
linguistics)
• c) To develop general theories about how and why language changes
• d) To describe the history of speech communities, e) To study the
history of words, i.e. etymology
• History and development At first, historical linguistics was
concerned establishing language families and recostructing
prehistoric proto- languages using comparative method and internal
reconstruction Their focus was initially on the Indo-European and
Uralic languages. Since then, there has been significant comparative
linguistic work expanding outside of European languages as well, such
as on the Austronesian languages and various families of Native
American languages, among many others
Sub–fields of study
• Comparative linguistics: a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned
with comparing languages in order to establish their historical
relatedness. Languages may be related by convergence through
borrowing or by genetic descent (a common origin or proto-language)
• Etymology: the study of the history of words—when they entered a
language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have
changed over time. A word may enter a language as a loanword (i.e., as a
word from one language adopted by speakers of another language),
through derivational morphology by combining pre-existing elements in
the language, by a hybrid of these two processes called phono-semantic
matching, or in several other minor ways.
• Dialectology: the scientific study of linguistic dialect, the varieties of a
language that are characteristic of particular groups, based primarily
on geographic distribution and their associated features. This is in
contrast to variations based on social factors, which are studied in
sociolinguistics, or variations based on time, which are studied in
historical linguistics.
• Phonology: is a sub-field of linguistics which studies the sound system
of a specific language or set of languages. Whereas phonetics is about
the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech,
phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language
or across languages.
• Morphology: is the study of the formal means of expression in a language; in
the context of historical linguistics, how the formal means of expression
change over time; This field studies the internal structure of words as a
formal means of expression
• Syntax: is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in
natural languages. The term syntax is used to refer directly to the rules and
principles that govern the sentence structure of any individual language, as
in "the syntax of Modern Irish". Modern researchers in syntax attempt to
describe languages in terms of such rules. Many professionals in this
discipline attempt to find general rules that apply to all natural languages in
the context of historical linguistics, how characteristics of sentence structure
in related languages changed over time
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