historical linguistics

historical linguistics

Exploring the Evolution of Languages: A Historical Linguistics Perspective

1. Introduction to Historical Linguistics

Historical linguistics investigates the history and development of languages using scientific constructs to place that history into a testable framework. It is a narrow branch of the more general discipline of diachronic linguistics. It concerns itself with the broad question of how and why languages change historically and is usually seen as necessarily utilizing the knowledge that historical linguistics has produced to date. It has both academic and practical applications. Academically, it provides a way of understanding how language and culture are interconnected, and impacts other fields such as anthropology, history, and geography. It helps provide a context for the existence of social institutions such as legislatures and monarchies. It is an essential tool in comparative linguistics, setting criteria for distinguishing language families from dialect chains, Sprachbünde, and long-term language contact. These can be synthesized to further advance linguistic theory.

2. Key Concepts in Language Evolution

One crucial property that distinguishes communication from other kinds of effecting is that a receiver must be able to detect the sender’s signs and understand their content well enough to perceive the information revealed by the signs. Even though language is a form of signal, the signals are so specialized and useful that it is useful to describe languages as special kinds of systems that produce and interpret signals. In particular, a language is a combination of a series of specialized systems for communicating information (e.g., vowels, consonants, and syntax). Unlike all other specialized systems for producing signals in the animal domain, language systems function almost exclusively to aid in human learning.

Given this exclusion, a language is a special and complex version of a signal system. All signal systems evolved to give the members of a social group at least basic abilities to influence the behavior of others, either by directing that behavior or by inducing mental or physical states that benefit the influencer. The slow-climbing wing-waving communication that enables a monkey to threaten its rivals, the whine of an injured dog that induces approaching behavior in others, and the cryptic moth’s use of camouflage coloration to avoid being eaten are all examples of such “effector” effects. Each of these signaling effects depends on the presence of a sender, a receiver, and a shared signaling system, as spells, blessings, curses, and oaths would in social interaction.

3. Methods and Approaches in Historical Linguistics

The pioneering work of August Schleicher. Schleicher’s theory states that no natural language can be entirely unrelated to the others because the same principle acts in the evolution of languages as in that of species. As related species originate time and time again, and as more remote species of one and the same genus are lineally connected, so too categories of languages within the grand family of human speech are, according to historical testimony, in continuous linear connection. The principal method for discovering these principles is the historical comparison across cognates, words which are held in common by all or some subset of the languages under consideration but which have similar sounds. According to the principle of the regular sound correspondence, there are axioms meant to formalize this. Each word has a sound representation in terms of a sequence of phonemes. Subsequently, these phonemes are expanded into sublexemes like consonants or vowel formants.

Historical linguistics is the subfield that is most concerned with problems of language evolution. The central goal is to achieve a better understanding of how languages have evolved from earlier to later stages of linguistic systems. Important methodological issues associated with problems of complexity and the formal tools available have recently been explored. In this chapter, we will not focus on these aspects of language change, but rather will concentrate on two problems that concern language evolution through time: methods for choosing among phylogenetic models of language change, which we will discuss in section 2, and principles for understanding general trends in the confidence with which we can claim to have discovered these phylogenetic rules, which we will discuss in section 3. We begin this chapter by reviewing the most important conceptual and theoretical results that have been discovered through the historical linguist’s methodological toolkit.

4. Case Studies in Language Change and Diversification

In the following subsection, we will present a couple of case studies that broadly study how different aspects of language change over time in response to different selection pressures. Though two of these case studies study phonology, we present them as a representative menagerie of interesting case studies of language change. First, they represent different dimensions of language change. The case study of the shift to sibilants in Andalusian Spanish shows a rapid language change that can be modeled over generations. Our other case study presents a very slow language change where percolation of sound changes occurs at the community level. Secondly, the different experiments in language evolution (section 7) are grounded in the findings of these diverse case studies. Third, these case studies raise interesting questions about why languages change the way they do over time.

To understand what drives language change and diversification, historical linguistics studies language changes over time and how it leads to language diversification. Unlike its sister discipline, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics studies language in populations. Within this framework, languages are seen as evolving in populations due to various micro and macro-level processes. There is a rich history of case studies from languages all over the world that study the mechanisms of language change over time. These case studies are especially critical in our development of complex computational models of the processes of language evolution. As we develop computational simulations of language evolution in heterogeneous populations, such case studies provide instantiations of the micro-level processes that need to be modeled. They can help tweak the parameters and initial conditions and mechanisms in the models.

5. The Impact of Historical Linguistics on Modern Language Studies

The impression of ease with which historical linguistics questions can be posed, studied, and answered is, however, deceiving. The science might proceed to work back, to ‘cognitively simulate’ centuries or millennia, preserving no step, and from other scholars as pragmatic considerations, schedule, or funds it might pose a tribute or rebound to statistical and quantitative analyses that often strive to materially support a concise verbal hypothesis. It assumes a well-documented delimited portion of the linguistic classification of all languages at each time depth, types of languages, and recommended goal of autochthonous derivation of all human languages from their inferred rustic protolanguages are hardly ever satisfied. The unfortunate fact is that the trace of human speech is mostly absent in the archaeological or written record, and that an all-conquering mystique has prevented historical linguists from recognizing that the classifications at offered depths, involving typically between 2000 and 1000 AD, represent convenient snapshots of what should be perceived as the dynamic de novo evolution of a community of contemporaneous languages—and silence is observed about true linkage rules that permit reconstruction of the history of a single language evolving in isolation, not to mention of historically related sibling languages.

Historical linguistics is the scientific study of language change. By maintaining that this change obeys natural laws and that these laws can be stated with precision, historical linguistics differs superficially from other historical sciences, which have been concerned with scientific laws and with precision, but in contrast to historical linguistics are often concerned with human actions and have the conviction that human liberty is beyond control. However, the theoretical motivation behind historical linguistics, and correspondingly the nature of actual enquiry, are similar. Just as almost all historical sciences, including linguistics, begin with an appraisal of contemporary empirical knowledge, and pass from facts, primary or secondary, to theories that decrease and explain known qualitative and quantitative regularities, which in turn are used to help interpret and better understand the available store of evidence, so the comparative method of historical linguistics begins with reliable knowledge about the linguistic and extralinguistic phenomena of the present and proceeds to ‘work backwards’ in time, eventuating in cross-turned internal reconstruction and subgrouping, and a methodological desire to contribute to the linguistic interpretation of dynamic systems of language in general is generated and influenced the study of contact-induced language change, with necessary modifications, over the surface of historical time.