Comparative linguistics

Comparative Linguistics By:Nermine Naboulsi

Outline… Thesis : Comparative linguistics is a study of how languages are close together, so here are the steps to explain about it.

1. Definition of language A. The old testament story of Babel B. Historical overview of the myth

2. Definition of comparative linguistics A. Comparative methods B. William Jones the former of comparative linguistics and examples of his methods.

3. Similarities in other comparative methods 4. Definition of families of languages 5. Conclusion.

Language…  Language is the mirror of our humanity, and only by studying its many reflections will we ever fully know ourselves.  There are more than five thousand languages spoken across the face of the earth.  Could all these languages ever be traced back to a common starting point? ? ?

 Was there a time when the people of the world spoke one tongue? ? ?

The Old Testament story of Babel.  This notion is vividly brought to life in the Old Testament story of Babel, When people use to talk one language; According to biblical legend, the people of Babylon started to build a tower reaching up to heaven.  Their ambition so offended God that he shattered the unity of their language, creating a confusion of incomprehensible tongues.  Forever after, the tower was called Babel, from the Hebrew word "balbail," meaning "to confuse."

From a Myth came questions than theories…  Like many myths, perhaps, there is a germ of truth in the Babel story.  Did a mother tongue ever exist? Can we find it?

 Clues can be found by studying the world's great language families, such as Indo-European, the family that includes English.  From this; concepts and questions emerged what we call Comparative linguistics.

What is Comparative Linguistics?  Comparative linguistics is study of the relationships or correspondences between two or more languages and the techniques used to discover whether the languages have a common ancestor.

 The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is the Comparative method, which aims to compare phonological systems, morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon .  Using this comparative method, linguists have been able to establish the connections among a group of languages

Comparative Methods… It aims to prove that two or more languages are descended from a single proto-language by comparing lists of cognate terms. The comparative method itself developed out of the attempts to reconstruct the proto-language which Jones had hypothesized about, known as Proto-IndoEuropean (PIE).

Jones?? Who is he? What did he do?  In 1786 Sir William Jones, a British scholar, One of the former who demonstrated one of the comparative methods:  He asserted that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin were related to one another and had descended from a common source.  He based this assertion on observations of similarities in sounds and meanings among the three languages.

For Example:  the English word “brother” resembles: the Sanskrit word bhratar the Latin word frater the Greek word phrater, Which all have the same meaning “Brother”  The initial sounds, although different, correspond regularly according to the pattern discovered by Jacob Grimm and named Grimm’s Law Labial and Dental Stops in the Indo-European Languages Greek

Latin

Gothic

Sanskrit

Salvic

p

p

f

p

p

b

b

p

b

b

Ph phrater

f/b frater

b

bh “bhratar”

b

t

t

e

t

t

d

d

t

d

d

Other Comparative Methods…  Comparative linguists also look for similarities in the way words are formed in different languages.  Latin and English, for example, change the form of a word to express different meanings,  as when the English verb go changes to went and gone to express a past action.  Chinese, on the other hand, has no such inflected forms; the verb remains the same while other words indicate the time (as in “go store tomorrow”)

Certain similarities are striking. 

Take the numbers ,for example. Here are two and three in English, Latin, Greek and Sanskrit. English

Latin

Greek

Sanskrit

Two

duo

dúo

dva

Three

Tres

treîs

tráyas

 But linguists are interested in discovering regular patterns, not isolated resemblances. So here, "t" in English often appears as "d" in the other languages.  By finding patterns like these, different languages can be grouped together as members of a language family as the Indo-European, the family that includes English

Families of language...  How can you tell that the languages you're looking at reflect a single original language, and therefore, form a family???  The only way you can do that is by finding systematic similarities between these languages in every area of their grammar, similarities in their sounds, in their inflections, in the syntax of the language, and so forth.  Two languages are genetically related if they are descended from the same ancestor language. Thus, for example, Spanish and French are both descended from Latin. Therefore, French and Spanish are considered to belong to the same family of languages, the Romance Languages .

In brief…. There are so many other language families:  we can imagine a tree; The branches of this tree can represent different language families.  The leaves on the branches, would represent different languages.  And by tracing these branches back, one can arrive at larger branches, such as Indo-European, and by tracing the IndoEuropean branch back, one arrives at even larger branches.  Eventually, we believe that you arrive at the main trunk of this tree into which all of the language or from which all of the language families have derived.

Conclusion… 

It's very nice to think about the days before Babel, when everybody spoke exactly the same way. But, it's a dream. It's a belief. It's not scientifically testable, one way or the other.  Gazing upon these silently evocative images from the past, it's only natural to want to know more about these artists and their message. New clues to the past continually emerge as we compare the world's languages and trace their relationships back in time.  Language is the mirror of our humanity, and

only by studying its many reflections will we ever fully know ourselves.

The End. Thank You… By: Nermine Naboulsi Bibliography:: • • • • •

• •

Encyclopedia Britannica from Microsoft ® Encarta ® Reference Library 2005. © 19932004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. Encyclopedia Britannica from Encyclopedia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite. (2006) R.L. Trask(ed.), Dictionary of Historical and Comparative Linguistics yorztiF( 2001 ,nrobraeD –(Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_linguistics) Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. and R. M. W. Dixon (eds.) (1999). The Amazonian Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2001). Areal Diffusion and Genetic Inheritance: Problems in Comparative Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Beekes, Robert S. P. (1995). Comparative Indo-European Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Bloomfield, Leonard (1925). "On the Sound System of Central Algonquian." Language 1:130-56.

•

•

Campbell, George L. (2000). Compendium of the World's Languages (2nd ed.). London: Routledge. Campbell, Lyle (1997). American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America. New York: Oxford University Press. (2004). Historical Linguistics: An Introduction (2nd ed.). Cambridge: The MIT Press. Churchward, C. Maxwell. (1959). Tongan Dictionary. Tonga: Government Printing Office. Comrie, Bernard (ed.) (1990). The World's Major Languages. New York: Oxford University Press. Fox, Anthony (1995). Linguistic Reconstruction: An Introduction to Theory and Method. New York: Oxford University Press. Goddard, Ives (1974). "An Outline of the Historical Phonology of Arapaho and Atsina." International Journal of American Linguistics 40:102-16. The Languages of Native North America. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• •

Andrew Sihler, New Comparative Grammar of Greek and Latin (New York 1995). Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method“

•

NOVA's website at pbs.org.

• • •

• • •

•

• •

•

• • • •

•

(1994a). "A New Look for Algonquian." Paper presented at the Comparative Linguistics Workship, University of Pittsburgh, April 9. Holm, John (1989). Pidgins and Creoles. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janda, Richard D. & Brian D. Joseph (1989). "In Further Defence of a Non-Phonological Account for Sanskrit Root-Initial Aspiration Alternations". Proceedings of the Fifth Eastern States Conference on Linguistics: 246-260. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University. Available online at http://www.ling.ohio-state.edu/~bjoseph/publications/1989aspiration.pdf Jones, Sir William (1786). "The Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus." In Lehman, W. P. (ed.) (1967). A Reader in Nineteenth Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Available online at http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/iedocctr/ie-docs/lehmann/reader/chapterone.html Krishnamurti, Bhadriraju (2003). The Dravidian Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ladefoged, Peter (2003). Phonetic Data Analysis: An Introduction to Fieldwork and Instrumental Techniques. Oxford: Blackwell. Lyovin, Anatole V. (1997). An Introduction to the Languages of the World. New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.. ISBN 0-19-508116-1. Crowley, Terry (1992). An Introduction to Historical Linguistics (2nd ed.). Auckland: Oxford University Press. Dixon, R. M. W. (1997). The Rise and Fall of Languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.