Yun-Pi Yuan1 Language Change Introduction to Linguistics.

Yun-Pi Yuan 1

Language Change

Introduction to Linguistics

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I. Introduction: change=a fact; attitudes towards changeII. Examples of change at all levels

A. sound (phonetic and phonological)B. morpho-syntacticC. lexical changes

III. Reasons for changeA. External (social) reasons)B. Internal reasons: natural linguistic processes a. child language acquisition b. speaker errors c. preference for regular systems d. competing pressures

IV. Historical linguisticsA. comparative reconstruction a. cognates b. non-cognates c. general principlesB. results of comparative reconstruction: lang. familiesC. language classification:

a. genetic b. typological

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I . Introduction (1)Language change is an undeniable fact: look at ancient Chinese, at Beowulf, at rapid changes in slang.Some people object to language change; they want to protect and preserve “pure” and “correct” language.

Examples (Nash 105): French law (in 1975) prevents the use of borrowed words (especially from English) in advertising: le club, le bar, le hit parade, le weekend, les hot dog.

But, fighting a losing battle, since fighting a natural process

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I . Introduction (2)All languages change; all parts of the grammar can and do change: phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon, semantics, sociolinguistic rules, etc.

Change can involve Addition, Loss and Shift (including individual elements—e.g. a word added, lost, or shifts meaning; and rules, too).

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II. Examples of ChangeWe’ll talk about changes at three levels: sound, grammar, and word.A. Phonetic and Phonological Changes

Post vocalic rAddition of /ʒ/, /v/ phonemesLoss of /x/Great vowel shiftMandarin consonant split

B. Morpho-Syntactic ChangesC. Lexical Changes

AdditionLoss of wordsChange in meaning

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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (1)A. Phonetic & phonological changes

1. post vocalic “r” (Labov 1972; Yule 240-41)

British: no post vocalic “r”; American: with post vocalic “r” in general

Some British and American varieties—British (high class; also Boston, parts of NYC, parts of the south in the US): “pronounce /r/ only when it comes before a vowel” e.g.: car, farm ↔ red(spelling shows it “was” there before)

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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (2)

2. Addition of /ʒ /, /v/ phonemes (Nash 106)

a. Before the Norman French invasion of England in 1066, there was no /ʒ / in English. /ʒ /―added to English through the influence of borrowed French.

e.g. pleasure, measure, visionb. Also before the Norman invasion, Old English had no /v/ phoneme. French words that were borrowed into English (e.g. very, vain, vacation) stimulated the split of /f/ into two phonemes, /f/ and /v/.

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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (3)3. loss of sound /x/: (Nash 106)

voiceless velar fricative /x/ was in English, but disappeared between the times of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

e.g. night /nIxt/, saw /saux/

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4. great vowel shift: (~1400-1600) (Yule 220)

e.g. mouse /maus/← /mus/;

house /haus/ ←/hus/; /u/ /au/

out /aut/ ← /ut/ Regular vowel sound change: changes in

a system are not haphazard, but regular—they occur not in isolated words, but in all words in a certain environment (i.e., /u/ /au/)

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Great Vowel Shift (1)The seven long or tense vowels of middle English underwent the following change:

iaI

e

ɛ

au u

o

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Great Vowel Shift (2)Examples from Yule 220:

Old Eng. Modern Eng.

• hu:s haws (‘house’)• wi:f wayf (‘wife’)• spo:n spu:n (‘spoon’)• brɛ:k bre:k (‘break’)• h:m hom (‘home’)• /e/ /i/ geese• /o/ /u/ goose• // /e/ name

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5. Mandarin consonant split (see Nash 106)

Six of each of the Mandarin consonants split into two phonemes.

This split can be described by rule: before /i/ and /y/ (namely, “ ㄩ” ), (high front vowel), each of the original phonemes became the corresponding + palatal, - retroflex consonant.

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A Local vs. Widespread Change (1)

These examples are all of widespread changes—the change spreads throughout the language; there are also local changes—which don’t spread so far—thus regional varieties. Examples of local change:

Parts of NYC: /з/ /oi/ e.g., third, bird, heard, first thoid, boid, hoid, foist台灣國語

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A Local vs. Widespread Change (2)

a local change vs. a widespread change These two examples, great vowel shift & 台灣國語 example, can help to show that regional sound differences (accents) are not bad in any way, but are only examples of the results of natural sound changes which did not spread beyond certain areas. Thus, no dialect or variety of a language can claim to be superior to or purer than some other variety.

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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (1)

Question formation

Negative sentence formation

Case endings

Verbs

Other examples

Mandarin

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B. Morpho- syntactic changes (Nash 108-11; Yule 221)

1. Q formation (Nash 108)

2. negative sentence formation (Nash 109)

3. case endings (Nash 109-110) Nouns (marked with suffixes) who/ whom questions: (Nash 108)

e.g. I don’t know who/whom to give it to. (“whom”: mainly in formal speech and writing)

A remnant still in the process of changing

Other remnants: other pronoun forms (e.g., I/me, he/ him, she/her), plural forms.

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4. verbs: examples: (from Elgin 211)

ic cepe “I keep”ðu cepest “you keep”he he

heo cepeð she keepshit it we cepað “we keep”ge cepað “you keep”hi cepað “they keep”

Note: Historical development of English

Old English: ~7th century to end of 11th century

Middle English: ~1100-1500

Modern English: after 1500

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5. Other examples:Old English about 7th century to 11th century (1066)1. 8 forms of “the” (Nash 110): 2. example (Framkin and Rodman)

“The Man Slew the King” (6 possible word order in Old Eng.)

a. se man sloh ðone cyning.b. ðone cyning sloh se man. c. se man ðone cyning sloh.d. ðone cyning se man sloh.e. sloh se man ðone cyning. f. sloh ðone cyning se man. Comparisons:The man slew the king.The king slew the man.

se: definite article only with subject

ðone: definite article only with object. So, with the article (& suffixes), word order wasn’t so important— but now word order (and preposition, too) is crucial in modern English.

Therefore, word order matters now.

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This change (reduction of Eng. inflections) related to Great Vowel Shift (phonological change)—which made it hard to distinguish the endings—necessitated other changes in order for the lang. to remain clear & processible, also quick & easy, & expressive (which could also be related to processes of child lang. acquisition) so, suffixes dropped out, Eng. word order becomes stricter and prepositions become more important.

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Morpho-Syntactic Changes (6)6. Mandarin:

related to monosyllabic questions—ancient Mandarin: monosyllabic; but phonological changes caused many formerly distinct syllables (morphemes) to become homophonous (e.g. 要 , 藥 ). “Threat of too many homophonous morphemes forced Mandarin to dramatically increase the proportion of polysyllabic words.” (Li and Thompson 14)

Homophone: a word that sounds the same as another, but is different in spelling, meaning, and origin. e.g. “knew” and “new” are homophones.

Polysyllable: a word that contains more than 2 or 3 syllables. e.g. “unnecessary”

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Lexical Changes (1)Lexical Changes (Nash 111-14; Yule 221-22)

It’s not difficult to add words to a language (as seen in “Morphology,” many derivational processes); Words can be added, lost, or changed.

AdditionLoss of wordsChange in meaning

BroadeningNarrowingShifting

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Lexical Changes (2)

1. Addition

a. derivational processesb. borrowing (a process, not a reason)

Majority of English words (as in a dictionary) are borrowed. But, most of the most frequently used words are native to English (100 most frequent words—all native; of next 100, 83—native out of corpus of 50,000 words).Why so many borrowed words? History of Eng. language.

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Lexical Changes (3)Historical development of English:

Old English (OE): ~7th century to end of 11th century (or 450 ~1150)Angles, Saxons, Jutes from northern Europe invaded the British Isles in 5th century spoke Germanic languages developed into earliest form of English. 6th to 8th centuries converted to Christianity—this brought Latin influence alphabet, many borrowed words. 8th to 9th centuries Viking invaders brought another language influence: old Norse. (many settled there).

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Lexical Changes (4)

Middle English (ME): ~1100-1500 (or 1150 ~1500)

Norman invasion in 1066: ruling class used French—the nobility, government, law, church leaders. But, the language of common people: still English.

e.g. (low-class and high-class people used different words) cow/beef; pig/pork; sheep/mutton; calf/veal; deer/venison.

Colonial/imperial periods: (economic imperialism now)

e.g. curry, tea, pajama (from India).

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Lexical Changes (5)Renaissance: 14th~17th century Greek and Latin represented LEARNING (still an infl

uence in scientific terminology) Borrowed words also got lost: “Of the more than ten

thousand new words brought into English during the 16th and 17th centuries, only about half are still in use” (Clairborne 162).

Borrowing can be “direct” or “indirect”“algebra”: Arabic Spanish English“grammar”: Greek Latin French EnglishAny Eng. Japanese Taiwanese?e.g. tomato, beer, truck, 秀逗 , lighter, slippers

Modern English: after 1500Economic domination of US: McDonald’s, microsoft, Costco, etc.

Note: half doesn’t mean bad at all.

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Lexical Changes (6)2. Loss of words:

Borrowed words also got lost: “Of the more than ten thousand new words brought into English during the 16th and 17th centuries, only about half are still in use” (Clairborne 162).

usually not as noticeable as borrowing—gradual

e.g. 1. from Shakespeare (Nash 113)

2. Hebrew—lost curse words, had to borrow form Arabic (Nash 113)

3. avoidance of “bad words”: cock in American English (Nash 113)

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Change in Meaning (1)3. Change in meaning:

a. Broadening

holiday: “holy day”—now any day without work (social change, too)

picture: now including “photograph” sail: now a spaceship sails, too (Nash

114)

dog: used to mean a certain breed of dog; now dogs in general

(also see “hound” below)

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Change in Meaning (2)

b. Narrowing girl original: “young person of either

sex” meat (Bible) = food; now animal flesh

used as food (Nash 114)

hound original: “dog of any type”; now usually “hunting dog”

wife original: “any woman”

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Change in Meaning (3)c. Shifting

nice original: “ignorant” bead original: “prayer” silly original: “happy” (OE) ”naïve” (ME) “foolish” (Modern English)

Shift through borrowing: “footing” (borrowed from English) in Spanish = “jogging”“lady-like” (in English): 她很 “ lady”

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III. Reasons for Change (1)

External (social) reasons:Socio-political upheavalsNew ideas, inventions, new things from other countriesOther social reasons

Internal reasons: natural ling. processesChild language acquisitionSpeaker errorsPreference for regular systemsCompeting pressures

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A. Social Reasons (external reasons) 1. Socio-political upheavals:

Wars, invasions: such as Norman invasion of England in 1066; Japanese occupation of Taiwan; religious conversions

Chinese civil war (geographical/physical separation): differences in Mandarin between Taiwan and Mainland China

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2. New ideas, inventions, new things from other countries

Television, computer, (set off whole big ran

ge of changes: “window,” “modem,” “hard

copy,” “mouse”), technological developmen

t, tea (words plus whole associated list of te

a utensils, tea-making processes), toufu, piz

za, 比薩 , 漢堡 , etc.

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3. other social reasons:

social gender/class/status differences:female: leads to standard, prestigious use

male: vernacular, non-standard lang. use

social interaction: tightly knitted community, few interaction with outside world fewer changes

population: multilingual more changes

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B. Internal reasons: natural linguistic processes: 1. child language acquisition: No one teaches them. Children build their own

grammar from what they hear; it gradually becomes more and more similar to adult grammar, but never exactly like adult grammar. Moreover, they hear many different speakers, who each have a slightly different grammar.

A “tenuous transmission process”–each new user of the language “has to ‘recreate’ for him- or herself the language of the community.”

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Speaker Errors (1)

2. speaker errors:assimilation as a speaker error (Nash 107)

sound change: e.g. gamel gamble; thuner thunder; tener

tender

alveolar (both /n/ and /d/ )release /m/ as a stop, both bilabial (/m/ and /b/)

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Speaker Errors (2) reversal of position of phonemes

e.g. “comfortable” very often pronounced /kΛ mftɚ bl/ (Nash 107)

e.g. metathesis (OE Modern E): involves a reversal in position of two adjoining sounds. For example, bridd bird; hr

os horse; frist first (a similar e.g. of metathesis by modern cowboy as a dialect variant within modern Eng.: purt

y good pretty good); in some American English dialects: ask aks (Yule 220)

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Speaker Errors (3)

spelling pronunciations: (Nash 107) Pronunciations have been affected by word spellings. e.g. often /ftən/, sword, singer

[Note: Chinese examples should be called a “writing pronunciation,” not a spelling pronunciation. e.g. 太空“梭”“俊“ ; 癌 vs. 炎 ; 床笫之事 ; 莘莘學子 ; 龜裂 ; 占卜 ; 病入膏肓 ; 一丘之貉 ]

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3. preference for regular systems: (Nash 117)

(Universal Operating Principle—“Avoid exceptions”) e.g. 1. Singular/plural nouns

cow—kine (pl.) cowsbandit—banditti (pl. Italian) banditsagendum (sing.)—agenda (pl.) agenda (singular)--agendas (plural)pizza—pizze (pl.) pizzas (pl.)syllabus—syllabi (pl.) syllabuses

e.g. 2. Irregular past tense forms: sweep—swept sweeped light—lit lighted dream—dreamt dreamed

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4. competing pressures: (the 4 Rules) e.g. involved in case endings change

(one change leading to another) sound change: first affected endings, then

something had to happen to maintain processibility and expressiveness strict word order and more prepositions)

e.g., for “quick and easy”: abbreviations replace longer original forms

e.g., laser

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IV. Historical Linguistics (1)

A. Comparative reconstruction (Yule 213-17)

“Linguistic investigation of this type…focuses on the historical development of languages, and attempts to characterize the regular processes which are involved in language change.” (Yule 213 bottom)

Note: regular processes = rule governed Scholars noted certain similarities between different

languages (e.g. Sanskrit—Latin—Greek), some very far apart geographically (see Yule 214 chart). Linguists studied these similarities; examined older written materials (when available); hypothesized a common ancestor—on the basis of the similar features and the development that would be traced through older records.

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IV. Historical Linguistics (2)Cognates:

(1) words that have descended from a common source (as shown by systematic phonetic and often semantic similarities) are called cognates.

(2) (2) possible family connection between different languages within groups (Yule 215).

(3) (3) A word in one lang. which is similar in form and meaning to a word in another lang. because both langs. are related.e.g. (Eng.) brother vs. (German) bruder(Note: sometimes words in 2 languages are similar in forms and meaning, but are borrowings and not cognate forms. e.g. (Swahili) kampuni= a borrowing from (English) “company”)

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Germanic Languages (Cognates)

English Dutch German Swedish Turkish

/mæn/ /mAn/ /mAn/ /mAn/ adam man

/hænd/

/hAnt/ /hAnt/ /hAnd el hand

/fut/ /vu:t/ /fu:s/ /fo:t/ ayak foot

/brŋ/ /breŋe/ /brŋen/ /briŋA/ getir bring

More closely related : Eng. Dutch, German, Swedish

Note: Turkish is not a Germanic language because vocabulary items fail to show systematic similarities.

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Cognates vs. Non-cognates

Which language is unrelated?

English Russian Turkish Hindi

two dva iki do

three tri üč tin

brother brat kardeš bhaya

nose nos burun nak (nahi)

Note: English, Russian, Hindi distantly related because they belong to different smaller families (i.e. Germanic, Slavic, Sanskrit).

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Some General Principles

So, from this kind of comparison—with much larger set of cognates (data)—many regular processes of change (rules) were figured out. [Note: all this is sound (phonological) change.]1. The majority principle (see Yule 216)

2. The most natural development principle

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The Most Natural Development Principle

a. final vowels often disappear b. voiceless sounds become voiced

between vowels and before or after voiced consonants (“assimilation”)

c. stops become fricatives (“weakening”) d. consonants become voiceless at the end

of words e. consonants become palatalized before

front vowels. (relevant to the split of Mandarin consonants, Nash 106)

f. (other) fricatives become /h/ g. difficult consonant clusters become

simplified.

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Language Families

B. Some results of comparative reconstruction: (Yule 214 chart)

Language families: about 30 language families identified so far (+ 4,000 languages)

Family Trees: (see slides #42,43—Language Family Trees)

1. Indo-European

2. Sino-Tibetan

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Indo-European Languages

Proto-Indo-European

Germanic Celtic Italic Hellenic Balto-Slavic Indo-Iranian

GermanEnglishDutchDanishSwedishNorwegianIcelandicYiddishAfrikaansetc.

Irish- Gaelic

Scots- Gaelic

Welsh

Breton

ItalianSpanishFrenchPortugueseRomanianCatalanRomanschSardinianOccitan

Greek Latvian

Lithuanian

Russian

Polish

Czech

Bulgarian

Serbo-Croatian

Slovene

etc.

Hindi-Urdu

Bengali

Punjabi

Marathi

Gujarati

Romany

etc.

Persian

Pashto

Kurdish

etc.

(Latin)(Ancient Greek)

Baltic Slavic Indic Iranian

(Sanskrit)

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Sino-Tibetan Languages

Sino-Tibetan

Tibeto-Burman Sinitic Miao-Yao (?)

Burmese

Tibetan

Sharpa

Newari

Northern Mandarin (4)

Central Mandarin (5)

Southwest Mandarin (5)

Hsiang (6)

Hakka (6)

Wu (7)

Min-pei (7)

Min-nan (7)

Cantonese (8)

N.IndiaNepalBurmaTibet

(# of tones)

Szechuan

Yunnan

Shanghai

Miao Yao

South China, Vietnam,

Laos,

Thailand

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Language Classification

Genetic vs. typological classification: Genetic classification

comparative reconstruction: show historic relationships and changes

Typological classificationanother way to classify languages is

by structural similarities

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Typological Classification (1)Similar word order patterns

SOV: Japanese, Korean, TurkishSVO: English, Chinese (sort of)VSO: Hebrew, Welsh, Maasai (language in Kenya)

Morphology—word structureIsolatingAgglutinatingSynthetic/inflectionalpolysynthetic

Phonological systems

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Isolating LanguagesIsolating (analytic) languages:

E.g., Mandarin Chinese (& English to a great extent), Cantonese, Vietnamese, Laotian, CambodianAll of its words consist of a single morpheme (root), so there’re few bound morphemes (affixes); e.g., 我的﹐我們Categories such as number and tense must therefore be expressed by a free morpheme (a separate word); e.g. 我有一本 or 很多本書，他吃飯了 or 他吃了飯

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Agglutinating Languages

Agglutinating languages:E.g., Turkish (one-to-one correspondences)

Making extensive use of words containing two or more morphemes (a root and one or more affixes).Each affix is clearly identifiable and characteristically encodes a single grammatical contrast; e.g., affixes in Turkish: ev = “house,” ev-ler = “houses” (“ler” marks plurality), ev-ler-de = “in the houses” (“de” = “in”)

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Synthetic/inflectional Languages

Synthetic/inflectional languagesSeveral-to-one correspondences

Example: RussianAffixes often mark several grammatical

categories simultaneously.e.g. Ptits-i peli (=Birds sang.)A single inflectional affix (i.e., “I”) indicates:

(1) the noun belongs to the feminine gender class (i.e., the N’s gender class)

(2) the noun is plural (its number) (3) N functions as subject (its grammatical role)

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Polysynthetic Languages

Polysynthetic languages: e.g. Swahili, native languages of North Am

erica Long strings of bound forms (or affixes) are

united into single words (which may be equal to entire sentence in English).

e.g. ni ta ku penda (Swahili)

I-will-you-love (“I will love you”)

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A Mix Language: English

English: a mix language

1. lots of isolating—free morphemes, function words

2. also agglutinating—in derivational morphemes. For example, “unwillingness”

3. some synthetic—pronouns (person, gender, number, case, all in one form)

e.g. “he”=the third person, singular, masculine subject

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Phonological Systems

3. Phonological systems Tone/intonation language: Chinese/English Stress time vs. syllable time language:

Stress time: rhythm is based on the stressed syllable (i.e., Eng. poetry); the stressed syllable is more important

Syllable time: syllable = unit of rhythm; stressed or not, every syllable receives more or less equal time

English vs. French, Spanish, (and maybe Chinese)

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Genetic and Typological Lang (1)

Genetically related languages may be different typologically.

E.g., Eng. + Russian distantly related genetically, which are very different typologically.

Russian: highly inflectional, extensive case system, free word order

English: few inflections, almost no case marking, fixed word order

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Genetic and Typological Lang (2)

Typologically similar languages may be unrelated genetically.

Chinese & Vietnamese: both isolating languages, but genetically unrelated.

Hebrew & Massai: both VSO languages, but genetically unrelated.

Chinese & Thai (5 tones): both tone languages, but genetically unrelated.

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ReviewIs language change for better or worse? Is it inevitable?

Can you give some examples about language change at phonetic & phonological, morpho-syntactic, and lexical level?

What are the reasons for change?

How are languages classified?

Name four Germanic languages.

Define the terms: cognates, isolating languages, agglutinating languages, and the majority principle.

Yun-Pi Yuan1 Language Change Introduction to Linguistics.

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