1.
Historical
Linguistics
By Daniel Caceres
Gabriela López

2.
What are 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.(1916)
 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

3.
 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.

4.
Five Concernings 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

5.
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.

6.
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.

7.
 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.

8.
 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

9.
Historical linguistics
according to English
 Language of the Germanic tribes gave rise to
English language
 Angles, Saxons, Frisii, Jutes and possibly
some Franks were most of the best known
Germanic tribes that lived alongside Latin-
speaking people, which included some words of
their vocabulary to the Proto-English language
before the arrival to Angle Land

10.
Old English (500 A.D – 1100 A.D)
 Germanic settlement displaced the indigenous Brythonic
languages and Latin in most of the areas of Britain
 What is now called Old English emerged over time out of the
many dialects and languages of the colonising tribes
 In the 10th and 11th centuries, Old English was influenced by
Old Norse, spoken by Norsemen who settled in the North East
of England. As result of this mixture, Old English earned loss of
the gramatical gender
 English borrowed about two thousand words from Old Norse,
including anger, bag, both, hit, law, leg, same, skill, sky, take,
and many others, possibly even including the pronoun they
 The Old English period formally ended some time after
the Norman conquest of 1066, when the language was
influenced to an even greater extent by the Normans, who
spoke a French dialect called Old Norman.

11.
Middle English
(Late 1100 A.D to Late 1500 A.D)
 Middle English was influenced by both Anglo-Norman
and, later, Anglo-French. Anglo-French is a branch
between Old English and Norman.
 The Norman kings and high-ranking nobles in England
spoke Anglo-Norman.
 Merchants and lower-ranked nobles were often
bilingual in Anglo-Norman and English, whilst English
continued to be the language of the common
people.

12.
 The more idiomatic, concrete and descriptive a style
of English is, the more it tends to be from Anglo-
Saxon origins.
 The more intellectual and abstract English is, the
more it tends to contain Latin and French influences.
 Two of the most important changes of the period
were changes related both to grammar and
vocabulary.

13.
 An overall diminishing of grammatical endings occurred in
Middle English. Grammar distinctions were lost as many noun
and adjective endings were leveled to -e. The older plural
noun marker -en largely gave way to -s, and grammatical
gender was discarded.
 Approximately 10,000 French (and Norman) loan words
entered Middle English, particularly terms associated with
government, church, law, the military, fashion, and food.
 English spelling was also influenced by Norman in this period,
with the /θ/ and /ð/ sounds being spelled th rather than with
the Old English letters þ (thorn) and ð (eth), which did not
exist in Norman.
 These letters remain in the modern Icelandic alphabet,
having been borrowed from Old English via Western
Norwegian.

14.
Early Modern English
(From late 15th century to the late
17th century)
 The English language underwent extensive sound changes
during the 1400s, while its spelling conventions remained
rather constant.Modern English is often dated from the
Great Vowel Shift, which took place mainly during the 15th
century.
 English was further transformed by the spread of a
standardised London-based dialect in government and
administration and by the standardising effect of printing.

15.
 Consequent to the push toward standardization, the
language acquired self-conscious terms such as "accent"
and "dialect”
 In 1604, the first English dictionary was published, the Table
Alphabeticall.
 Increased literacy and travel have facilitated the adoption
of many foreign words, especially borrowings from Latin and
Greek since the Renaissance.
 During the period, loan words were borrowed from Italian,
German, and Yiddish.

16.
Modern English
( from the late 17th century to the
present)
 The Dictionary of the English Language was the first full
featured English dictionary. Samuel Johnson published the
authoritative work in 1755. To a high degree, the dictionary
standardized both English spelling and word usage
 Early Modern English and Late Modern English vary
essentially in vocabulary. Late Modern English has many
more words, arising from the Industrial Revolution and the
technology that created a need for new words as well as
international development of the language.

17.
 British English and American English, the two major varieties of
the language, are spoken by 400 million persons. Received
Pronunciation of British English is considered the traditional
standard. The total number of English speakers worldwide
may exceed one billion.

18.
Hwæt! Wē Gār-
Dena
in geārdagum,
þēodcyninga þrym gefrūnon,
hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon.
Oft Scyld Scēfing sceaþena þrēatum,
monegum mǣgþum, meodosetla oftēah,
egsode eorlas. Syððan ǣrest wearð
fēasceaft funden,
hē þæs
frōfre gebād,
wēox under wolcnu
m,
weorðmyndum þāh,
oðþæt him ǣghwylc þāra ymbsittendra
ofer hronrāde hȳran scolde,
gomban gyldan.
Þæt
wæs gōd cyning!
Beowulf lines 1 to 11, aprox. 900 A.D
Old English

19.
From Ayenbyte of Inwit, 1340
Nou ich wille þet
ye ywite hou hit is ywent
þet þis boc is ywrite mid Engliss of
Kent.
Þis boc is ymad vor lewede men
Vor vader and vor moder and
vor oþer ken
ham vor to berȝe vram alle
manyere zen
þet ine hare inwytte ne bleve no
voul wen.
'Huo ase god' in his name yzed,
Þet þis boc made god
him yeve þet bread,
Of angles of hevene, and þerto
his red,
And ondervonge his zaule huann
e þet he is dyad. Amen.
Middle English Early Modern English
From Paradise Lost by John Milton,
1667:
Of Mans First Disobedience, and the Fruit
Of that Forbidden Tree, whose mortal tast
Brought Death into the World, and all our
woe,
With loss of Eden, till one greater Man
Restore us, and regain the blissful Seat,
Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top
Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire
That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen
Seed,
In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth
Rose out of Chaos: Or if Sion Hill
Delight thee more, and Siloa's Brook that
flow'd
Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence
Invoke thy aid to my adventrous Song,
That with no middle flight intends to soar
Above th' Aonian Mount, while it pursues
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime.

20.
Modern English
Taken from Oliver Twist, 1838, by Charles Dickens:
“…The evening arrived: the boys took their places; the master
in his cook's uniform stationed himself at the copper; his pauper
assistants ranged themselves behind him; the gruel was served
out, and a long grace was said over the short commons. The
gruel disappeared, the boys whispered each other and winked
at Oliver, while his next neighbours nudged him. Child as he
was, he was desperate with hunger and reckless with misery.
He rose from the table, and advancing, basin and spoon in
hand, to the master, said, somewhat alarmed at his own
temerity—”

21.
Thanks for your
attention!