This document discusses language change and historical reconstruction. It outlines several routes to language change, including language learning, language contact, social differentiation, and natural processes in usage. It then provides examples of specific sound changes that have occurred over time in various languages, such as the Great Vowel Shift in English and changes to consonants in Hawaiian. The document also describes common sound change processes like assimilation, dissimilation, metathesis, and haplology.

1. HOW LANGUAGE
CHANGE
Language Change and Historical Reconstruction

2. Language Change & Historical Reconstruction
•Language is always changing
•Language is often socially problematic
•Language change is functionally disadvantageous

3. Routes to Language Change
•Language learning
•Language contact
•Social Differentiation
•Natural processes in usage

4. LANGUAGE LEARNING
•Language is transformed as it is transmitted from
one generation to the next.
•The experience of each individual is different.
•The process of linguistic replication is imperfect.
•The result varies across individuals.
•Cause systematic drift.
•Random differences may spread and become ‘fixed’
in small population.

5. LANGUAGE CONTACT
•Migration, conquest and trade bring speakers of
one language into contact with the speakers of
another language.
•In such contact situations, languages often
borrow words, construction and so on.

6. SOCIAL DIFFERENTIATION
•Social groups adopt distinctive norms of dress,
adornment, gesture and so forth.
•Language is a part of a package.
•Linguistic distinctiveness can be achieved
through vocabulary, pronunciation,
morphological processes, syntactic construction
and so on.

7. NATURAL PROCESS IN THE USAGE
•Rapid or casual speech naturally produces
processes such as assimilation, dissimilation,
syncope and apocope.
•Some linguists distinguish between internal and
external sources of language change being those
that occur within a single linguistic community
and contact phenomena- a source of external
change.

8. THE ANALOGY WITH EVOLUTION VIA NATURAL
SELECTION
•Darwin himself, made an analogy of evolution of
languages.
•Just-listed types of language as framework.
•Key differences between grammars/lexicons and
genotypes.
•Acquired linguistic traits can be passed on others.
•With languages splitting but never re-joining.

9. TYPES OF CHANGE (SOUND CHANGE)
•GREAT VOWEL SHIFT

10. SOUND CHANGE
•Hawai’ian, the /t/ sounds in older forms of the
language became /k/ at the first European
encounter.
•At the time Europeans encountered Hawai’ian,
there were no /t/ in it at all, which closely
related to Tongan, Tahitian, Samoan and Maori
all have /t/

11. SOUND CHANGE
•Unconditioned sound change that occur
between Middle and Early Modern English is
known as “Great Vowel Shift” used during 1450-
1700

12. PROCESS OF SOUND CHANGE
•Assimilation
•Dissimilation
•Metathesis
•Haplology

13. ASSIMILATION
•The influence of one sound on an adjacent
sound and perhaps the most pervasive process.
•Assimilation process change Latin /k/ when
followed by /i/ or /y/ first to /ky/ then to /ch/
then to /s/

14. DISSIMILATION
•Involves change of one or two ‘same’ sounds
that are adjacent or almost adjacent in a
particular words such that they are no longer the
same. /l/ in English colonel is changed to an /r/
the word is now pronounced as /kernel/.

15. METATHESIS
•Involves the change in order of two adjacent
sounds. Modern English of third from OE thrid
and Modern English bird is a parallel example.
•Modern English bright underwent the opposite
change – beorht, it’s ancestor.

16. HAPLOLOGY
•Is similar to dissimilation because it involves
getting rid of similar neighboring sounds, but at
the same time simply dropped out rather than
being changed to a different sound. Modern
English ‘probably’ as prob’ly.

17. OTHER SOUND CHANGE PROCESS
•Merger
•Split
•Loss
•Syncope
•Apocope
•Prothesis
•Epenthesis

18. OTHER SOUND CHANGE PROCESS
•Merger – currently expanding over much US in
the merger between short ‘o’ and long open ‘o’.
SHORT ‘O’ LONG OPEN ‘O’
Cot Caught
Hot Haughty
Hock Hawk
Stock Stalk

19. OTHER SOUND CHANGE PROCESS
•Split – are rarer than merger, and usually arise
when a formerly conditioned alteration loses the
environment that provided the original
conditioning, and the previously conditioned
alteration becomes two independent sounds
that contrast with each other.
•/f/ and /v/ occurred in intervocalic position.

20. OTHER SOUND CHANGE PROCESS
•Loss – involves the loss of a sound from a
language, as when Hawai’ian lost the /t/ in the
favour of /k/
•Syncope and Apocope – are the loss of medial
and final sounds respectively. Middle English
‘tame’ in the past tense was /temede/ became
/teymd/.

21. OTHER SOUND CHANGE PROCESS
•Prothesis and Epenthesis – are the introduction
of additional sounds, initially and medially
respectively. The addition of the /e/ that made
the Latin words like scola- school into Portugese
escolar is the only example of prosthesis in the
historical linguistics textbooks.