Hello and welcome to the fourth lesson
in NativLang's introduction to
historical linguistics and language
change. Last time around we looked at
some basic words in three Latinic or
Romance languages and determined how
they were related to each other.
We also filled out their family tree
back in time and saw that they had this
relationship dependent on the existence
of some common ancestor that was an
actual language spoken in the past.
We also determined that if we didn't have attested data for that language we'd have
to go back and reconstruct the language
to know what it was like. In this lesson
we're going to do some of those basic
reconstructions to determine the shape
of an ancestral language that isn't
attested. In other words, we have no
written records of it. We're going to
start with some fresh data from a few
new languages. These are all Polynesian
languages. I'll start out by saying
they're all related to each other. We're
not trying to determine here if they're
related but rather what is the common
ancestral form that these cognates all
share. These cognates all come from some
one word in the past. What was the shape
of that one word? So here are some words
for numbers in these languages. As you
can see, the forms are all very close.
It's easy to tell based on this data at
least that the languages are related.
I've given you the IPA forms (the
International Phonetic Alphabet forms) of
these words because we need to look at
sounds and sound change to determine how
these words changed. If you're not
familiar with the IPA - even though the
symbols used here are fairly basic - I
have a whole lesson on that. I'll put a
link to it below. I also need to
introduce you to innovations and
retentions. Innovations are changes to
ancestral forms that were introduced at
some point in the past. They may occur in
one language or they may be shared by a
group of more closely related languages.
Retentions are those forms - in this case
the sounds - that go back to the common
ancestor. What we need to do is determine
which of the sounds here are retentions
and which are innovations. Once we can do
that, we can posit common forms that
must have occurred in the parent or the
reconstructed language. One simple
innovation shows up pretty quickly as we
look at this data. Notice that Hawaiian
always has this prefixed material, this /ʔe/, in front of every single number. This
shows up only in Hawaiian and not in any
of the other languages. We have good
grounds for assuming that this is an
innovation. We don't have hard proof here
but the common material to all of these
numbers does not include that /ʔe/. So when
we're looking at the Hawaiian numbers,
the common material is everything after
that /ʔe/. So let's compare individual
sounds. Notice the phoneme /t/, the
voiceless dental plosive, that shows up
in most languages, but also notice this
curiosity that some languages, instead of
having the phoneme /t/, have this voiceless
velar stop instead of the voiceless
dental stop. In this case there's almost
something like a democratic vote by the
languages against the velar plosive (the
/k/ sound) being the original phoneme. We
have a pretty good indication that /t/ was
an original phoneme, a retention, that
changed to the innovation /k/ in a
specific language: in Hawaiian. So we
choose /t/ as the ancestral inherited
retained phoneme in all of these
languages that then change to a /k/ in
some instances. But it would be lazy of
us to stop there. We should go and
confirm against further data. What we'd
find is that this is indeed the case:
where there's a /k/ in Hawaiian other
cognates in other languages have a /t/,
and vice versa, where there's a /t/ in the
other languages there's a /k/ in Hawaiian.
So this seems to be confirmed across the
board. We can posit some /t/ in the
ancestral language. What's more, we're not
surprised to find that the number seven
has a form with /t/ and not with a /k/ in
that ancestral language. So our
reconstruction of that root
pretty straightforward. The question
becomes a bit more complicated when we
look at /l/s and /r/s. Take a look at the
word for the number two and for the
number three and the number eight in the
Polynesian languages that we have here.
Should the reconstructions of these
languages have an /l/ or an /r/? One thing to
notice here is that languages that have
an /l/ seem to always have an /l/ and
languages that have an /r/ seem to always
have an /r/. And there's a good
distribution here, so which one should we
choose? As I mentioned, this isn't so
straightforward.
What we'll need to do is to extend our
comparison to other languages. These
languages aren't as closely related.
They'll give us some comparative
evidence for the distribution of /l/s
and /r/s throughout the whole family.
You can see in these languages that /l/ and /r/ are distinct phonemes. In other words,
/l/ doesn't always show up when /r/ does.
What's even more important is that these
languages are consistent in their
distribution of /l/ and /r/, so it's reasonable
to suppose that this distinction was
also made in the common ancestor
language that's the parent of the
Polynesian languages w'ere evaluating.
Based on this evidence, we'll reconstruct
the numbers two and three this way. We can
then conclude that some of the daughter
languages changed all instances of /l/s
and /r/s to /r/ and other daughter
languages changed all instances of /l/s
and /r/s to /l/.
When it comes to sound change, there's a lot going on. There are
reasons for seeing typological
characteristics, in other words, these
types of sound changes tend to happen;
these other ones don't or are less
common. So we have grounds for saying
that the change from the phoneme /f/ to
the phoneme /h/ is a common and expected
one, but we wouldn't expect /h/ to turn
into /f/. And the same goes for /v/ and /w/. We
commonly expect /w/ to turn into a
/v/-like sound. On top of that, there are
regular types of sound changes that
happen in languages,
and these are especially important for
understanding language change. If you'd
like to take a look at those types of
regular sound changes like assimilation,
which I believe I've mentioned before in
a previous lesson, to get a more in-depth
understanding of assimilation,
dissimilation, things like metathesis
compensatory lengthening and so on, I put
together a brief page with definitions
and examples. I'll leave you the URL for
that page as well. I really hope this
lesson's been helpful for you. I know it's
a brief introduction, but take a look at
the site. You'll get more information
there and a couple of exercises as well.
Thanks for learning with me.
(NOTE: page since removed. See NativLang playlist "Sound change".)
