This is a very short introduction to the
field of historical linguistics, in
particular to the idea that languages
are grouped into language families, that
similar languages like French, Spanish,
Italian, are all grouped together
precisely because of those similarities.
They are clustered together because of
their similarities, if you will. And the
way we figure out if two languages are
similar is precisely by looking at
their features, at what words look
similar
amongst them. Languages change. Languages
change all the time, every day. Imagine
when you were in high school. You had
your group of friends and every now and
then people came up with a new word to
say "cool": That's so "blap", something like
that. And the idea was, you know, for
people in the know to say "oh, that's so
blap!", "oh, the blap thing last night!"... For
your friends to know the word and for
your mom not to know the word. If you
caught your mom saying: "Hey, I saw
something that is so blap", you would go
like "oh my god, mom, please don't say that". So, in human communities there's always
a constant tension between wanting
people in your group or in your
community to understand you and wanting
those that are not in your immediate
group not to understand you. And of
course these groups are defined
dynamically, according to the identities
we perform. If we want to be in a context
where we're, you know, with our cool friends
we use the word "blap" amongst themselves [ourselves]
but we cannot have our mom use it or we
cannot have the teachers use the word.
And some of those words will go out of
usage and we'll never hear them again.
Some of them will stick and keep on
going. If you fast-forward that process,
you know, where a group who introduces a
tiny change here and a tiny change there
and some of them stick,
and you fast-forward that for a couple
hundred years, over time enough changes
will accumulate that not only will your
friends be speaking differently but
maybe different neighborhoods or cities
will be speaking differently, and
eventually different regions will have
different words, different sounds, and
different accents. Indeed, not only words
change but also the way we produce
sounds. English has many dialects so
someone from England doesn't sound the
same as someone from the US and someone
from New Zealand. All those changes
happen very slowly over time and they
happen to all human languages. Every
human language is always changing and
again, if you let the movie go for a
couple hundred years you're gonna see
that you're gonna end up with things
that look very different from what you
started with. Even to this day English is
changing and, again, it will continue to
change. Right now, for example, some ways
in which English is different from the
English of your parents or your
grandparents is that you can use "they" as
a singular. So sentences like "everybody
came in their car", in the 21st century
means that people came in the cars
belonging to each of them. For your
grandparents this was... this would have
meant something like everyone came in
the car of those people over there, in
the plural meaning. This is one change
that's happening in the 21st century.
There's other changes in present-day
English. For example, before the only way
to say the sentence in number two would
have been "so Karen says wow I wish I'd
been there". In the early 21st century we
usually say things like "so Karen goes
wow I wish I'd been there"
"so Karen's like wow, I wish I'd been there", "so Karen's all wow, I wish I'd
have been there". So these new forms have
been emerging for a while. Also things
like the word "whom": "Whom am I seeing", for example. No one really uses it
anymore and people, only people who want to project a presumably pedantic persona would use that word.
Modern-day English really doesn't have
it. So this is English in the 20th
century. If we go back a few steps
maybe... I'm sorry not the 20th century, the
21st century. If we go back 400 years
into the 1600s you would have Romeo and
Juliet, for example, where the words are
similar but the pronunciation was
different. And as a matter of fact I
leave you a link there so you can listen
to what Shakespeare sounded like, which I
cannot say, so I will just say the first
two lines: "Two households both alike in
dignity in fair Verona where we lay our
scene". You can see that the words are
similar. Every now and then you're
gonna find a word that you don't
understand but you can pretty much read
this without much effort. The sounds are
different but the language is still the
same. Let's go back a little bit further.
Maybe around 600 years. These are the
four... These are the first lines of a book
called The Canterbury Tales and the
first lines would have sounded something
like this one: Whan that Aprill with his shoures
soote, the droghte of March
hath perced to the roote, and bathed
every vein in swich liquor of which vertu engendred is the flour. When April
with its sweet-smelling showers has pierced the drought of March to the root.
So can see that, first of all, it sounds very
different. Second, many of the words are
different.
For example, "soote" at the end of the
first line would mean sweet. Also the
positions are different: We would say
sweet showers, they would say showers
sweet, "shoures soote". So 600 years
has meant quite a bit of change for
English. Let's go back even further.
This is from about a thousand years ago
from a poem called Beowulf and the first
lines are: "Hwæt! Wē Gār-Dena in geārdagum, þēodcyninga þrym gefrūnon
hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon".
Lo, praise of the prowess
people-kings of spear-armed Danes, in days long sped.
If you look at this language,
first of all, I wouldn't understand
anything if you placed this in front of me.
The words are really different. Second, if
anything, it looks like Icelandic or
German or a Scandinavian language. This is
not an accident. We can find many words
in languages like German and Icelandic
that are very similar to words in
English and the further back we go, the
more all of these languages are gonna
start resembling one another. In
modern-day English the word fish for
example is very similar to Dutch vis,
German fisch, Danish fisk, Swedish fisk, and
Icelandic fiskur. And in an older stage
of English it wasn't - it was pronounced
fisk like in Swedish and Danish, for
example. You can see this written in
runes, on this object, the Franks casket
which shouldn't have the apostrophe, the
first four characters are the runes for
this. So again all of these words are
very similar. There's one concept, fish
which is very similar across all of
these languages. If you will, a feature,
how you say the word fish, which has a
very similar representation in all of
these. These would form a group called
the Germanic languages. As you can see,
Germanic languages include German and dialects of
German, English, Icelandic, and the
languages of Scandinavia. But Germanic is
just a tiny component of a much larger
family called Indo-European. So sometime
around 5,000 to 7,000 years ago, somebody
must have spoken in some language called
Indo-European and then the group
of people that spoke that language
separated. Some people went as far down
as India, for example, some people went to
Italy, some people went to Central Europe,
and as they went along their words
started changing. Again same process
where you had some words in high school
that you used with your friends but not
with your mom, for example. All these tiny
changes in pronunciation and words added
up over time. Sometimes change is
accidental, like a biological mutation.
You have a baby that instead of saying
/r/ you start saying /r/ for example. So
for the people who spoke Indo-European,
they must have had a word for it I, like
egoH or egHom, the people who walked
to Italy, as they went along, that word
changed from egHom to ego, and then from
Italy as people went in to Iberia and to
other parts of Central Europe, the word
ego from Latin changed into yo for
Spanish, eu for Portuguese, je for
French, io for Italian. Going back, people
spoke Indo-European and the word I was egHom.
The ones that left for India, their
word probably changed into something
like ajam, and then it became Sanskrit
aham, and ultimately became Hindi main,
for example or Gujarati hu. This also
happened for Germanic: they had egHom at
first and then the people who went to
Central Europe started saying that word
ik, until it eventually became I for
English, ich for German, and jag for
Swedish. So we have a family,
Indo-European, and we had some previous
form that then changed into the languages that we see
today. As you can see, there's many other
languages Indo-European. Russian for
example, Ukrainian, Polish are in one part
of the family,
Greek, Armenian, Farsi/ Persian, it
should be there somewhere as well,
there's many languages, Albanian. Let's
give a couple more examples of language
families. There's another family spoken
by students in the class called Afro-Asiatic.
So Afro-Asiatic includes languages
like Arabic includes Ge'ez, which is like
the classical language of Amharic, and
includes other languages, as you can see,
and we know that these are related
because their words are similar. The word
tongue, for example, is lisan in
Arabic, it's lisan in Ge'ez, its ns in
Middle Egyptian, you can see it there with
the hieroglyphs. It's harshe in Hausa,
for example, and arraba in Oromo. So there's
things that are l;s or r's
in many of these words. There's things
that are s in many other words, and
that's how we know that they're
connected. A final example of a language
family. This family is called
Sino-Tibetan, this is the language that
Ma- the language family that Mandarin
belongs to. So in the proto-language, in
the proto Sino-Tibetan, as you can see in
Table 1, the word I must have been
something like ngay or nay. This word
changed  into na as it went into old
Chinese, and then from now you see the
variations we see in the languages of
China today. In Mandarin na became wo, in
Hakka for example at the far right of
the table, na became nai. And in
Cantonese, na became no. So you can see
here how there are systemic changes as
you go from the older forms to the
newer forms. Sino-Tibetan includes other
languages like Bodo from Indian -
India, where na became ang and Yi from
China where na became ngax. So there are
many language families in the world. We
know that things should be clustered
together because we find similarities in
words, consistent regularities. We're
gonna call those sound correspondences.
For example, these are languages from the
Austronesian family,
they're called Tongan Samoan Tahitian
Maori and Hawaiian.
Listen to the word for bird. This is manu, manu, manu, manu, manu for all the languages.
This means that there was probably a
word like manu in the original language
were the m changed - didn't change, and
became m in all of the daughter
languages. Likewise there was a sound
like n which remained n in all of the
other languages. So there's
correspondence of m m m m m in all of these. And
by the way when you have a feature or
word that has related forms, we call that
a cognate. So manu, manu.
So Tongan manu is a cognate of Samoan
manu and of Tahitian manu and of Maori
manu and of Hawaiian manu. These are
cognates and that's how we're going to
cluster a language family by finding
cognates. Sounds can change. The word for
canoe, for example, maybe was something
like vaka or waka it had some initial
sound that became a v in Tongan vaka, in
Samoan va'a, in Tahitian va'a, that same sound
became a w in Maori waka and Hawaiian
wa'a. So whatever the original sound was,
there's now a regular correspondence
between Tongan and Samoan and
Tahitian v and Maori and Hawaiian w.
Likewise for the central consonant there
must have been something there that
became a k in Tongan vaka and in Maori
waka, and that same something became a
glottal stop in Samoan va'a, in Tahitian
va'a, and in Hawaiian wa'a.
So some sound became a k sometimes and
the glottal stop
sometimes. And again the Tongan
vaka is a cognate for Samoan va'a and
for Maori waka and for Hawaiian wa'a.
These are cognates.
Maybe the protoform in the protoform of
this language was something like manu or
something like vaka. The process of
deciding what a protoform should look
is called comparative linguistics. It's a
branch of historical linguistics.
So as a quick summary, languages are always
changing. The - it's natural, all living
things change, and this happens to every
single language, so every language that
we have today is equally old. Languages
are clustered together in language
families and the main way we know that
they belong in the same cluster is
because they share cognate words that
have regular consistent similarities
between them. We're going to use these
principles to produce a tree. a cluster
tree of the Indo-European family.
