Language Change and Evolution
Dr.
C. George Boeree
Languages change, usually very
slowly, sometimes very rapidly. There are many reasons a language might
change. One obvious reason is interaction with other languages. If
one tribe of people trades with another, they will pick up specific words and
phrases for trade objects, for example. If a small but powerful tribe
subdues a larger one, we find that the language of the elite often shows the
influence of constant interaction with the majority, while the majority
language imports vocabulary and speaking styles from the elite language.
Often one or the other simply disappears, leaving behind a profoundly altered
"victor." English is, in fact, an example of this: The
Norman French of the conquerers has long disappeared, but not before changing
Anglo-Saxon into, well, a highly Frenchified English.
If a people are isolated on
islands or mountain valleys, language can change very slowly indeed. But
it still changes. For example, in the highlands of Papua New Guinea are
many dozens of languages, each quite different from its neighbors. But
they are apparently the results of long-term isolation rather than mutual
influence. The same has happened in the Caucasus Mountains between Russia
and Turkey and Iran.
The slower mechanisms of change
seem to include the "battle" between simplicity and
expressiveness. We want our languages to communicate as much information
as possible, and yet do so economically. We want our languages rich yet
concise. How many prepositions or cases do we need? How many are
too much? How many verb forms do we need, and how many strain the
brain? How many suffixes, prefixes, and irregularities can children take
before they begin to simplify? What combinations of sounds are easily
pronounced and easily understood? And so on.
One surprising aspect of
language change is the influence of fashion and even of individual
idiosyncracies. Although the story is apocryphal, some say that the th
pronunciation of Castillian Spanish was due to courtiers imitating the lisp of
a young king! In my own family, we refer to Christmas as Wikis because of
one of children's inability to say Christmas. Imagine if we were a part
of a tightly knit tribal village: If others thought it was as cute as we
did, the word Christmas could morph into Wikis in one generation! That
has probably happened millions of times in human history.
Let's look at a real example of a very
influential people:
Around 5000 bc, between the
Danube river valley and the steppes of what is now the Ukraine, there lived
small tribes of primitive farmers who all spoke the same language. They
cultivated rye and oats, and kept pigs, geese, and cows. They would soon
become the first people on earth to tame the local wild horses -- an
accomplishment that would make them a significant part of history for thousands
of years to come. And their proximity to the culturally more advance
people of Asia Minor -- what is now Turkey -- would allow them to learn the
metal working invented there, beginning with copper.
Beginning around 3000 bc, these
people would spread into Europe and the Russian steppes. Around 1500 bc,
they would continue into Persia and India, even as far as western China.
Later still (in the last 500 years), they would spread to the Americas,
Australia, the Pacific islands, and parts of Africa. They would take
their language with them, although it would gradually change into hundreds of
mutually unintelligible languages, including English, German, French, Spanish,
Russian, Persian, Hindi and many more.
By examining the oldest examples
of modern and classical languages such as Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit, linguists
have been able to reconstruct an educated guess as to what the language of
these ancient people was like. They call the language Proto-Indo-European.
The work that went into reconstructing Proto-Indo-European has led to efforts
to reconstruct other prehistorical language ancestors as well.
To show you how these linguists
did this, let's start with a simple example: Italian, Spanish,
Portuguese, French, and Rumanian all come from Latin, which we still have many
records of. Words with -ct- in the middle in Latin changed in a
systematic way, like this:
Latin
|
Italian
|
Spanish
|
Portuguese
|
French
|
English
|
dicto
|
detto
|
dicho
|
dito
|
dit
|
said
|
lacte
|
latte
|
leche
|
leite
|
lait
|
milk
|
lecto
|
letto
|
lecho
|
leito
|
lit
|
bed
|
nocte
|
notte
|
noche
|
noite
|
nuit
|
night
|
So one "rule" could be
that a "difficult" combination of letters like -ct- change in certain
ways to end up "simpler." In most of the descendent languages,
it just became -t-; in Spanish, it became ch. Another example:
Words that began with pl-, cl-, or fl- in Latin changed in a systematic way as
well. In this case the initial consonant combinations
"simplified" in different ways in Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese,
but remained the same in French. In Italian, the l became an i, in
Spanish they became ll (pronounced like y), and in Portuguese they became ch
(pronounced like sh):
Latin
|
Italian
|
Spanish
|
Portuguese
|
French
|
English
|
pleno
|
pieno
|
lleno
|
cheio
|
plein
|
full
|
clave
|
chiave
|
llave
|
chave
|
clef
|
key
|
flamma
|
fiamma
|
llama
|
chama
|
flamme
|
flame
|
The relationships among the
Germanic languages are often obvious, and linguists have reconstructed what
they call Proto-Germanic:
English
|
Dutch
|
German
|
Danish
|
Norwegian
|
Swedish
|
Icelandic
|
book
|
boek
|
buch
|
bog
|
bok
|
bok
|
bók
|
come
|
komen
|
kommen
|
komme
|
komme
|
komma
|
koma
|
drink
|
drinken
|
trinken
|
drikke
|
drikke
|
dricka
|
drekka
|
And among the Slavic languages,
the relationships are more obvious still, and they have reconstructed a
Proto-Slavic:
Russian
|
Belarus
|
Ukrainian
|
Polish
|
Czech
|
Slovak
|
Slovenian
|
Serbo-Croatian
|
Makedonian
|
Bulgarian
|
mat'
|
maci
|
maty
|
matka
|
matka
|
matka
|
mati
|
mati
|
majka
|
maika
|
Vera
|
vera
|
vira
|
wiara
|
vira
|
viera
|
vera
|
vjera
|
vera
|
Vjara
|
Son
|
son
|
son
|
sen
|
sen
|
sen
|
sen
|
san
|
son
|
San
|
Over time, the linguists learned
the patterns of change, and have used them to reconstruct languages whose
original versions we no longer have any record of -- such as
Proto-Indo-European! They are able to use some of the oldest versions of
the different branches of the Indo-European languages as a foundation:
English
|
Sanskrit
|
Greek
|
Latin
|
Old Irish
|
Gothic
|
Lithuanian
|
Old Church Slavic
|
four
|
chaturtha
|
tettares
|
quattuor
|
cethair
|
fidwor
|
keturi
|
Chetyre
|
five
|
pancha
|
pente
|
quinque
|
coic
|
fimf
|
penki
|
Peti
|
mother
|
maatra
|
mater
|
mater
|
mathir
|
modhir
|
mote
|
Mati
|
brother
|
bhrataa
|
phrater
|
fratera
|
brathair
|
brothar
|
brolis
|
Bratu
|
These examples are nowhere near
as obviously related -- but they are, in fact, related. The words for
brother are clearer than the others: You can see that the first sound
varies between b, bh (a breathy b), ph (a breathy p), and f. The first
vowel varies between a and o. The middle consonant varies between t and
th. In all but the last two languages, the words end in some variation of
ar or er. Notice that the examples include Sanskrit (ancestor of the
languages of northern India), Greek, Old Irish, and Lithuanian! Gothic is
the oldest recorded version of the Germanic languages, and Old Church Slavic
the oldest of the Slavic languages. There are, in fact, even more relatives,
including Albanian, Armenian, the languages of Iran, and many languages which
haven't survived.
By examining the patterns in
many languages and many words, linguists have reconstructed the
Proto-Indo-European forms of these and many other words:
Proto-indoeuropean
|
kwetwer
|
penkwe
|
mater
|
bhrater
|
For a few more examples, here
are the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European numbers from one to ten:
oino, dwo, trei, kwetker,
penkwe, sweks, sept, oktou, newn, dekm.
Look vaguely familiar?
Linguists have
reconstructed other "Proto" languages for other language
families. Some, such as the Polynesian languages, are relatively easy,
because those languages only diverged about 1000 years ago. Others are
nearly impossible, either because of a lack of older written material, or
because it isn't even certain that the languages are truly related!
Many linguists believe that it
is hard to go much further than 5000 years, even with a good set of
vocabularies to work with. In fact, many suggest that over 10,000 years,
the changes that occur are so thorough that no clear connection can be
established between two languages that separated that long ago. But
saying something is impossible has never stopped us before! Some other
linguists have indeed taken the leap and used certain specialized statistical
tools to project back to a language that (supposedly) is the ancestor not only
of Proto-indoeuropean, but of the language groups Afro-Asiatic (e.g. Arabic,
Hebrew, and ancient Egyptian), Uralic (e.g. Finnish and Hungarian), Altaic
(e.g. Turkish and Mongolian), Dravidian (the languages of southern India),
Korean, Japanese, the languages of eastern Siberia, and Eskimo-Aleut!
They call the reconstruction Nostratic
(meaning "ours"), and suggest that it may have existed some 15,000 to
20,000 years ago. Some examples of words that may have been a part of
Nostratic include küjna (dog), p'at (foot), haku (water),
and küni (woman). Perhaps you recognize them from words like
canine (and hound!), pedicure (and foot!), aqua (and water!), and gynecologist
(and queen!).
To do this, some linguists have
used a different set of techniques. Instead of looking at a vast
collection of words, they look at a smaller collection of words that have shown
a certain stability in languages such as the Indo-European languages.
They then look at statistical patterns over a large number of languages.
It is techniques like this that have allowed linguists to suggest, for example,
that most North and South American Indian languages are part of a language
group they called Amerindian -- something the older, more meticulous methods
could not do, and many linguists still do not trust.
Nevertheless, it is likely that,
"once upon a time," there was indeed only one language, one with a
limited vocabulary and simple rules for combining words into sentences.
As the need arose, the vocabulary could expand by combining old words or
inventing new ones, and the rules could become more and more detailed. At
some point, long ago, the vocabulary and the grammar apparently levelled
off: All languages today, no matter how "primitive" the people,
appear to be equal in their abilities to express the nuances and complexities
of human life.
SUMMARY :
Generally it
is believed that most of the languages of Europe and India are the descendents
of an ancient parent language which existed 4000 years ago. The name, traces,
or the historical record of that language is no more available now. Modern
Researchers identify it with the name of the “Indo-European Language”. There
are several possible reason why language change :
- economy: Speakers tend to make their utterances as efficient and effective as possible to reach communicative goals. Purposeful speaking therefore involves a trade-off of costs and benefits.
- the principle of least effort: Speakers especially use economy in their articulation, which tends to result in phonetic reduction of speech forms. See vowel reduction, cluster reduction, lenition, and elision. After some time a change may become widely accepted (it becomes a regular sound change) and may end up treated as a standard. For instance: going to [ˈɡoʊ.ɪntʊ] → gonna [ˈɡʌnə], with examples of both vowel reduction [ʊ] → [ə] and elision [nt] → [n], [oʊ.ɪ] → [ʌ].
- analogy - reducing word forms by likening different forms of the word to the root.
- language contact - the borrowing of words from foreign languages.
- the medium of communication
- cultural environment: Groups of speakers will reflect new places, situations, and objects in their language, whether they encounter different people there or not.
Taking into consideration that languages will not
remain stable, but that change and variation are inevitable, two different
concepts have been studied. The difference between studying a language diachronically
and synchronically is in time. e.g: English spoken today in America is somewhat different from the English
used in England, and both are different
from the varieties of English spoken in India. These are synchronic
forms of English. English spoken by an English speaker
in 2003 is different from English spoken in 1903, and different from the way
they spoke in 1803. These are
diachronic forms of English.
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