HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS –

IG 577Week 10: Comparative Method

Lecturers: Dr. Dadang Sudana, M.A.

Ernie D.A. Imperiani, M.Ed.

Reconstruct Reflexes Cognate Sound correspondence Comparative method

COMPARATIVE METHOD It is said that “one form is a reflex of another

form”. What does it actually mean? It means that this later form (in the various of related

languages) appears to be derived from the earlier form (a common source/original form).

Therefore it is possible to reconstruct some of the aspects of the original language from the reflexes in the daughter languages (Linguistic Reconstruction).

Reconstruct = to make some kind of estimation about what a protolanguage might have been like.

Linguistic reconstruction = the desire to establish language relationship, that is, we want to determine what languages have descended from a common protolanguage and we want to determine language relationships.

COMPARATIVE METHOD (CONT’D) How ? By using Comparative Method (CM) So, what is it? It refers to the procedure / technique used to

reconstruct an earlier form of an unrecorded language on the basis of evidence from several different languages/ dialects that are assumed to be related.

In addition, it compares words of similar forms and meaning (cognate) in the various daughter languages that are descended from a single ancestor/a common source (protolanguage).

COMPARATIVE METHOD (CONT’D) Cognate forms/ words = those forms/

words that descend / have descended from the same/common original form and usually similar in form and meaning (phonetic similarity and semantic identity).

Some Germanic cognates

Yet, keep in mind that “cognates” are not always as obvious as the Germanic.

English Dutch German Swedish

Gloss

man man Mann man ‘man’

hand hand Hand hand ‘hand’

COMPARATIVE METHOD (CONT’D) Where languages from the same family are only

distantly related, the systematic correspondence may be considerably less striking/ less noticeable.

Some distinctly related cognates compared to not related Turkish.

Here, I put Turkish to emphasize the similarities among the first three languages.

English Russian Hindi Turkish

Two dva Do Iki

Three Tri tin ytʃ

Brother Brat Bhai Kardeʃ

nose nos Nahi burun

COMPARATIVE METHOD (CONT’D) There are two tendencies that make it possible

to determine language relationships1. The arbitrary relationship between a word’s

form and meaning (so it’s reasonable to assume that two / more languages that share words of similar forms and meanings are related, that is, descended from a common source). This will make it highly unlikely that unrelated languages will share large numbers of words of similar forms and meanings.

2. The regularity of sound change (two/more languages that are related will show regular sound correspondence

COMPARATIVE METHOD (CONT’D)Sound correspondences = each set of sounds that

appears to be descended from the same original sound (both vowel and consonant correspondences).

Example: if we compare the vowel sounds in some Germanic cognates (shown previously), we establish the following sound correspondence in the word meaning ‘man’: [æ] in English correspondence to [a] in German, Swedish and Dutch.

In order for this sound correspondence to be regular, it must occur in other words that have similar forms and meanings. Since these sound correspondences (æ -a-a-a) occur regularly, we have eliminated the possibility of being misled by change similarity between words with similar form and meaning in unrelated languages.

COMPARATIVE METHOD (CONT’D) Once the existence of a relationship

between two languages / more has been established, an attempt can be made to reconstruct thye common source.

This reconstructed language = protolanguage is made up of ‘proto-forms’ –reconstructed forms (which are written with a preceding asterisk), for example /*hand/ = to indicate their hypothetical character as reconstructions of earlier forms that have not been recorded/ are not being directly observable.

COMPARATIVE METHOD (CONT’D) If two or more languages show regular

correspondences between themselves in words where the meanings are the same / similar, it means that these words have descended from a common source.

As a small preliminary example of how the comparative method works, let us turn to our Germanic cognates.

We note that the first consonant in the word ‘man’ is an [m] and that the final consonant is an [n] in all four languages. Thus, we can safely assume that the protolanguage had an initial *[m] and a final *[n] in the word ‘man’. So, at this point we can reconstruct *[m_n] in our protolanguage.

COMPARATIVE METHOD (CONT’D) With respect to the vowel sound, there

is some uncertainty because there is variation in the sound. E has [æ], while D, G, and S have [a].

However, since there is numerical superiority on the side of [a], it is best assume that this is the sound the protolanguage possessed and that English alone has changed *[a] to [æ].

Thus we reconstruct the proto-form for ‘man’ as *[man] and the sound change *a> æ (“*[a] changes to [æ]”) in English.

SOME STEPS TO DO COMPARATIVE METHOD Compile cognate sets, eliminate

borrowings. Determine sound correspondences Reconstruct a sound for each position

a. Total correspondenceb. Most natural development *c. Majority rules

Check for regularity of sound change

MOST NATURAL DEVELOPMENT Voiceless sounds become voiced between

vowels & before voiced consonants. Stops become fricatives between vowels. Consonants become palatalized before

vowels. Consonants become voiceless at the ends of

the words. Different consonants clusters are simplified. Different consonants are made easier. Vowels become nasalized before nasals. (other) fricatives become [h]. [h] deletes between vowels.

INTERNAL RECONSTRUCTION Similar to comparative method, Internal

reconstruction is a method which is used to reconstruct linguistic history.

The basic difference between the two methods is that in the case of internal reconstruction, we reconstruct only on the basis of evidence from within a single language, whereas in the comparative method we reconstruct on the basis of evidence from several different languages / dialects.

INTERNAL RECONSTRUCTION CONT’D With the comparative method, you

arrive at a protolanguage from which two or more languages/ dialects are derived, while with the internal method of reconstruction, we simple end up with an earlier stage of a language (a prelanguage).

Cases of morphological alternation would be taken as the basis for applying the internal method of reconstruction.

When might you want to use internal reconstruction instead of comparative method?When we are investigating language that might be a linguistic isolate (may not be related to any other language and is therefore in a family of its own)

PROBLEMS IN USING THE INTERNAL METHOD OF RECONSTRUCTION

This method can only be used when a sound change has resulted in some kind of morphological alternation in a language.

It may be inapplicable or may even lead to a false reconstruction when intermediate changes are affected by other later changes, with the changes leaving no traces in the modern language.