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Language Change
Yun-Pi Yuan 1
I. Introduction: change=a fact; attitudes towards change
II. Examples of change at all levels
A. sound (phonetic and phonological)
B. morpho-syntactic
C. lexical changes
III. Reasons for change
A. External (social) reasons)
B. Internal reasons: natural linguistic processes
a. child language acquisition
b. speaker errors
c. preference for regular systems
d. competing pressures
IV. Historical linguistics
A. comparative reconstruction
a. cognates
b. non-cognates
c. general principles
B. results of comparative reconstruction: lang. families
C. language classification:
a. genetic Yun-Pi Yuan 2
b. typological
I . Introduction (1)
Language change is an undeniable fact:
look at ancient Chinese, at Beowulf, at
rapid changes in slang.
Some people object to language change;
they want to protect and preserve “pure”
and “correct” language.
Examples (Nash 105): French law (in 1975)
prevents the use of borrowed words (especially
from English) in advertising: le club, le bar, le hit
parade, le weekend, les hot dog.
But, fighting a losing battle, since fighting a
natural process
Yun-Pi Yuan 3
I . Introduction (2)
All languages change; all parts of the
grammar can and do change:
phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon,
semantics, sociolinguistic rules, etc.
Change can involve Addition, Loss and
Shift (including individual elements—
e.g. a word added, lost, or shifts
meaning; and rules, too).
Yun-Pi Yuan 4
II. Examples of Change
We’ll talk about changes at three levels:
sound, grammar, and word.
A. Phonetic and Phonological Changes
Post vocalic r
Addition of /ʒ/, /v/ phonemes
Loss of /x/
Great vowel shift
Mandarin consonant split
B. Morpho-Syntactic Changes
C. Lexical Changes
Addition
Loss of words
Change in meaning Yun-Pi Yuan 5
Phonetic and Phonological Changes (1)
A. Phonetic & phonological changes
1. post vocalic “r” (Labov 1972; Yule 240-41)
British: no post vocalic “r”; American: with
post vocalic “r” in general
Some British and American varieties—
British (high class; also Boston, parts of
NYC, parts of the south in the US):
“pronounce /r/ only when it comes before a
vowel”
e.g.: car, farm ↔ red
(spelling shows it “was” there before)
Yun-Pi Yuan 6
Phonetic and Phonological Changes (2)
Yun-Pi Yuan 8
Phonetic and Phonological Changes (4)
4. great vowel shift: (~1400-1600) (Yule 220)
e.g. mouse /maus/← /mus/;
house /haus/ ←/hus/; /u/ /au/
out /aut/ ← /ut/
Regular vowel sound change: changes
in a system are not haphazard, but
regular—they occur not in isolated
words, but in all words in a certain
environment (i.e., /u/ /au/)
Yun-Pi Yuan 9
Great Vowel Shift (1)
The seven long or tense vowels of
middle English underwent the following
change:
aI au u
i
o
e
ɛ
Yun-Pi Yuan 10
Great Vowel Shift (2)
Examples from Yule 220:
Old Eng. Modern Eng.
• hu:s haws (‘house’)
• wi:f wayf (‘wife’)
• spo:n spu:n (‘spoon’)
• brɛ:k bre:k (‘break’)
• h:m hom (‘home’)
• /e/ /i/ geese
• /o/ /u/ goose
• // /e/ name
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Phonetic and Phonological Changes (5)
Yun-Pi Yuan 13
A Local vs. Widespread Change (2)
a local change vs. a widespread
change
These two examples, great vowel shift &
台灣國語 example, can help to show
that regional sound differences (accents)
are not bad in any way, but are only
examples of the results of natural sound
changes which did not spread beyond
certain areas. Thus, no dialect or variety
of a language can claim to be superior
to or purer than some other variety.
Yun-Pi Yuan 14
Morpho-Syntactic Changes (1)
Question formation
Negative sentence formation
Case endings
Verbs
Other examples
Mandarin
Yun-Pi Yuan 15
Morpho-Syntactic Changes (2)
B. Morpho- syntactic changes (Nash 108-11; Yule 221)
Yun-Pi Yuan 16
Morpho-Syntactic Changes (3)
4. verbs:
examples: (from Elgin 211)
ic cepe “I keep” Note: Historical
development of
ðu cepest “you keep” English
he he Old English: ~7th
century to end of
heo cepeð she keeps 11th century
hit it Middle English:
we cepað “we keep” ~1100-1500
b. Narrowing
girl original: “young person of either
sex”
meat (Bible) = food; now animal flesh
used as food (Nash 114)
hound original: “dog of any type”;
now usually “hunting dog”
wife original: “any woman”
Yun-Pi Yuan 28
Change in Meaning (3)
c. Shifting
nice original: “ignorant”
bead original: “prayer”
silly original: “happy” (OE) ”naïve”
(ME) “foolish” (Modern English)
Shift through borrowing:
“footing” (borrowed from English) in
Spanish = “jogging”
“lady-like” (in English): 她很 “lady”
Yun-Pi Yuan 29
III. Reasons for Change (1)
External (social) reasons:
Socio-political upheavals
New ideas, inventions, new things from
other countries
Other social reasons
Internal reasons: natural ling. processes
Child language acquisition
Speaker errors
Preference for regular systems
Competing pressures
Yun-Pi Yuan 30
III. Reasons for Change (2)
A. Social Reasons (external reasons)
1. Socio-political upheavals:
Wars, invasions: such as Norman invasion
of England in 1066; Japanese occupation
of Taiwan; religious conversions
Chinese civil war (geographical/physical
separation): differences in Mandarin
between Taiwan and Mainland China
Yun-Pi Yuan 31
III. Reasons for Change (3)
2. New ideas, inventions, new things
from other countries
Television, computer, (set off whole big
range of changes: “window,” “modem,”
“hard copy,” “mouse”), technological
development, tea (words plus whole
associated list of tea utensils, tea-making
processes), toufu, pizza, 比薩, 漢堡, etc.
Yun-Pi Yuan 32
III. Reasons for Change (4)
3. other social reasons:
social gender/class/status differences:
female: leads to standard, prestigious use
male: vernacular, non-standard lang. use
social interaction:
tightly knitted community, few interaction
with outside world fewer changes
population:
multilingual more changes
Yun-Pi Yuan 33
III. Reasons for Change (5)
B. Internal reasons: natural linguistic processes:
1. child language acquisition:
No one teaches them. Children build their own
grammar from what they hear; it gradually
becomes more and more similar to adult
grammar, but never exactly like adult grammar.
Moreover, they hear many different speakers,
who each have a slightly different grammar.
A “tenuous transmission process”–each new
user of the language “has to ‘recreate’ for him-
or herself the language of the community.”
Yun-Pi Yuan 34
Speaker Errors (1)
2. speaker errors:
assimilation as a speaker error (Nash 107)
sound change:
e.g. gamel gamble; thuner thunder;
tener tender
Yun-Pi Yuan 35
Speaker Errors (2)
reversal of position of phonemes
e.g. “comfortable” very often pronounced
/kΛ mftɚ bl/ (Nash 107)
e.g. metathesis (OE Modern E): involves
a reversal in position of two adjoining
sounds. For example, bridd bird; hros
horse; frist first (a similar e.g. of
metathesis by modern cowboy as a
dialect variant within modern Eng.: purty
good pretty good); in some American
English dialects: ask aks (Yule 220)
Yun-Pi Yuan 36
Speaker Errors (3)
spelling pronunciations: (Nash 107)
Pronunciations have been affected
by word spellings.
e.g.often /ftən/, sword, singer
[Note: Chinese examples should be
called a “writing pronunciation,” not a
spelling pronunciation. e.g. 太空
“梭”“俊“; 癌 vs. 炎; 床笫之事; 莘 莘學
子; 龜裂; 占卜; 病入膏肓; 一丘之貉]
Yun-Pi Yuan 37
III. Reasons for Change (5)
3. preference for regular systems: (Nash 117)
(Universal Operating Principle—“Avoid exceptions”)
e.g. 1. Singular/plural nouns
cow—kine (pl.) cows
bandit—banditti (pl. Italian) bandits
agendum (sing.)—agenda (pl.) agenda
(singular)--agendas (plural)
pizza—pizze (pl.) pizzas (pl.)
syllabus—syllabi (pl.) syllabuses
e.g. 2. Irregular past tense forms:
sweep—swept sweeped
light—lit lighted
dream—dreamt dreamed
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III. Reasons for Change (6)
4. competing pressures: (the 4 Rules)
e.g. involved in case endings change
(one change leading to another)
sound change: first affected endings, then
something had to happen to maintain
processibility and expressiveness strict
word order and more prepositions)
e.g., for “quick and easy”:
abbreviations replace longer original forms
e.g., laser
Yun-Pi Yuan 39
IV. Historical Linguistics (1)
A. Comparative reconstruction (Yule 213-17)
“Linguistic investigation of this type…focuses on the
historical development of languages, and attempts to
characterize the regular processes which are involved in
language change.” (Yule 213 bottom)
Note: regular processes = rule governed
Scholars noted certain similarities between different
languages (e.g. Sanskrit—Latin—Greek), some very
far apart geographically (see Yule 214 chart). Linguists
studied these similarities; examined older written
materials (when available); hypothesized a common
ancestor—on the basis of the similar features and the
development that would be traced through older
records. Yun-Pi Yuan 40
IV. Historical Linguistics (2)
Cognates:
(1) words that have descended from a common
source (as shown by systematic phonetic and
often semantic similarities) are called cognates.
(2) (2) possible family connection between different
languages within groups (Yule 215).
(3) (3) A word in one lang. which is similar in form
and meaning to a word in another lang.
because both langs. are related.
e.g. (Eng.) brother vs. (German) bruder
(Note: sometimes words in 2 languages are similar
in forms and meaning, but are borrowings and not
cognate forms. e.g. (Swahili) kampuni= a borrowing
from (English) “company”)
Yun-Pi Yuan 41
Germanic Languages (Cognates)
More closely related : Eng. Dutch, German,
Swedish
English Dutch German Swedish Turkish
Yun-Pi Yuan 44
The Most Natural Development
Principle
a. final vowels often disappear
b. voiceless sounds become voiced
between vowels and before or after
voiced consonants (“assimilation”)
c. stops become fricatives (“weakening”)
d. consonants become voiceless at the end
of words
e. consonants become palatalized before
front vowels. (relevant to the split of
Mandarin consonants, Nash 106)
f. (other) fricatives become /h/
g. difficult consonant clusters become
simplified. Yun-Pi Yuan 45
Language Families
Yun-Pi Yuan 47
Sino-Tibetan Languages
Sino-Tibetan
(# of tones)
Burmese Szechuan Northern Mandarin (4) Miao Yao
Tibetan Central Mandarin (5)
N. Sharpa Yunnan Southwest Mandarin (5)
India Newari Hsiang (6) South China,
Nepal Vietnam,
Hakka (6)
Burma Laos,
Tibet
Wu (7)
Thailand
Shanghai Min-pei (7)
Min-nan (7)
Cantonese (8)
Yun-Pi Yuan 48
Language Classification
Yun-Pi Yuan 52
Synthetic/inflectional Languages
Synthetic/inflectional languages
Several-to-one correspondences
Example: Russian
Affixes often mark several grammatical
categories simultaneously.
e.g. Ptits-i peli (=Birds sang.)
A single inflectional affix (i.e., “I”) indicates:
(1) the noun belongs to the feminine
gender class (i.e., the N’s gender class)
(2) the noun is plural (its number)
(3) N functions as subject (its grammatical role)
Yun-Pi Yuan 53
Polysynthetic Languages
Polysynthetic languages:
e.g. Swahili, native languages of North
America
Long strings of bound forms (or affixes) are
united into single words (which may be
equal to entire sentence in English).
e.g. ni ta ku penda (Swahili)
I-will-you-love (“I will love you”)
Yun-Pi Yuan 54
A Mix Language: English
English: a mix language
1. lots of isolating—free morphemes, function
words
2. also agglutinating—in derivational
morphemes. For example, “unwillingness”
3. some synthetic—pronouns (person, gender,
number, case, all in one form)
e.g. “he”=the third person, singular,
masculine subject
Yun-Pi Yuan 55
Phonological Systems
3. Phonological systems
Tone/intonation language: Chinese/English
Stress time vs. syllable time language:
Stress time: rhythm is based on the
stressed syllable (i.e., Eng. poetry); the
stressed syllable is more important
Syllable time: syllable = unit of rhythm;
stressed or not, every syllable receives
more or less equal time
English vs. French, Spanish, (and maybe
Chinese)
Yun-Pi Yuan 56
Genetic and Typological Lang (1)
Genetically related languages may be
different typologically.
E.g., Eng. + Russian distantly related
genetically, which are very different
typologically.
Russian: highly inflectional, extensive
case system, free word order
English: few inflections, almost no case
marking, fixed word order
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Genetic and Typological Lang (2)
Yun-Pi Yuan 58
Review
Is language change for better or worse? Is it
inevitable?
Can you give some examples about language
change at phonetic & phonological, morpho-
syntactic, and lexical level?
What are the reasons for change?
How are languages classified?
Name four Germanic languages.
Define the terms: cognates, isolating
languages, agglutinating languages, and the
majority principle.
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