Chapter 22 Linguistic Affiliation In the preceding chapter i gave you a very quick survey of some of the more common ways in which languages are known to change. Now we are going to take a closer look at what is known about the processes of language change and how we can use this knowledge to reconstruct language history. Note my use of the word ‘reconstruct’ or ‘reconstruction’. Bear in mind that, when we talk about language history, to a great extent we are talking history that isn't clearly recorded anywhere. For instance, if you look at European culture nowadays you will find a great many different languages — Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Nor- wegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovene, Spanish, Swedish, to mention only a few of the more important ones — most of which are nevertheless recognizably related to each other.1 Pushing back as far as we can in the historical records it becomes obvious that French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish are all descended from Latin, and we have plenty of records of Latin. Czech, Polish, Russian, and Slovene are clearly all related to an older language called Old Church Slavonic,2 for which we have records. Danish, Icelandic, Norwegian, and Swedish are all descended from a language usually referred to as Old Norse, for which we have records from about 800–1000 years ago, while Dutch, English, and German are all somehow or other related to what is usually called Old High German, for which we have some records, but the details of the relationship are not quite as obvious as one might like. Beyond that, it is very clear that Old Norse and Old High German are related to each other, but there is no historical record of any language from which they could both be derived; any such language — usually referred to as ‘Proto-Germanic’ — obviously died out before any of its speakers learned to write. And the same is true, only much more so, for Greek, Latin, Old Church Slavonic, and Proto-Germanic; these languages are also known to be related to each other, but their common ancestor ceased to exist as a recognizable languages thousands of years ago, long before any of its speakers had ever so much as heard of writing. And in all this i've left out Finnish and Hungarian. These languages are related too — that is, they're related to each other, but as far as we know are not related to any of the other languages i've mentioned — but their common ancestor, like the common ancestor of the Germanic languages, has left no written records. A major part of the work of historical linguistics is figuring out what we are able to learn about lan- guages that no longer exist on the basis of their living descendants. Actually, it isn't strictly neces- sary that the descendants be living, only that they be attested. If there are adequate historical records of a word, an expression, or a language, that word, expression, or language is said to be ‘attested’. 1The relatioships and relative status of these languages are all shown in Fig. 22.1 on the next page. 2Though perhaps not as closely as the modern Romance languages are related to Latin. 420 Proto-Indo-European (PIE) Proto-Uralic NEITHER LIVING NOR ATTESTED Proto-Germanic Finnish Hungarian Common Slavic Proto-West Germanic Greek Latin × Old Norse × Old High German (OHG) ATTESTED Old Church Slavonic (OCS) Dutch English German LIVING French Spanish Czech Slovene Danish Swedish Italian Portuguese Polish Russian Icelandic Norwegian Fig. 22.1 — Selected European Languages, Living, Dead, and Attested3 3In this diagram, the languages whose names appear below the broken line are living now; the languages whose names appear between the solid line and the broken line are no longer living, but are attested. The languages whose names appear above the solid line are neither living nor attested. 421 Lexical vs. Sound Correspondences In this chapter we will be looking almost entirely at phonological change, because ultimately that's where most of the action is. There are several reasons for this. One, related to one of the statements i made earlier, is simply that more research has been done on phonological change than on any other kind of change, with the result that we have more to say about it. But there's a much more impor- tant reason, which i'm going to spend a little bit of time on right now. In the popular mind, historical linguistics4 is tied up with the notion of etymology, the study of the history of words. When people want to know ‘what is the history of the word glamour?’ or ‘Why doesn't the word prevent mean what it did 400 years ago?’, it's ultimately to the historical linguist that they go. And well they should. And it's understandable that ordinary people should be more concerned about words, and the history of words, than about such abstractions as phonemes or seg- ments; that's one of the reasons why i began this course by talking about morphology — about word structure — and only later talked about phonetics and phonology. Because ordinary human beings are much more aware of words than of anything else about language, at least in the abstract, when they think about the work of historical linguistics with regard to the comparison of different languages to find connections between them and the reconstruction of an- cient languages, they naturally think about this work in connection with lists of words: ‘Oh, they collect lots of words from different languages and see if the words that different languages use for the same thing are similar to each other.’ Consider the words for the concept ‘3’ from 25 European languages given in (1).5 I would venture that it would be virtually impossible for an intelligent human being to look at this list and not suspect that there's something very funny going on here, that these words must all be, in some sense, the same word, even though they come from so many differ- ent languages. And indeed such a suspicion would be very well founded. We know that all these words derive ultimately from one single word, whose form was very, very similar to that of the Rumanian word in the middle of the third line. Furthermore, if you look at the complete vocabularies of these two dozen or so European languages, you will find hundreds — even thousands — of similarities just like this. (1) Breton, Bulgarian, Croatian, Irish, Norwegian, Serbian, Welsh tri Czech tři, Russian tryi, Polish tši, Lithuanian tryis, Greek & Latvian tris, Spanish tres, Portuguese treš, Rumanian treI, Albanian, Danish, Italian, Swedish tre, Dutch dri, German drai, Icelandic θrir, English θri, French trwa But if you think that what historical linguists do is draw up long lists of words from different langua- ges and compare them, you're in danger of becoming horribly confused sooner or later. Because it's 4And remember that i said earlier that, in the popular mind, historical linguistics is linguistics. 5Note that in (1) i am presenting the words in a reasonable approximation of their pronunciations, not the way they are actually spelled in the standard orthographies of the languages in question. The German, English, and French words are, of course, customarily represented as ‘drei’, ‘three’, and ‘trois’ respectively, while the Russian word is customarily represented as ‘три’. 422 absurdly easy to come up with lists like this. If you take any two languages, you can find dozens — hundreds — possibly even thousands of words that mean the same thing, or approximately the same thing, and that are pronounced somewhat alike, even though there is no historical connection between the words, or between the languages they come from. Mark Rosenfelder, a historical linguist who has a knack for coming up with lists like this and shows them to his students and colleagues to de- monstrate how dangerous this game can be, has calculated that, on the average, it is quite possible to come up with over 200 matches between languages that are chosen totally at random and have no historical connection with each other that can be recognized by the scientific methods of historical linguistics. I'm going to give you a little taste — just a little taste — of how confusing this can be. Consider first the words in the first two columns in (2). Now we know that these languages are related to each other. But these pairs of words are not, in fact, related to each other, even though in each case they mean virtually the same thing and they are very similar in pronunciation. Pairs of words like these — in which we know the languages in question are related to each other, the two words sound alike and mean approximately the same thing, and yet the two words are not related — are called ‘false friends’; such pairs have indeed misled and deceived many a researcher. In both cases, i've included in the right-hand column the word from the language in the middle column that is actually related to the word in the left-hand column.6 (2) ‘false friend’ ‘true friend’ a. Greek theos, ‘god’ Latin deus, ‘god’ (possibly) Latin festus, ‘festive’ b. Latin dies, ‘day’ English day Tues- as in ‘Tuesday’ I can also show you the ‘matches’ or correspondences’ in Fig. 22.2 on the next page. These involve Chinese (Mandarin) and one or two other languages, in most cases either (or both) English or Quechua, a South American language native to Peru.