Theme 3. Analysis of Development of Languages

 

In the 19^th century, following up on Jones’s discovery, language scholars began to develop the study of comparative grammar.

1. Scholars, particularly in Germany, began to propose lines of descent among different languages, introducing the metaphor of “the language tree” (one proto-language splitting into various daughter languages, some of those then splitting again into further languages). The authorship of the theory of “the language tree” belongs to A. Schleicher, due to whom all languages originate from one proto-language, forming a language type (tree) divided into language families (branches).

The theory was strongly criticized by F.Shmidt refuting its main theses about a common proto-language and chance of its reconstruction as integrity. Due to him, relation of languages is based upon their geographical closeness, thus every language is a transitional link from one to another neighbouring language. The theory got the name “The Theory of Waves”. Shmidt’s scientific views got application in studies of Indo-European dialects by means of the Linguistic Geography Method.

2. The comparative method got developed out of many attempts to reconstruct the proto-language which Jones had hypothesized about, known as Proto-Indo-European. The first attempt to analyze the relationships between the Indo-European languages was made by the German linguist Franz Bopp in 1816. Professor of Oriental literature and general philology at the University of Berlin (1821–67), Bopp published a Sanskrit grammar (1827) and a Sanskrit and Latin glossary (1830). He sought to trace the common origin of Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin, and German, a task never before attempted. The task which Bopp endeavoured to carry out in his Comparative Grammar was threefold - to give a description of the original grammatical structure of the languages as deduced from their intercomparison, to trace their phonetic laws, and to investigate the origin of their grammatical forms.

3. In 1818, the Danish philologist Rasmus Rask developed the principle of regular sound changes to explain his observations of similarities between individual words in the Germanic languages and their cognates in Greek and Latin. Rask was the first to indicate that the Celtic languages, which include Breton, Welsh, and Irish, belong to the Indo-European family and also stated that Basque and Finno-Ugric do not. He established the relationship of Old Norse to Gothic and of Lithuanian to Slavic, Greek, and Latin.

It was another German, Jacob Grimm - better known for his Fairy Tales - who formulated the law of consonants correspondence in older Indo-European, and Low Saxon and High German languages. The main merit of Grimm was that he ascertained the so called sound law (later – Grimm’s law) stating an internal connection between acts of general shift in languages development (voiced → voiceless→fricatives→ voiced and so on (by circle):

bh ratar (Sanskrit) > b roþar (Gothic) - fricatives→ voiced

d auhtar (Gothic) > T ochter (German) – voiced → voiceless

p iper (Lat) > Pf effer (German) – voiceless→fricatives

4. Both Rask and Grimm were unable to explain apparent exceptions to the sound laws that they had discovered. It was in 1875 that a Danish scholar, Karl Vernerz:\wikiKarl_Verner, made a methodological breakthrough when he formulated the sound law which now bears his name, and which was the first sound law to use comparative evidence to show that a phonological change in one phoneme could depend on other factors within the same word, such as the neighbouring phonemes and the position of the accent: in other words, the modern concept of conditioning environments.

 

SELF-ASSESSMENT TEST

Module 1

 

1. How many people speak English as a first language:

a) 350 mln; b) 500 mln; c) 35 mln; d) 153 mln.

 

2. The subject matter of the History of the English Language covers

a) the English language in its interrelation with culture;

b) contacts of English with other related and unrelated languages;

c) the history of phonetic structure and spelling of the English language;

d) material culture of historically ancient and modern peoples;

e) the changing historical conditions of English speaking communities;

f) peculiarities of spreading of peoples throughout the world in the past and nowadays for determining ethnic borders;

g) language as a systematically composed body of words that exhibit regularity of structure and arrangement into sentences;

h) cultural and routine peculiarities of peoples of the world;

i) the evolution of the grammatical system of the English Language;

j) the growth of the vocabulary of the English Language.

3. The Comparative Historic Method aims at

a) establishing the differences and similarities of development of different countries with the same language;

b) comparing the way the cognate languages have been developing;

c) reconstructing earlier forms of a language or languages by comparing surviving forms in recorded languages

4. Who was the first to have noticed some similarity of Latin, Greek, English and Sanskrit and stated the hypothesis about a common language ancestor for them?

a) Rasmus Rask;

b) Franz Bopp;

c) William Jones;

d) Jacob Grimm.

5. The peoples speaking Proto-Indo-European are supposed to live

a) in southern Russia from some time after 5000 BC;

b) in northern part of modern Germany in 5 BC;

c) on the territory of the Scandinavian peninsular in 1000 BC.

 

6. The peoples speaking Proto-Indo-European are supposed to be called

a) the Slovaks;

b) the Kurgans;

c) the Anglo-Saxons.

7. Match the names of the scientists with the achievements associated with them:

a) A. Schleicher 1) the principle of regular sound changes between individual words in the Germanic languages and their cognates in Greek and Latin

b) F.Shmidt2) an internal connection between acts of general shift in the languages development (voiced→voiceless→fricatives→ voiced…)

c) Franz Bopp3) existence of a so called proto-language

4) the modern concept of conditioning environments

 

d) Rasmus Rask 5) “the family tree”

6) established the relationship of Old Norse to Gothic and of Lithuanian to Slavic, Greek, and Latin.

e) Jacob Grimm 7) the law of consonants correspondence in older Indo-European

8) “The theory of Waves”

f) Karl Verner 9) first to have given a description

of the original grammatical

structure of the Indo-European languages and to have investigated the origin of their grammatical forms

g) William Jones 10) analysis of the relationships

between the Indo-European languages z:\wikiIndo-European_languages

 

 

 

MODULE 2

Germanic languages

Objectives:

1) to know the place of the Germanic languages among the world languages

2) to develop understanding of spreading of the Germanic languages

3) to know the main common features of the Germanic languages