Hello and welcome to the fourth lesson in NativLang's introduction to
historical linguistics and language change. Last time around we looked at
some basic words in three Latinic or Romance languages and determined how
they were related to each other. We also filled out their family tree
back in time and saw that they had this relationship dependent on the existence
of some common ancestor that was an actual language spoken in the past.
We also determined that if we didn't have attested data for that language we'd have
to go back and reconstruct the language to know what it was like. In this lesson
we're going to do some of those basic reconstructions to determine the shape
of an ancestral language that isn't attested. In other words, we have no
written records of it. We're going to start with some fresh data from a few
new languages. These are all Polynesian languages. I'll start out by saying
they're all related to each other. We're not trying to determine here if they're
related but rather what is the common ancestral form that these cognates all
share. These cognates all come from some one word in the past. What was the shape
of that one word? So here are some words for numbers in these languages. As you
can see, the forms are all very close. It's easy to tell based on this data at
least that the languages are related. I've given you the IPA forms (the
International Phonetic Alphabet forms) of these words because we need to look at
sounds and sound change to determine how these words changed. If you're not
familiar with the IPA - even though the symbols used here are fairly basic - I
have a whole lesson on that. I'll put a link to it below. I also need to
introduce you to innovations and retentions. Innovations are changes to
ancestral forms that were introduced at some point in the past. They may occur in
one language or they may be shared by a group of more closely related languages.
Retentions are those forms - in this case the sounds - that go back to the common
ancestor. What we need to do is determine which of the sounds here are retentions
and which are innovations. Once we can do that, we can posit common forms that
must have occurred in the parent or the reconstructed language. One simple
innovation shows up pretty quickly as we look at this data. Notice that Hawaiian
always has this prefixed material, this /ʔe/, in front of every single number. This
shows up only in Hawaiian and not in any of the other languages. We have good
grounds for assuming that this is an innovation. We don't have hard proof here
but the common material to all of these numbers does not include that /ʔe/. So when
we're looking at the Hawaiian numbers, the common material is everything after
that /ʔe/. So let's compare individual sounds. Notice the phoneme /t/, the
voiceless dental plosive, that shows up in most languages, but also notice this
curiosity that some languages, instead of having the phoneme /t/, have this voiceless
velar stop instead of the voiceless dental stop. In this case there's almost
something like a democratic vote by the languages against the velar plosive (the
/k/ sound) being the original phoneme. We have a pretty good indication that /t/ was
an original phoneme, a retention, that changed to the innovation /k/ in a
specific language: in Hawaiian. So we choose /t/ as the ancestral inherited
retained phoneme in all of these languages that then change to a /k/ in
some instances. But it would be lazy of us to stop there. We should go and
confirm against further data. What we'd find is that this is indeed the case:
where there's a /k/ in Hawaiian other cognates in other languages have a /t/,
and vice versa, where there's a /t/ in the other languages there's a /k/ in Hawaiian.
So this seems to be confirmed across the board. We can posit some /t/ in the
ancestral language. What's more, we're not surprised to find that the number seven
has a form with /t/ and not with a /k/ in that ancestral language. So our
reconstruction of that root pretty straightforward. The question
becomes a bit more complicated when we look at /l/s and /r/s. Take a look at the
word for the number two and for the number three and the number eight in the
Polynesian languages that we have here. Should the reconstructions of these
languages have an /l/ or an /r/? One thing to notice here is that languages that have
an /l/ seem to always have an /l/ and languages that have an /r/ seem to always
have an /r/. And there's a good distribution here, so which one should we
choose? As I mentioned, this isn't so straightforward.
What we'll need to do is to extend our comparison to other languages. These
languages aren't as closely related. They'll give us some comparative
evidence for the distribution of /l/s and /r/s throughout the whole family.
You can see in these languages that /l/ and /r/ are distinct phonemes. In other words,
/l/ doesn't always show up when /r/ does. What's even more important is that these
languages are consistent in their distribution of /l/ and /r/, so it's reasonable
to suppose that this distinction was also made in the common ancestor
language that's the parent of the Polynesian languages w'ere evaluating.
Based on this evidence, we'll reconstruct the numbers two and three this way. We can
then conclude that some of the daughter languages changed all instances of /l/s
and /r/s to /r/ and other daughter languages changed all instances of /l/s
and /r/s to /l/.
When it comes to sound change, there's a lot going on. There are
reasons for seeing typological characteristics, in other words, these
types of sound changes tend to happen; these other ones don't or are less
common. So we have grounds for saying that the change from the phoneme /f/ to
the phoneme /h/ is a common and expected one, but we wouldn't expect /h/ to turn
into /f/. And the same goes for /v/ and /w/. We commonly expect /w/ to turn into a
/v/-like sound. On top of that, there are regular types of sound changes that
happen in languages, and these are especially important for
understanding language change. If you'd like to take a look at those types of
regular sound changes like assimilation, which I believe I've mentioned before in
a previous lesson, to get a more in-depth understanding of assimilation,
dissimilation, things like metathesis compensatory lengthening and so on, I put
together a brief page with definitions and examples. I'll leave you the URL for
that page as well. I really hope this lesson's been helpful for you. I know it's
a brief introduction, but take a look at the site. You'll get more information
there and a couple of exercises as well. Thanks for learning with me.
(NOTE: page since removed. See NativLang playlist "Sound change".)