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84-534: The concept is speculative and not amenable to analysis in historical linguistics . It presupposes a monogenetic origin of language , i.e. the derivation of all natural languages from a single origin, presumably at some time in the Middle Paleolithic period. As the predecessor of all extant languages spoken by modern humans ( Homo sapiens ), Proto-Human as hypothesised would not necessarily be ancestral to any hypothetical Neanderthal language . There

168-502: A Proto-World word for 'woman'. Cónyuge , for example, comes from the Latin root meaning 'to join', so its origin had nothing to do with the word 'woman'; chica is related to a Latin word meaning 'insignificant thing'; cana comes from the Latin word for 'white', and again shows a history unrelated to the word for 'woman'. Campbell asserts that these types of problems are endemic to the methods used by Ruhlen and others. Some linguists question

252-629: A common ancestor and synchronic variation . Dialectologists are concerned with grammatical features that correspond to regional areas. Thus, they are usually dealing with populations living in specific locales for generations without moving, but also with immigrant groups bringing their languages to new settlements. Immigrant groups often bring their linguistic practices to new settlements, leading to distinct linguistic varieties within those communities. Dialectologists analyze these immigrant dialects to understand how languages develop and diversify in response to migration and cultural interactions. Phonology

336-418: A construction-specific property rather than a language-specific property. Many languages show mixed accusative and ergative behaviour (for example: ergative morphology marking the verb arguments, on top of an accusative syntax). Other languages (called " active languages ") have two types of intransitive verbs—some of them ("active verbs") join the subject in the same case as the agent of a transitive verb, and

420-464: A discipline, unfortunately confusing and misleading to those who might look to linguistics for understanding in this area". Historical linguistics Historical linguistics , also known as diachronic linguistics , is the scientific study of how languages change over time. It seeks to understand the nature and causes of linguistic change and to trace the evolution of languages. Historical linguistics involves several key areas of study, including

504-401: A fox in-the woods seen"), Dutch ( Hans vermoedde dat Jan Marie zag leren zwemmen - *"Hans suspected that Jan Marie saw to learn to swim") and Welsh ( Mae 'r gwirio sillafu wedi'i gwblhau - *"Is the checking spelling after its to complete"). In this case, linguists base the typology on the non-analytic tenses (i.e. those sentences in which the verb is not split) or on the position of

588-415: A given time, usually the present, but a synchronic analysis of a historical language form is also possible. It may be distinguished from diachronic, which regards a phenomenon in terms of developments through time. Diachronic analysis is the main concern of historical linguistics. However, most other branches of linguistics are concerned with some form of synchronic analysis. The study of language change offers

672-413: A hybrid known as phono-semantic matching . In languages with a long and detailed history, etymology makes use of philology , the study of how words change from culture to culture over time. Etymologists also apply the methods of comparative linguistics to reconstruct information about languages that are too old for any direct information (such as writing) to be known. By analysis of related languages by

756-453: A language with cases , the classification depends on whether the subject (S) of an intransitive verb has the same case as the agent (A) or the patient (P) of a transitive verb. If a language has no cases, but the word order is AVP or PVA, then a classification may reflect whether the subject of an intransitive verb appears on the same side as the agent or the patient of the transitive verb. Bickel (2011) has argued that alignment should be seen as

840-406: A member of this set, while 51% of average languages (19-25) contain at least one member and 69% of large consonant inventories (greater than 25 consonants) contain a member of this set. It is then seen that complex consonants are in proportion to the size of the inventory. Vowels contain a more modest number of phonemes, with the average being 5–6, which 51% of the languages in the survey have. About

924-509: A selection of these forms: Based on these correspondences, Ruhlen lists these roots for the ancestor language: Selected items from Bengtson's and Ruhlen's (1994) list of 27 "global etymologies": There are competing theories about the basic word order of the hypothesized Proto-Human. These usually assume subject-initial ordering because it is the most common globally. Derek Bickerton proposes SVO (subject-verb-object) because this word order (like its mirror OVS ) helps differentiate between

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1008-411: A single dominant order. Though the reason of dominance is sometimes considered an unsolved or unsolvable typological problem, several explanations for the distribution pattern have been proposed. Evolutionary explanations include those by Thomas Givon (1979), who suggests that all languages stem from an SOV language but are evolving into different kinds; and by Derek Bickerton (1981), who argues that

1092-425: A single language family." Notable American advocates of linguistic monogenesis include Merritt Ruhlen , John Bengtson , and Harold Fleming . The first concrete attempt to estimate the date of the hypothetical ancestor language was that of Alfredo Trombetti , who concluded it was spoken between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, or close to the first emergence of Homo sapiens . It is uncertain or disputed whether

1176-631: A tool for linguistic reconstruction . Scholars were concerned chiefly with establishing language families and reconstructing unrecorded proto-languages , using the comparative method and internal reconstruction . The focus was initially on the well-known Indo-European languages , many of which had long written histories; scholars also studied the Uralic languages , another Eurasian language-family for which less early written material exists. Since then, there has been significant comparative linguistic work expanding outside of European languages as well, such as on

1260-476: A valuable insight into the state of linguistic representation, and because all synchronic forms are the result of historically evolving diachronic changes, the ability to explain linguistic constructions necessitates a focus on diachronic processes. Initially, all of modern linguistics was historical in orientation. Even the study of modern dialects involved looking at their origins. Ferdinand de Saussure 's distinction between synchronic and diachronic linguistics

1344-428: Is aspirated , but the p in spin is not. In English these two sounds are used in complementary distribution and are not used to differentiate words so they are considered allophones of the same phoneme . In some other languages like Thai and Quechua , the same difference of aspiration or non-aspiration differentiates words and so the two sounds, or phones , are considered to be distinct phonemes. In addition to

1428-430: Is onomatopoeia : for example, the suggested root for smell listed above, * čuna , may simply be a result of many languages employing an onomatopoeic word that sounds like sniffing, snuffling, or smelling. Another is the taboo quality of certain words. Lyle Campbell points out that many established proto-languages do not contain an equivalent word for * putV 'vulva' because of how often such taboo words are replaced in

1512-437: Is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages in order to establish their historical relatedness. Languages may be related by convergence through borrowing or by genetic descent, thus languages can change and are also able to cross-relate. Genetic relatedness implies a common origin among languages. Comparative linguists construct language families , reconstruct proto-languages , and analyze

1596-409: Is a chart showing the breakdown of voicing properties among languages in the aforementioned sample. Languages worldwide also vary in the number of sounds they use. These languages can go from very small phonemic inventories ( Rotokas with six consonants and five vowels) to very large inventories ( !Xóõ with 128 consonants and 28 vowels). An interesting phonological observation found with this data

1680-401: Is a sub-field of linguistics which studies the sound system of a specific language or set of languages. Whereas phonetics is about the physical production and perception of the sounds of speech, phonology describes the way sounds function within a given language or across languages. Phonology studies when sounds are or are not treated as distinct within a language. For example, the p in pin

1764-643: Is accounted for in the ‘Catalogue of the Languages of the Populations We Know’, 1800, by the Spanish Jesuit Lorenzo Hervás . Johann Christoph Adelung collected the first large language sample with the Lord's prayer in almost five hundred languages (posthumous 1817). More developed nineteenth-century comparative works include Franz Bopp 's 'Conjugation System' (1816) and Wilhelm von Humboldt 's ‘On

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1848-512: Is available, such as Uralic and Austronesian . Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect , the varieties of a language that are characteristic of particular groups, based primarily on geographic distribution and their associated features. This is in contrast to variations based on social factors, which are studied in sociolinguistics , or variations based on time, which are studied in historical linguistics. Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from

1932-430: Is by excluding the subject from consideration. It is a well-documented typological feature that languages with a dominant OV order (object before verb), Japanese for example, tend to have postpositions . In contrast, VO languages (verb before object) like English tend to have prepositions as their main adpositional type. Several OV/VO correlations have been uncovered. Several processing explanations were proposed in

2016-495: Is contrasted with genealogical linguistics on the grounds that typology groups languages or their grammatical features based on formal similarities rather than historic descendence. The issue of genealogical relation is however relevant to typology because modern data sets aim to be representative and unbiased. Samples are collected evenly from different language families , emphasizing the importance of lesser-known languages in gaining insight into human language. Speculations of

2100-425: Is defined by position within a sentence or presence of a preposition. For example, in some languages with bound case markings for nouns, such as Language X, varying degrees of freedom in constituent order are observed. These languages exhibit more flexible word orders, allowing for variations like Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) structure, as in 'The cat ate the mouse,' and Object-Subject-Verb (OSV) structure, as in 'The mouse

2184-532: Is fundamental to the present day organization of the discipline. Primacy is accorded to synchronic linguistics, and diachronic linguistics is defined as the study of successive synchronic stages. Saussure's clear demarcation, however, has had both defenders and critics. In practice, a purely-synchronic linguistics is not possible for any period before the invention of the gramophone , as written records always lag behind speech in reflecting linguistic developments. Written records are difficult to date accurately before

2268-441: Is linguistic change in progress. Synchronic and diachronic approaches can reach quite different conclusions. For example, a Germanic strong verb (e.g. English sing ↔ sang ↔ sung ) is irregular when it is viewed synchronically: the native speaker's brain processes them as learned forms, but the derived forms of regular verbs are processed quite differently, by the application of productive rules (for example, adding -ed to

2352-482: Is no generally accepted term for this concept. Most treatments of the subject do not include a name for the language under consideration (e.g. Bengtson and Ruhlen). The terms Proto-World and Proto-Human are in occasional use. Merritt Ruhlen used the term Proto-Sapiens . The first serious scientific attempt to establish the reality of monogenesis was that of Alfredo Trombetti , in his book L'unità d'origine del linguaggio , published in 1905. Trombetti estimated that

2436-425: Is seen in most languages or is probable in most languages. Universals, both absolute and statistical can be unrestricted, meaning that they apply to most or all languages without any additional conditions. Conversely, both absolute and statistical universals can be restricted or implicational, meaning that a characteristic will be true on the condition of something else (if Y characteristic is true, then X characteristic

2520-513: Is suggested more recently that the left-right orientation is limited to role-marking connectives ( adpositions and subordinators ), stemming directly from the semantic mapping of the sentence. Since the true correlation pairs in the above table either involve such a connective or, arguably, follow from the canonical order, orientation predicts them without making problematic claims. Another common classification distinguishes nominative–accusative alignment patterns and ergative–absolutive ones. In

2604-452: Is that the larger a consonant inventory a language has, the more likely it is to contain a sound from a defined set of complex consonants (clicks, glottalized consonants, doubly articulated labial-velar stops, lateral fricatives and affricates, uvular and pharyngeal consonants, and dental or alveolar non-sibilant fricatives). Of this list, only about 26% of languages in a survey of over 600 with small inventories (less than 19 consonants) contain

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2688-496: Is the study of patterns of word-formation within a language. It attempts to formulate rules that model the knowledge of speakers. In the context of historical linguistics, formal means of expression change over time. Words as units in the lexicon are the subject matter of lexicology . Along with clitics , words are generally accepted to be the smallest units of syntax ; however, it is clear in most languages that words may be related to one another by rules. These rules are understood by

2772-422: Is to describe and explain the structural diversity and the common properties of the world's languages. Its subdisciplines include, but are not limited to phonological typology, which deals with sound features; syntactic typology, which deals with word order and form; lexical typology, which deals with language vocabulary; and theoretical typology, which aims to explain the universal tendencies. Linguistic typology

2856-399: Is true). An example of an implicational hierarchy is that dual pronouns are only found in languages with plural pronouns while singular pronouns (or unspecified in terms of number) are found in all languages. The implicational hierarchy is thus singular < plural < dual (etc.). Qualitative typology develops cross-linguistically viable notions or types that provide a framework for

2940-697: The Austronesian languages and on various families of Native American languages , among many others. Comparative linguistics became only a part of a more broadly-conceived discipline of historical linguistics. For the Indo-European languages, comparative study is now a highly specialized field. Some scholars have undertaken studies attempting to establish super-families, linking, for example, Indo-European, Uralic, and other families into Nostratic . These attempts have not met with wide acceptance. The information necessary to establish relatedness becomes less available as

3024-400: The comparative method and the method of internal reconstruction . Less-standard techniques, such as mass lexical comparison , are used by some linguists to overcome the limitations of the comparative method, but most linguists regard them as unreliable. The findings of historical linguistics are often used as a basis for hypotheses about the groupings and movements of peoples, particularly in

3108-475: The comparative method , linguists can make inferences about their shared parent language and its vocabulary. In that way, word roots that can be traced all the way back to the origin of, for instance, the Indo-European language family have been found. Although originating in the philological tradition, much current etymological research is done in language families for which little or no early documentation

3192-475: The origin of language ) studies Lamarckian acquired characteristics of languages. This perspective explores how languages adapt and change over time in response to cultural, societal, and environmental factors. Language evolution within the framework of historical linguistics is akin to Lamarckism in the sense that linguistic traits acquired during an individual's lifetime can potentially influence subsequent generations of speakers. Historical linguists often use

3276-587: The out-of-Africa migrations of 50,000 to 70,000 years ago and that language might have been the essential cultural and cognitive innovation that facilitated human colonization of the globe. In Perreault and Mathew (2012), an estimate of the time of the first emergence of human language was based on phonemic diversity. This is based on the assumption that phonemic diversity evolves much more slowly than grammar or vocabulary, slowly increasing over time (but reduced among small founding populations). The largest phoneme inventories are found among African languages , while

3360-472: The "characteristics" of Proto-World is limited to linguistic typology , i.e. the identification of universal features shared by all human languages, such as grammar (in the sense of "fixed or preferred sequences of linguistic elements"), and recursion , but beyond this, nothing is known of it. Christopher Ehret has hypothesized that Proto-Human had a very complex consonant system, including clicks . A few linguists, such as Merritt Ruhlen , have suggested

3444-511: The 1961 conference on language universals at Dobbs Ferry . Speakers included Roman Jakobson , Charles F. Hockett , and Joseph Greenberg who proposed forty-five different types of linguistic universals based on his data sets from thirty languages. Greenberg's findings were mostly known from the nineteenth-century grammarians, but his systematic presentation of them would serve as a model for modern typology. Winfred P. Lehmann introduced Greenbergian typological theory to Indo-European studies in

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3528-573: The 1970s. During the twentieth century, typology based on missionary linguistics became centered around SIL International , which today hosts its catalogue of living languages, Ethnologue , as an online database. The Greenbergian or universalist approach is accounted for by the World Atlas of Language Structures , among others. Typology is also done within the frameworks of functional grammar including Functional Discourse Grammar , Role and Reference Grammar , and Systemic Functional Linguistics . During

3612-598: The 1980s and 1990s for the above correlations. They suggest that the brain finds it easier to parse syntactic patterns that are either right or left branching , but not mixed. The most widely held such explanation is John A. Hawkins ' parsing efficiency theory, which argues that language is a non-innate adaptation to innate cognitive mechanisms. Typological tendencies are considered as being based on language users' preference for grammars that are organized efficiently, and on their avoidance of word orderings that cause processing difficulty. Hawkins's processing theory predicts

3696-639: The Difference in Human Linguistic Structure and Its Influence on the Intellectual Development of Mankind’ (posthumous 1836). In 1818, August Wilhelm Schlegel made a classification of the world's languages into three types: (i) languages lacking grammatical structure, e.g. Chinese; (ii) agglutinative languages, e.g. Turkish; and (iii) inflectional languages, which can be synthetic like Latin and Ancient Greek, or analytic like French. This idea

3780-449: The English niece and knees . According to a worldwide sample of 637 languages, 62% have the voicing contrast in stops but only 35% have this in fricatives. In the vast majority of those cases, the absence of voicing contrast occurs because there is a lack of voiced fricatives and because all languages have some form of plosive (occlusive) , but there are languages with no fricatives. Below

3864-404: The ability to produce complex speech only developed some 50,000 years ago (with the appearance of modern humans or Cro-Magnon ). Johanna Nichols (1998) argued that vocal languages must have begun diversifying in our species at least 100,000 years ago. In 2011, an article in the journal Science proposed an African origin of modern human languages. It was suggested that human language predates

3948-544: The above table but also makes predictions for non-correlation pairs including the order of adjective, demonstrative and numeral in respect with the noun. This theory was based on corpus research and lacks support in psycholinguistic studies. Some languages exhibit regular "inefficient" patterning. These include the VO languages Chinese , with the adpositional phrase before the verb, and Finnish , which has postpositions. But there are few other profoundly exceptional languages. It

4032-486: The actual daily use of the language. The daily spoken language of Sophocles or Cicero might have exhibited a different or much more regular syntax than their written legacy indicates. The below table indicates the distribution of the dominant word order pattern of over 5,000 individual languages and 366 language families. SOV is the most common type in both although much more clearly in the data of language families including isolates . 'NODOM' represents languages without

4116-442: The application of mass comparison and internal reconstruction (cf. Babaev 2008). Several linguists have attempted to reconstruct the language, while many others reject this as fringe science . Ruhlen tentatively traces several words back to the ancestral language, based on the occurrence of similar sound-and-meaning forms in languages across the globe. Bengtson and Ruhlen identify 27 "global etymologies". The following table lists

4200-547: The auxiliary. German is thus SVO in main clauses and Welsh is VSO (and preposition phrases would go after the infinitive). Many typologists classify both German and Dutch as V2 languages, as the verb invariantly occurs as the second element of a full clause. Some languages allow varying degrees of freedom in their constituent order, posing a problem for their classification within the subject–verb–object schema. Languages with bound case markings for nouns, for example, tend to have more flexible word orders than languages where case

4284-484: The basic form of a verb as in walk → walked ). That is an insight of psycholinguistics , which is relevant also for language didactics , both of which are synchronic disciplines. However, a diachronic analysis shows that the strong verb is the remnant of a fully regular system of internal vowel changes, in this case the Indo-European ablaut ; historical linguistics seldom uses the category " irregular verb ". The principal tools of research in diachronic linguistics are

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4368-437: The basic order of subject , verb , and direct object in sentences: These labels usually appear abbreviated as "SVO" and so forth, and may be called "typologies" of the languages to which they apply. The most commonly attested word orders are SOV and SVO while the least common orders are those that are object initial with OVS being the least common with only four attested instances. In the 1980s, linguists began to question

4452-512: The cat ate.' To define a basic constituent order type in this case, one generally looks at frequency of different types in declarative affirmative main clauses in pragmatically neutral contexts, preferably with only old referents. Thus, for instance, Russian is widely considered an SVO language, as this is the most frequent constituent order under such conditions—all sorts of variations are possible, though, and occur in texts. In many inflected languages, such as Russian, Latin, and Greek, departures from

4536-569: The common ancestor of existing languages had been spoken between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago. Monogenesis was dismissed by many linguists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when the doctrine of the polygenesis of the human races and their languages was popularised. The best-known supporter of monogenesis in America in the mid-20th century was Morris Swadesh . He pioneered two important methods for investigating deep relationships between languages, lexicostatistics and glottochronology . In

4620-466: The default word-orders are permissible but usually imply a shift in focus, an emphasis on the final element, or some special context. In the poetry of these languages, the word order may also shift freely to meet metrical demands. Additionally, freedom of word order may vary within the same language—for example, formal, literary, or archaizing varieties may have different, stricter, or more lenient constituent-order structures than an informal spoken variety of

4704-503: The description and comparison of languages. The main subfields of linguistic typology include the empirical fields of syntactic, phonological and lexical typology. Additionally, theoretical typology aims to explain the empirical findings, especially statistical tendencies or implicational hierarchies. Syntactic typology studies a vast array of grammatical phenomena from the languages of the world. Two well-known issues include dominant order and left-right symmetry. One set of types reflects

4788-441: The development of the modern title page . Often, dating must rely on contextual historical evidence such as inscriptions, or modern technology, such as carbon dating , can be used to ascertain dates of varying accuracy. Also, the work of sociolinguists on linguistic variation has shown synchronic states are not uniform: the speech habits of older and younger speakers differ in ways that point to language change. Synchronic variation

4872-460: The earliest members of Homo sapiens had fully developed language. Some scholars link the emergence of language proper (out of a proto-linguistic stage that may have lasted considerably longer) to the development of behavioral modernity toward the end of the Middle Paleolithic or at the beginning of the Upper Paleolithic , roughly 50,000 years ago. Thus, in the opinion of Richard Klein ,

4956-563: The early years of the twenty-first century, however, the existence of linguistic universals became questioned by linguists proposing evolutionary typology. Quantitative typology deals with the distribution and co-occurrence of structural patterns in the languages of the world. Major types of non-chance distribution include: Linguistic universals are patterns that can be seen cross-linguistically. Universals can either be absolute, meaning that every documented language exhibits this characteristic, or statistical, meaning that this characteristic

5040-703: The existence of a (logical) general or universal grammar underlying all languages were published in the Middle Ages, especially by the Modistae school. At the time, Latin was the model language of linguistics, although transcribing Irish and Icelandic into the Latin alphabet was found problematic. The cross-linguistic dimension of linguistics was established in the Renaissance period. For example, Grammaticae quadrilinguis partitiones (1544) by Johannes Drosaeus compared French and

5124-409: The historical changes that have resulted in the documented languages' divergences. Etymology studies the history of words : when they entered a language, from what source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time. Words may enter a language in several ways, including being borrowed as loanwords from another language, being derived by combining pre-existing elements in the language, by

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5208-399: The history of speech communities, and study the origins and meanings of words ( etymology ). Modern historical linguistics dates to the late 18th century, having originally grown out of the earlier discipline of philology , the study of ancient texts and documents dating back to antiquity. Initially, historical linguistics served as the cornerstone of comparative linguistics , primarily as

5292-578: The lexicon, and notes that it "strains credibility to imagine" that a Proto-World form of such a word would survive in many languages. Using the criteria that Bengtson and Ruhlen employ to find cognates to their proposed roots, Campbell found seven possible matches to their root for woman * kuna in Spanish, including cónyuge 'wife, spouse', chica 'girl', and cana 'old (of a woman)' (adjective). He then goes on to show how what Bengtson and Ruhlen would identify as reflexes of * kuna cannot possibly be related to

5376-522: The minimal meaningful sounds (the phonemes), phonology studies how sounds alternate, such as the /p/ in English, and topics such as syllable structure, stress , accent , and intonation . Principles of phonology have also been applied to the analysis of sign languages , but the phonological units do not consist of sounds. The principles of phonological analysis can be applied independently of modality because they are designed to serve as general analytical tools, not language-specific ones. Morphology

5460-499: The original SOV to the modern SVO. Givón bases his theory on the empirical claim that word-order change mostly results in SVO and never in SOV. Exploring Givón's idea in their 2011 paper, Murray Gell-Mann and Merritt Ruhlen stated that shifts to SOV are also attested. However, when these are excluded, the data indeed supported Givón's claim. The authors justified the exclusion by pointing out that

5544-543: The original language was SVO, which supports simpler grammar employing word order instead of case markers to differentiate between clausal roles. Universalist explanations include a model by Russell Tomlin (1986) based on three functional principles: (i) animate before inanimate; (ii) theme before comment; and (iii) verb-object bonding. The three-way model roughly predicts the real hierarchy (see table above) assuming no statistical difference between SOV and SVO, and, also, no statistical difference between VOS and OVS. By contrast,

5628-463: The prehistoric period. In practice, however, it is often unclear how to integrate the linguistic evidence with the archaeological or genetic evidence. For example, there are numerous theories concerning the homeland and early movements of the Proto-Indo-Europeans , each with its own interpretation of the archaeological record. Comparative linguistics , originally comparative philology ,

5712-455: The processing efficiency theory of John A. Hawkins (1994) suggests that constituents are ordered from shortest to longest in VO languages, and from longest to shortest in OV languages, giving rise to the attested distribution. This approach relies on the notion that OV languages have heavy subjects, and VO languages have heavy objects, which is disputed. A second major way of syntactic categorization

5796-571: The reconstruction of ancestral languages, the classification of languages into families , ( comparative linguistics ) and the analysis of the cultural and social influences on language development. This field is grounded in the Uniformitarian Principle , which posits that the processes of language change observed today were also at work in the past, unless there is clear evidence to suggest otherwise. Historical linguists aim to describe and explain changes in individual languages, explore

5880-482: The relevance of geographical distribution of different values for various features of linguistic structure. They may have wanted to discover whether a particular grammatical structure found in one language is likewise found in another language in the same geographic location. Some languages split verbs into an auxiliary and an infinitive or participle and put the subject and/or object between them. For instance, German ( Ich habe einen Fuchs im Wald gesehen - *"I have

5964-487: The rest ("stative verbs") join the subject in the same case as the patient . Yet other languages behave ergatively only in some contexts (this " split ergativity " is often based on the grammatical person of the arguments or on the tense/aspect of the verb). For example, only some verbs in Georgian behave this way, and, as a rule, only while using the perfective (aorist). Linguistic typology also seeks to identify patterns in

6048-451: The same language. On the other hand, when there is no clear preference under the described conditions, the language is considered to have "flexible constituent order" (a type unto itself). An additional problem is that in languages without living speech communities, such as Latin , Ancient Greek , and Old Church Slavonic , linguists have only written evidence, perhaps written in a poetic, formalizing, or archaic style that mischaracterizes

6132-407: The second half of the 20th century, Joseph Greenberg produced a series of large-scale classifications of the world's languages. These were and are controversial but widely discussed. Although Greenberg did not produce an explicit argument for monogenesis, all of his classification work was geared toward this end. As he stated: "The ultimate goal is a comprehensive classification of what is very likely

6216-461: The shift to SOV is unexceptionally a matter of borrowing the order from a neighboring language. Moreover, they argued that, since many languages have already changed to SVO, a new trend towards VSO and VOS ordering has arisen. Harald Hammarström reanalysed the data. In contrast to such claims, he found that a shift to SOV is in every case the most common type, suggesting that there is, rather, an unchanged universal tendency towards SOV regardless of

6300-562: The smallest inventories are found in South America and Oceania, some of the last regions of the globe to be settled. The authors used data from the colonization of Southeast Asia to estimate the rate of increase in phonemic diversity. Applying this rate to African languages, Perreault and Mathew (2012) arrived at an estimated age of 150,000 to 350,000 years, compatible with the emergence and early dispersal of H. sapiens . The validity of this approach has been criticized as flawed. Speculation on

6384-739: The speaker, and reflect specific patterns in how word formation interacts with speech. In the context of historical linguistics, the means of expression change over time. Syntax is the study of the principles and rules for constructing sentences in natural languages . Syntax directly concerns the rules and principles that govern sentence structure in individual languages. Researchers attempt to describe languages in terms of these rules. Many historical linguistics attempt to compare changes in sentence between related languages, or find universal grammar rules that natural languages follow regardless of when and where they are spoken. In terms of evolutionary theory, historical linguistics (as opposed to research into

6468-485: The structure and distribution of sound systems among the world's languages. This is accomplished by surveying and analyzing the relative frequencies of different phonological properties. Exemplary relative frequencies are given below for certain speech sounds formed by obstructing airflow (obstruents) . These relative frequencies show that contrastive voicing commonly occurs with plosives , as in English neat and need , but occurs much more rarely among fricatives , such as

6552-419: The subject and object in the absence of evolved case markers by separating them with the verb. By contrast, Talmy Givón hypothesizes that Proto-Human had SOV (subject-object-verb), based on the observation that many old languages (e.g., Sanskrit and Latin ) had dominant SOV, but the proportion of SVO has increased over time. On such a basis, it is suggested that human languages are shifting globally from

6636-449: The terms conservative and innovative to describe the extent of change within a language variety relative to that of comparable varieties. Conservative languages change less over time when compared to innovative languages. Linguistic typology Linguistic typology (or language typology ) is a field of linguistics that studies and classifies languages according to their structural features to allow their comparison. Its aim

6720-582: The three ‘holy languages’, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. The approach was expanded by the Port-Royal Grammar (1660) of Antoine Arnauld and Claude Lancelot , who added Spanish, Italian, German and Arabic. Nicolas Beauzée 's 1767 book includes examples of English, Swedish, Lappish , Irish, Welsh , Basque , Quechua , and Chinese. The conquest and conversion of the world by Europeans gave rise to 'missionary linguistics' producing first-hand word lists and grammatical descriptions of exotic languages. Such work

6804-415: The time increases. The time-depth of linguistic methods is limited due to chance word resemblances and variations between language groups, but a limit of around 10,000 years is often assumed. Several methods are used to date proto-languages, but the process is generally difficult and its results are inherently approximate. In linguistics, a synchronic analysis is one that views linguistic phenomena only at

6888-459: The very possibility of tracing language elements so far back into the past. Campbell notes that given the time elapsed since the origin of human language, every word from that time would have been replaced or changed beyond recognition in all languages today. Campbell harshly criticizes efforts to reconstruct a Proto-Human language, saying: "the search for global etymologies is at best a hopeless waste of time, at worst an embarrassment to linguistics as

6972-401: The way that languages change and that the relative increase of SVO is a historical effect of European colonialism. Many linguists reject the methods used to determine these forms. Several areas of criticism are raised with the methods Ruhlen and Gell-Mann employed. The essential basis of these criticisms is that the words being compared do not show common ancestry; the reasons for this vary. One

7056-419: Was later developed by others including August Schleicher , Heymann Steinthal , Franz Misteli, Franz Nicolaus Finck , and Max Müller . The word 'typology' was proposed by Georg von der Gabelentz in his Sprachwissenschaft (1891). Louis Hjelmslev proposed typology as a large-scale empirical-analytical endeavour of comparing grammatical features to uncover the essence of language. Such a project began from

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