University of Oum El Bouaghi
Department of English Teacher: H. MAAMOURI
2nd Year All groups Linguistics
Historical Linguistics: The 19th Century Linguistics
Before 19th century, language was of interest of the philosophers as Plato and Aristotle.
Plato, for example, was the first person who distinguished between noun and verbs.
• In 1786 Sir William Jones points out that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Celtic and Germanic all
had structural similarities. These languages must spring from one source. ʹ This discovery
could considered as the birthdate of linguistics.
• There started comparative Grammar. Linguists started to compare various members of the
Indo-European Language Family. They started to relate languages according to their
origin and drew trees and diagrams for them.
• In the 19th century the linguists were busy with reconstructing Proto-Indo European and
making hypotheses about the way it split into modern languages.
Historical linguistics is also termed diachronic linguistics, it is the study of language change
over time. Principal concerns of historical linguistics include :
1. To describe and account for observed changes in particular languages.
[Link] reconstruct the pre-history of languages and to determine their relatedness, grouping
them into language families (comaparative linguistics/ philology).
[Link] develop general theories about how and why language changes.
[Link] describe the history of speech communities.
[Link] study the history of words, i.e. etymology.
Development of the comparative method
It is generally agreed that the most outstanding achievement of linguistic scholarship in the
19th century was the development of the comparative method, which comprised a set of
principles whereby languages could be systematically compared with respect to their sound
systems, grammatical structure, and vocabulary and shown to be “genealogically” related. As
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French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, and the other Romance languages had
evolved from Latin, so Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit as well as the Celtic, Germanic, and Slavic
languages and many other languages of Europe and Asia had evolved from some
earlier language, to which the name Indo-European or Proto-Indo-European is now
customarily applied. That all the Romance languages were descended from Latin and
thus constituted one “family” had been known for centuries; but the existence of the Indo-
European family of languages and the nature of their genealogical relationship was first
demonstrated by the 19th-century comparative philologists. (The term philology in
this context is not restricted to the study of literary languages.)
The main impetus for the development of comparative philology came toward the end of the
18th century, when it was discovered that Sanskrit bore a number of striking resemblances to
Greek and Latin. An English orientalist, Sir William Jones, though he was not the first to
observe these resemblances, is generally given the credit for bringing them to the attention of
the scholarly world and putting forward the hypothesis, in 1786, that all three languages must
have “sprung from some common source, which perhaps no longer exists.” By this time, a
number of texts and glossaries of the older Germanic languages (Gothic, Old High German,
and Old Norse) had been published, and Jones realized that Germanic as well as Old Persian
and perhaps Celtic had evolved from the same “common source.” The next important step
came in 1822, when the German scholar Jacob Grimm, following the Danish linguist Rasmus
Rask (whose work, being written in Danish, was less accessible to most European scholars),
pointed out in the second edition of his comparative grammar of Germanic that there were a
number of systematic correspondences between the sounds of Germanic and the sounds of
Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit in related words. Grimm noted, for example, that where Gothic
(the oldest surviving Germanic language) had an f, Latin, Greek, and Sanskrit frequently had
a p (e.g., Gothic fotus, Latin pedis, Greek podós, Sanskrit padás, all meaning “foot”); when
Gothic had a p, the non-Germanic languages had a b; when Gothic had a b, the non-Germanic
languages had what Grimm called an “aspirate” (Latin f, Greek ph, Sanskrit bh). In order to
account for these correspondences he postulated a cyclical “soundshift” (Lautverschiebung) in
the prehistory of Germanic, in which the original “aspirates” became voiced unaspirated stops
(bh became b, etc.), the original voiced unaspirated stops became voiceless (b became p, etc.),
and the original voiceless (unaspirated) stops became “aspirates” (p became f). Grimm’s term,
“aspirate,” it will be noted, covered such phonetically distinct categories as aspirated stops
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(bh, ph), produced with an accompanying audible puff of breath, and fricatives (f ), produced
with audible friction as a result of incomplete closure in the vocal tract.
In the work of the next 50 years the idea of sound change was made more precise, and, in
the 1870s, a group of scholars known collectively as the Junggrammatiker (“young
grammarians,” or Neogrammarians) put forward the thesis that all changes in the sound
system of a language as it developed through time were subject to the operation of regular
sound laws. Though the thesis that sound laws were absolutely regular in their operation
(unless they were inhibited in particular instances by the influence of analogy) was at first
regarded as most controversial, by the end of the 19th century it was quite generally accepted
and had become the cornerstone of the comparative method. Using the principle of regular
sound change, scholars were able to reconstruct “ancestral” common forms from which the
later forms found in particular languages could be derived. By convention, such reconstructed
forms are marked in the literature with an asterisk. Thus, from the reconstructed Proto-Indo-
European word for “ten,” *dekm, it was possible to derive Sanskrit daśa, Greek déka,
Latin decem, and Gothic taihun by postulating a number of different sound laws that operated
independently in the different branches of the Indo-European family.
