1. The comparative-historical method in linguistics.

The comparative-historical method in linguistics.

Linguists today hotly debate the issue of monogenesis vs. polygenesis. One scientific way to study the origin of language is to try to prove historical relationships between languages. To find language families, that is, groups of languages descended from a common ancestor, linguists compare languages to find systematic differences or similarities.

This method of analysing languages is known as the comparative method; linguists using it are referred to as comparative linguists. Some languages are obviously related to one another, as shown by the presence of systematic differences--like the regular sound correspondence between English [T] and German [d]. Many such correspondences show up between the vocabulary of French and Spanish, on one hand, and Hebrew and Arabic, on the other, as well as between such geographically disparate languages as Hawaiian, Maori and Malagasy.

When comparative linguists discover a group of historically related languages, they try to reconstruct the original form of the ancestor language of each family, which they call a proto language (give example of Indo-European mother and daughter languages). Obviously, there is no way to prove the results, and proto-language reconstruction is risky business intellectually.

Lumpers have have narrowed the number of proto-languages to about two dozen (see map): Indo-European, Uralic, Altaic, 4 families in Africa, a few in East Asia; perhaps only 3 in all of the Americas. Also, there are a few languages left over that seem not related to any others. They are called language isolates: Basque, Ket, Burushaski. These languages are probably remnants of larger families spoken in the distant past.

Splitters are far more cautious in drawing conclusions of genetic relationship. The map you received is one favored by the lumpers. If I had given you a world map devised by splitters, it would contain many times the number of basic groupings, and you would be very unhappy with me. For instance, instead of one family in Australia there would be at least five; and New Guinea would have over 70 families; and Amerindian is actually composed of a few dozen major groupings, each of which the splittes consider to be a separate family.

So the debate and the research goes on. Recently there have appeared linguists who might even be called "mega-lumpers", notably Stanford University's Joseph Greenberg. Greenberg and his colleagues are convinced they will eventually reconstruct the Mother Tongue of all languages, which they call proto-World.

2. Phonetic Law. Types of the sound changes.

In linguistics, regular changes that occur during the development of a language in its sound structure (compare the disappearance of the vowels 2 and b in Russian) or in the phonetic structure of words (compare the replacement of e by o in Russian; for example the present-day nes [nyos] “he carried” from the old nes [nyes]). Spontaneous and combinative changes are distinguished from each other; the former occur in all instances where a corresponding sound is encountered; for example, in Russian?? has been replaced in all positions by the vowel e. The second type of change occurs only in certain phonetic positions; thus, the replacement of e by o took place only in the stressed syllable, if a hard consonant followed the e (compare podenii, “daily,” with den’, “day”). With the development of phonology came historical, or diachronic, phonology, in which phonetic laws were examined in the aspect of the study of the phoneme.

Sound change includes any processes of language change that affect pronunciation (phonetic change) or sound system structures (phonological change). Sound changes can be environmentally conditioned, meaning that the change in question only occurs in a defined sound environment, whereas in other environments the same speech sound is not affected by the change. The term "sound change" refers to diachronic changes, or changes in a language's underlying sound system over time; "alternation", on the other hand, refers to surface changes that happen synchronically and do not change the language's underlying system (for example, the -s in the English plural can be pronounced differently depending on what sound it follows; this is a form of alternation, rather than sound change). However, since "sound change" can refer to the historical introduction of an alternation (such as post-vocalic /k/ in Tuscan, once [k], but now [h]), the label is inherently imprecise and often must be clarified as referring to phonetic change or restructuring.

Sound change is usually assumed to be regular, which means that it is expected to apply mechanically whenever its structural conditions are met, irrespective of any non-phonological factors (such as the meaning of the words affected). On the other hand, sound changes can sometimes be sporadic, affecting only one particular word or a few words, without any seeming regularity.

For regular sound changes, the term sound law is sometimes still used. This term was introduced by the Neogrammarian school in the 19th century and is commonly applied to some historically important sound changes, such as Grimm's law. While real-world sound changes often admit exceptions (for a variety of known reasons, and sometimes without one), the expectation of their regularity or "exceptionlessness" is of great heuristic value, since it allows historical linguists to define the notion of regular correspondence (see: comparative method).

Each sound change is limited in space and time. This means it functions within a specified area (within certain dialects) and during a specified period of time. For these reasons, some scholars avoid using the term "sound law" — reasoning that a law should not have spatial and temporal limitations — replacing the term with phonetic rule.

Sound change has no memory: Sound change does not discriminate between the sources of a sound. If a previous sound change causes X,Y > Y (features X and Y merge as Y), a new one cannot affect only an original X.

Sound change ignores grammar: A sound change can only have phonological constraints, like X > Z in unstressed syllables. The only exception to this is that a sound change may or may not recognise word boundaries, even when they are not indicated by prosodic clues.

Sound change is exceptionless: if a sound change can happen at a place, it will. It affects all sounds that meet the criteria for change.