Lecture Four

Reconstructing Meaning and Sound

Scope: In this lecture, we will examine the ways in which historical linguists classify languages, study their particular history, and trace relationships of sound and sense. Our focus is the IE languages, and we will look closely at one of the most important relationships of sound among them: Grimm’s Law. This set of relationships helps us understand the ways in which words from different, modern European languages are related. It also helps scholars reconstruct the older forms of those words and, in the process, recover something of the history, culture, and social life of the IE peoples. In this and the following lecture, we explore the world of the IE peoples as revealed through these techniques of reconstruction.

Objectives: Upon completion of this lecture, you should be able to:

1. Describe the ways in which the IE languages have been classified, and more generally, describe the ways in which languages in general are classified.

2. Characterize the major features of the IE languages.

3. Explain the major sound relationships (or sound laws), especially Grimm’s Law, in the IE languages and why they matter to the study of English.

Outline

I. What did scholars of IE learn, and how did they study the languages?

A. The surviving IE languages can be classified in two ways.

1. Genetic classification implies the growth or development from a “root stock” and the branching into language groups or families. Genetic classification looks for shared features of vocabulary, sound, and grammar that enable scholars to reconstruct earlier forms. This is a historical, or diachronic, system of classification.

2. Typological classification means comparing languages for larger systems of organization. For example, do the languages signal meaning in a sentence by means of inflectional endings (a so-called synthetic language), or do they signal meaning by word order patterns (an analytic language)? This is primarily a synchronic system of classification, in which what matters is not the historical descent but rather the present features of the languages. There is a wide variety of languages: agglutinizing, isolative, etc. ©1998 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 15

B. Broadly speaking, the surviving IE languages can be classified into two groups defined by geography: eastern and western branches. These are distinguished, for practical purposes, by representative words for “hundred.”

1. The western languages that descended from IE are so-called “centum” languages. Centum is the Latin word for 100, and all these languages have a word for that number closely related to centum (the Germanic languages have the word beginning with h-, which is a later sound change).

2. The eastern languages are so-called “satem” languages; satem is the old Persian word for 100.

C. There are other ways of linking the languages together, most of them very technical. But we can make some general claims about the IE language for our purposes here:

1. It was a highly inflected language. It had eight noun cases, each of which signaled the noun’s place in a sentence.

2. It had six tenses, each of which was signaled with special verb endings.

3. It had grammatical gender for the nouns.

4. It had a special system of distinguishing words by changing the root vowel in certain patterns.

5. This descends into the Germanic languages, and into English, in what we will see later as certain kinds of verbs: drink, drank, drunk; sing, sang, sung.

6. These are “strong” verbs that signal change in tense by a shift in the root vowel of the word. “Weak” verbs, on the other hand, take a suffix.

II. The Germanic Languages and the Origin of English. One branch of Indo-European is known as the Germanic languages. We will explore their features in a subsequent lecture. But for now, it is important to recognize that the sound changes and patterns of meaning (what we call semantic changes) across Indo-European languages matter most to us for the Germanic languages, from which English descends.

III. By comparing surviving words in the IE languages, we can go back to their originals. Certain relationships of sound and pronunciation have been discovered that enable us to say with assurance that words are related (or cognate) in different languages. A cognate is a word shared by different languages whose relationship can be explained by precise sound laws.

A. By reconstructing sound (phonetic reconstruction), scholars compare the sounds of surviving languages and use sound laws to recover an IE original. In the process, we can learn much about how certain surviving words are related. ©1998 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 16

B. Perhaps the most important tool for reconstruction is the set of sound relationships known as Grimm’s Law. Discovered by the Grimm brothers (who also gave us the fairy tales) in the early nineteenth century, it is a set of relationships for words in the Germanic languages and non-Germanic languages of IE.

English fish ~ Latin pisces

English tooth ~ Latin dentis

English hundred ~ Latin centum

These kinds of correspondences, and many others, illustrate that Germanic f-, th-, h- correspond to the non-Germanic initials p-, t-, k-. Tooth is important because it shows that non-Germanic d- corresponds to Germanic t-. Other examples from other languages generate the following set of correspondences:

Germanic Non-Germanic (and thus, posited original IE)

p ~ b

t ~ d

k ~ g

b ~ bh

d ~ dh

g ~ gh

f ~ p

th ~ t

h ~ k