principles of historical linguistics

1. General remarks

Historical linguistics (HL) is a branch of linguistics which focuses its attention on language change. The starting point of HL is that languages change contantly! Languages undergo changes in all aspects – phonetic, morphological, lexical, syntactic, etc.

Historical linguistics was considered to be one of the most important branches of linguistics from the XIX – to the beginning of the XX centuries. Nowadays the interest to HL is not decreasing as far as all other aspects of language study only benefit from a better understanding of its historical processes.

Historical linguistics is divided into several sub-branches and has a number of close disciplines:

Historical phonology, its task consisting in reconstruction of all structural elements of the sound system of a language.

Historical lexicology, which deals with historical change of words in the course of language development.

Etymology, which is the study of the history of words (when they entered a language, what was their source, and how their form and meaning have changed over time).

Historical morphology, which studies the changes in morphological structure and types of languages in the ourse of language development.

Historical syntax, which analyzes the changes in syntactic structures over time using text conropa in diachronic perspective.

Typology, studying the typology of Common Germanic, the birth of new morphological categories and changes in the type reference of languages.

Historical pragmatics, which studies textual organization, specific discourse types in a diachronic perspective.

Historical dialectology studies dialectal boundaries of the Germanic and other peoples in correspondence with the geographical areas they inhabited.

There are some other branches of linguistics contributing to the study. Such diversity proves that it is impossible to study language change from a single theoretical perspective.

There were several stages in the development of historical linguistics. Having started in the XIX century, it was marked by the predominance of different aspects studied at a time, the most important being the comparative linguistics, neogrammarian movement, etc.

1.2. Comparative method and “genetic” hypothesis

The rise of comparative historical linguistics in the first half of the XIX^th century was prepared by the philological activity of William Jones (1746-1794). Being an educated person who knew a lot of languages (nearly 28) and acquired knowledge of the written records in Sanskrit, the ancient Indic language, he managed to pronounce a revolutionary statement in linguistics, which could be compared to the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo in scientific astronomy, and to Darwin's integrated explanation of organic change. It was the statement about the common source of some languages. Having studied Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Persian and some other languages, he drew a conclusion that they originated from the same parent language which might no longer exist. W. Jones noticed that Sanskrit bore genetic resemblance with such languages as Latin and Greek. He claimed that Gothic, Celtic and Old Persian originated from the same source, too. This hypothesis about the genetic relationship between the languages was called “genetic hypothesis”.

A full-scale comparison of the Indo-European family of languages began after W. Jones, in the first decades of the XIXth century by Friedrich Schlegel (1772 - 1829), who arouse the interest to comparative grammar and attempted to use typology in support of the genealogical classification. He suggested that close relationship of Sanskrit, Latin, Greek, Germanic and Persian languages is based on the similarity of their innermost structure and grammar, which pointed to their common descent.

His brother, August Wilhelm von Schlegel (1767-1845), also concerned himself with the typological classification of language. He divided languages into three types: 1) isolating (those without inflectional morphology and with word order assuming grammatical significance, like Chinese); 2) agglutinating (those which use affixes, like Turkish); 3) inflecting (those which present accidence, like Sanskrit).

Among the followers of the ideas of comparative linguistics was Franz Bopp (1791-1867), who invented the term Indo-European. For his pioneering analysis of the grammatical forms in Indo-European languages Bopp got fame as the founder of comparative philology. Among his works are detailed investigations on comparative grammar of Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Persian, Germanic, Lithuanian, Gothic, and Slavic languages.

Two other scholars, who continued the study, are brothers Grimm - Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) and Wilhelm Grimm (1786-1859). Jacob Grimm was the author of “A grammar of German”, which was considered the foundation of Germanic philology. His grammar is the first description of a whole group of dialects, beginning with the earliest attested forms. The second edition of this book contains the formulation of Grimm's Law. Grimm's sound law was supported by Rasmus Rask (1787-1832). He made profound assumptions on language relatedness: 1) grammatical agreement is a far more certain indication of original unity than vocabulary. According to Rask, the language with the most ingenious grammar is the nearest to the parent-language; 2) languages belong to the same class of languages if they have their core vocabulary in common, etc. In other words, he applied systemic approach to confirming the relatedness of languages.

The language typology of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) is also of concern for historical research. He distinguished morphological types and claimed that inflecting languages are higher developed in comparison with the agglutinating ones, whereas agglutinating ones are more progressive than isolating ones. W. von Humboldt considered Sanskrit to be the optimal language-type because of its developed inflectional forms. Thus, he connected morphological type of a language with the stage of its developments which was estimated from the point of view of progress or decay.

So, the comparativists of the first half of the XIXth century turned their attention to the genetic relationships of living languages with their hypothetical ancestor languages. They developed the theory of family of languages stating the relatedness of languages on the basis of grammatical similarity (see below: family tree model, great migrations, etc.).