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CHAPTER 11

Language: The Syllables of Time

All living languages change in time. The branch of linguistics that deals with how languages change, what kinds of changes occur and why they occurred is called historical and comparative linguistics. It is historical because it deals with the history of particular languages; it is comparative because it deals with relations among languages. The Regularity of Sound Change The [ai] [a:] correspondence of these two dialects is an example of a regular sound

correspondence.

The Sound Correspondences The regular sound correspondences we observe between older and modern forms of a language are the result of phonological changes that affect certain sounds, or classes of sounds, rather than individual words. Centuries ago, English underwent a phonological change called a sound shift in which [u:] became [au]. Ancestral Protolanguages There is nothing degenerate about regional pronunciations. They are the result of natural sound changes that occur wherever human language is spoken. In a sense, the Romance languages are the offspring of Latin, their metaphorical parent. Because of their common ancestry, the Romance languages are genetically related. Early forms of English and German, too, were once dialects of a common ancestor called Proto Germanic. A protolanguage is the ancestral language from which related languages have developed. Both Latin and Proto Germanic were descendants of an older language called Indo European or

Proto Indo European.


The Great Vowel Shift

Between 1400 and 1600 a major change took plane in English that resulted in new phonemic representations of words and morphemes. This phonological restructuring is known as the Great Vowel Shift. Before the Great Vowel Shift, the vowels in each pair were pronounced the same. Then the vowels on the second word of each pair were shortened by the Early Middle English Vowel Shortening rule.

Morphological Change Extensive changes in morphology have occurred in the history of the Indo- European Languages. Latin had case endings, suffixes on the noun based on it thematic role or its grammatical relationship to the verb. Words from Names

Eponyms are words that are coined from proper names and are another of the many creative
ways that the vocabulary of a language expands.

Blends are similar to compounds in that they are produced by combining two words, but parts of
the words that are combined are deleted. Smog, from smoke + fog

Reduced Words

Speakers tend to abbreviate words in various ways to shorten the messages they convey.

Clipping is the abbreviation of longer words into shorter ones, such as fax for facsimile. Acronyms are words derived from the initials of several words. Alphabetic Abbreviations are acronyms produced by sounding out each letter especially when
the string of letters is not easily pronounced as a word. Borrowing words from other languages is an important source of new words, which are called loan words. The lexicons of most languages can be divided into native words and loan words. A native words is one whose history or etymology can be traced back to the earliest known stages of the language. Loss of Words Languages can also lose words, although the departure of an old word is never as striking as the arrival of a new one.

Broadening is when the meaning of the word becomes broader, it means everything is used to
mean and more.

Cognates are words in related languages that developed from the same ancestral root.

The Neogrammarians viewed linguistics as a natural science and therefore believed that laws of sound change were unexceptionable natural laws. Extinct and Endangered Languages (Da-eun, this is your report with Sarah so I did not include it anymore. I suppose you have a copy of this)

Analogic Change is a generalization of rules that reduces the number of exceptional or


irregular morphemes.

CHAPTER 12 WRITING: Pictograms and Ideograms

The ABCs of Language

The roots of writing were the early drawings made by ancient humans. Cave art, called petroglyphs, such as those found in the Altamira cave in Northern Spain., created by humans living more than 20,000 years ago, can be read today.

Pictograms are picture writings. A picture of the sun could represent warmth, heat, light,
daytime and so on. Pictograms began to represent ideas rather than objects. Such generalized pictograms are called ideograms (idea pictures or idea writing). They began to produce the symbols of their written language by using a wedge-shaped stylus that was pressed into soft clay tablets. The tablets hardened in the dessert sun to produce permanent records that were far hardier than modern paper or electronic documents. This form of writing is called cuneiform literally, wedge-shaped.

Logographic also called word writing. The cuneiform script came to represent words fo the

language. Such system is called the logographic. Logograms the symbols of a word writing system, are ideograms that represent in addition to the concept, the word or morpheme in the language for that concept.

Syllabic Writing System is an evolution of the cuneiform. In this system, each syllable in the
language is represented by its own symbol, and words are written syllable by syllable.

Emoticons are strings of text characters that, when viewed sideways, form a face expressing a
particular emotions.

The Rebus Principle When a graphic sign no longer has a visual relationship to the word it represents, it becomes a phonographic symbol, standing for the sound that represent the word. A single sign can be used to represent all words with the same sounds the homophones of the language.

Alphabetic Writing is a system in which both consonants and vowels are symbolized. Word Writing or logographic writing system, a written character represents both the meaning
and the pronunciation of each word or morpheme.

Syllabic Writing is more efficient than word writing systems, and they are certainly less taxing
on the memory. To write these syllables, the Japanese have two syllabaries, each containing 46 characters called kana. The entire Japanese language can be written using kana. Katakana is used for loan words and for special effects similar to italics in European writing. Hiragana is used for native words. Kanji are borrowed Chinese characters.

Hangul is the Korean Alphabet, which have seventeen consonants and eleven vowels. Digraphs are languages that used two letters together to represent a single sound.

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