I

Historical linguistics
And
language changes
studies

search paper in linguistics

: prepared by
Mohiee Ad’den Alja’biriee
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Although it is clear that Ferdinand de Saussure ( father of

modern linguistics ) gave more interesting for study language
in its currently forms, and he confirmed on a synchronic study
of language, but its really important to know that the study of
language in time (diachronic studies) and observing its
changes from time to time, take its great roles in the serious
studies of the language performation and its own technical
.ways to convey meaning
In twentieth century, when Saussure tried to distance
between synchronic and diachronic studies of languages, this
branch of traditional studies of language take its new
characters and called by different name as historical
linguistics . which refers to study of language change and of
. its consequences
Historical linguistics was the first branch of linguistics to
be placed on a firm scholarly footing. It is traditional to date
the founding of the discipline to 1786, when the British
amateur linguist Sir William Jones famously pointed out the
clear common ancestry of Greek, Latin and Sanskrit, and
hence of the existence of the vast Indo-European family of
languages, all of which descend from a single common
.ancestor
Historical linguistics was vigorously developed throughout
the nineteenth century, chiefly by linguists who were German
or trained in Germany. Most of the attention was on
comparative linguistics: the business of deciding which
languages shared a common ancestry and hence which
language families existed, of performing reconstruction to
work out the properties of unrecorded ancestral languages
(protolanguages), and of identifying the various changes
which had led each ancestral language to break up into its
(several divergent daughters. ( 77-78 KEY CONCEPTS
In the last quarter of nineteenth century , a group of
scholars named the (Young Grammarians ) claimed that
language change is regular ,( linguistics – jean Aitchison
p.28 ). they decided that they had enough evidence to declare
that sound change was invariably regular—that is, that a given
sound in a given context in a given language always changed
in the same way, without exception. This Neogrammarian
 III

hypothesis became the orthodoxy in the field for the next

. (hundred years, and it proved very fruitful.( 77-78 KEY CONCEPTS
Neogrammarians saw in sound change the application of
laws of a mechanical nature opposed by the psychological
process of the speakers towards regularization of forms
resulting in analogically irregular sound changes.(THE LINGUISTICS
ENCYCLOPEDIA,.223 )
In the twentieth century, and especially in recent years,
there has been an explosion of interest in all aspects of
language change. In particular, linguists have been searching
eagerly for principles governing language change: what
makes some changes more likely than others? It has proved
possible to study changes which are in progress in
contemporary languages, including English, and such studies
have turned up a number of startling phenomena, many of
which are clearly incompatible with the Neogrammarian
hypothesis. A key point has been the discovery of the crucial
link between variation and change. Historical linguistics has
once again become one of the liveliest areas in all of
. (linguistics.( 77-78 KEY CONCEPTS
From a practical point of view, historical linguists map the
world’s languages, determine their relationships, and with the
use of written documentation, fit extinct languages of the past
into the jigsaw puzzle of the world’s complex pattern of
linguistic distribution.
From a theoretical perspective, the practitioner may be
interested in the nature of linguistic change itself; that is, how
and why languages change, and the underlying forces and
processes which shape, mould and direct modifications. Of
paramount concern is the notion of language universals, which
shed light on the linguistic behavior of the species. Such
universals may reflect tendencies in language to change
towards preferable types of sound patterns, syllabic structures
and even syntactic arrangements. Such universals may relate
to physiological and cognitive parameters inherent in the
organism in a form of marked and unmarked features of
language. The historian must also identify the various
influences that disrupt these tendencies with varying degrees
of intensity related to the degree and nature of external
contacts and internal conflicts.
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Perhaps the greatest achievement of the forces at work in

evolutionary biology has been the development of natural
human language, and historical linguistic studies are important
for our understanding of this complex behavior. Only through
such studies can we account for many of the social and
cultural aspects of language and certain innate linguistic
propensities of human kind. In its structural, social and
biological complexity, and its relationships to other forms of
communication, human language can only be fully understood
when we know how it responds to internal and external stimuli.
(THE LINGUISTICS ENCYCLOPEDIA p. 228 ) .
In our Arabian history of language studies , we can find
such important theories about the change of straight meaning
of one word to another one . these changes maybe happened
because of the differences in periods of time or because of
strong influences of the changes in thoughts and ideologies as
the great effects of Islam .
From the beginning, Arab and Islamic scientists, whose
studied Arabic language, tried to distinction between two
dimensions in their studies: the first one was treated with
grammar, named as ( annaho ‫ ) النحو‬, which is including and
discussing all grammatical, declension and inflection
problems. And the other one named as (al'lug'a ‫ ) اللغة‬which
deal with the words and derivational problems .
The second dimension of Arabic studies in language can
be a counterpart to the historical linguistics for its' interesting
and dealing with interstructure changes of the words, and for
its' seeking for the bases and roots of every word in order to
uncover its' technical performing to convey a meaning .
Because of local characters of Arabian studies and its'
limitation in Arabic only , they are still in their places and they
do not developed to became more expanded or to moved to
another levels . From other hand , the European and English
studies, in special way, succeeded in a spreading out to cover
large fields of knowledge .
Language changes :
According linguistics point of view the describing of
languages as alive or not alive mean alive languages are
having real ability to change .
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" One of the fundamental facts about living languages is

that they are always changing. New words, new
pronunciations, new grammatical forms and structures, and
new meanings for existing words are always coming into
existence, while older ones are always dropping out of use. It
is absolutely impossible for a living language to avoid
changing " .( KEY CONCEPTS P. 99 )
The change maybe happened in sounds , meanings,
grammatical structure or other elements , and these changes
come from different factors, under different conditions , they
come for instance from : mishearing , misunderstanding ,
misrecollection, imperfection of speech organs, indolence, the
tendency towards analogy, the desire to be distinct, the need
for expressing new ideas, and influences from foreign
languages.
" The motivations for change are many and various, and
only some of them are reasonably well understood. New
objects, new concepts, new activities all require new names;
at the same time, old objects and activities may cease to exist,
and their names may die with them. Certain linguistic forms
may acquire social prestige and spread to the speech of those
who formerly did not use them. The physiological
characteristics of the mouth may tend to favour certain
changes in pronunciation, but such changes may disrupt
formerly regular grammatical patterns, introducing
irregularities which may later be removed in one way or
another. Syntactic structures which come to be frequently
used may be reduced to simpler grammatical forms. And
language contact may induce speakers to import forms and
usages from other languages.
Such constant change means that a language at any point
in time is always significantly different from its direct ancestor
of some centuries earlier, and often vastly different from its
ancestor of one or two millennia earlier. Moreover, a language
spoken over a sizeable area does not change everywhere in
the same way, and so, over time, it breaks up, first into
regional dialects and then, eventually, into several very
different languages, producing alanguage family.
The study of language change is historical linguistics, and
this discipline has enjoyed great success in working out the
 VI

innumerable changes which have applied in the past to

individual languages and families; it has also made progress
in identifying, and sometimes explaining, principles of
language change: some types of change, we now know, are
more natural, more frequent and more readily explicable than
others.
Not infrequently, speakers take exception to the presence
in their language of certain changes, or even of all changes,
and they campaign to ‘stamp out’ those innovations of which
they particularly disapprove. Sometimes they even agitate to
‘fix’ their language into a particular form admired by them, like
a dead butterfly in a specimen box, with no further changes to
be tolerated except after protracted deliberation by suitable
authorities. Well, it is true that certain changes may lead to a
(temporary) reduction in the expressive power of a language
(though most do not, and many changes actually increase its
expressive power), and informed commentary on these
matters may be valuable in educational contexts. On the
whole, though, railing against language change is a waste of
time: trying to stop languages from changing is like trying to
stop the wind from blowing." ( KEY CONCEPTS . p. 99 – 100 )
Its very interesting to us to remember her that the
collecting of data which describe the differences in language
from time to time is a serious matter in this branch of
linguistics . The languages change as a branch of historical
linguistics studies gained more importance in last years
because the development in technological ways to collecting
data makes this kind of studies more easy , and more useful .
Now , in this paper we can not explain all things which
related with our subject, Historical Linguistics , there are many
idioms, terms and concepts, which are link with this branch of
science of linguistics , and this kinds of studies are very
expanding indeed . But we can at the end of this paper
numbering some of idioms and terms that related with
historical linguistics like languages change which it mentioned
above and others that we will be talk about them in brief :
1 –diachrony : The time dimension in language. It was
the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, in the early
twentieth century, who first emphasized the fundamental
difference between synchrony and diachrony in the study of
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language. In a diachronic approach, we look at how a

language has changed over some period of time. Most work in
historical linguistics is diachronic in nature, but not all of it: a
linguist might well be interested in constructing a purely
synchronic description of, say, the Old English of King Alfred’s
day or the Latin of Caesar’s day, without considering how the
language had developed from an earlier form or what
happened to it later .
2 –analogy : A type of language change in which some
forms are changed merely to make them look more like other
forms.
3 - apparent time : A technique for studying language
change in progress. One way of studying language change in
a community is to examine the speech of that community at
intervals over several generations .
4 - comparative reconstruction : The principal method
used to find information about an unattested language which
is the ancestor of several known languages.
5 - philology : The branch of historical linguistics
concerned with the histories of individual words and names .
6 - genetic relationship : The relationship between
languages which share a common ancestor.
7 - internal reconstruction : A method in historical
linguistics which can be applied to a single language to
recover information about its past.
8 - quantitative approach : A statistical approach to the
study of variation in language .
social history of language : The study of the history - 9
of language as a social institution. Traditionally, historical
linguistics, and in particular the study of language change,
has focused upon internal structural changes: changes in
pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. In the 1960s,
however, linguists began to turn their attention to the social
context of language change, to the ways in which changes are
introduced and propagated by speakers, and to the social
forces accompanying these changes, and this type of
.investigation has proved very illuminating

These are some of branches that related with historical

linguistics studies and there are many others in all levels of
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languages change studies , but the explanation and research

of this objects needs more time and unlimited quantity of
. references

: English References

Jean Aitchison - linguistics – third edition- hodder and Stoughton – -1

. 1987
Kirsten Malmkjaer – The Linguistics Encyclopedia - Second edition -2
2002 -Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. London and New York
Trask, R.L. (Robert Lawrence) Key Concepts in Language and -3
Linguistics - Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. London and
New York
Ferdinand de Saussure - Course in General Linguistics – translated -4
in Arabic by dr. Yoaeel Yosof Azez . 1988 . and in English
edition Translated, with an introduction and notes by Wade
Baskin . McGraw-Hill Book Company New York Toronto
. London- with out date

: Arabic References
1980 ‫ دار الحرية للطباعة – بغداد‬-‫ حاكم مالك لعيبي – الترادف في اللغة‬-1