Historical linguistics

Historical linguistics studies how languages change over time and reconstructs their histories and relationships from linguistic evidence.

Comparative method: A procedure for reconstructing ancestral languages by comparing systematic similarities among related languages. Regular correspondences across related languages let linguists infer shared ancestral forms.
Proto-language: A reconstructed or documented ancestral language from which a group of languages developed. Comparative reconstruction aims to recover features of a shared ancestor.
William Jones (philologist): An eighteenth-century British judge and scholar who argued that Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin shared a common source. His 1786 proposal helped prompt systematic study of Indo-European relationships.
Indo-European languages: A large language family spanning much of Europe and parts of Asia, descended from a reconstructed common ancestor. Its reconstruction is the classic large-scale application of comparative linguistics.
Indo-European homeland: The proposed geographic region where Proto-Indo-European was spoken before its descendant languages spread. Linguistic reconstruction constrains homeland proposals but does not settle their geography alone.
Sound change: A systematic alteration in the pronunciation of speech sounds over time. Regular sound changes create recurring correspondences that reveal language history.
Cognate: A word in one language that descends from the same ancestral word as a word in another language. Cognates supply evidence for genetic relationships when their sound correspondences are regular.
Franz Bopp: A German linguist whose comparative work established Indo-European grammar as a systematic field of study. His comparisons helped make language relationship a methodical historical inquiry.
Nostratic hypothesis: A proposal that several major language families descend from a still deeper common ancestor. It illustrates the evidential difficulty of extending reconstruction beyond well-established families.
Language contact: The interaction of speakers of different languages, which can produce borrowing and structural influence. Contact complicates the tree-like histories inferred from inherited similarities.

Linked from 135 pages