Genetic relationships I David Willis Li2 Language variation: Historical linguistics

The Comparative Method How do we establish that languages are related? Similarities between languages can be due to: accident (chance resemblance or independent parallel development) borrowing / language contact onomatopoeia universals and typology genetic relationship The first four need to be eliminated to demonstrate the last.

Eliminating borrowings and chance similarities

Correspondence sets systematic sound correspondences between cognates (items in two languages that have been continuously transmitted from a single parent- language item) are strong evidence for linguistic affinity (assuming regularity of sound change) some linguists regard sound correspondences as essential for demonstrating it

Correspondence sets some linguists regard them as essential for demonstrating it use basic vocabulary: body parts, close kin, natural world, low numbers (but even basic vocabulary can sometimes be borrowed e.g. Finnish borrowed from Baltic and Germanic the words for ‘mother’, ‘daughter’, ‘sister’, ‘tooth’, ‘navel’, ‘neck’, ‘thigh’, ‘fur’) similarity due to onomatopoeia is not reliable evidence of relatedness, but can usually be readily identified cognacy is often not recognised until the systematic correspondences are understood: English wheel : Hindi cakkā English horn : Hindi sĩg English sister : Hindi bahan French cinq : Russian pjat’ : Armenian hing : English five (< PIE *penkwe) (regular but non-obvious correspondences e.g. Armenian hing shows *p > h in Armenian cf. Armenian het : Greek ped- ‘foot’, hour : pyr ‘fire’ etc.)

False correspondence sets due to borrowing regular correspondences may sometimes be found in loans: English : French normally shows f : p (pere : father, pied : foot, pour : for) Romance loans show p : p (paternel : paternal, piedestal : pedestal) use of basic vocabulary may help up to overcome this but not always: Massive borrowing may create false correspondence sets e.g. Welsh /p/ : Latin /p/:

False correspondence sets due to borrowing can be hard to distinguish from real correspondence sets e.g. Welsh /p/ : Old Irish /k/: Armenian was widely believed to be an Iranian language until 1875, when Heinrich Hübschmann showed it to be an independent branch of Indo- European in 1875 by showing that similarities with Iranian were due to borrowing (Armenian showed three systems of sound correspondence with Iranian) and were not supported by morphological irregularity.

‘Shared aberrancy’ / shared grammatical irregularity The presence of similar (highly arbitrary) morphological alternation in two languages is a very good indicator of genetic relationship (e.g. English good, better, best and German gut, besser, best-). Antoine Meillet termed this ‘shared aberrancy’

Typological evidence the value of typological evidence in disputed early linguists often used shared morphological type as evidence of relatedness usually considered to be of little value today, despite some attempts to use it

The subgrouping problem lines on family trees indicate a period of shared innovation (development) of all the daughter languages splits indicate the beginning of independent innovation nodes indicate intermediate parent languages (whether or not these are attested or even have names) e.g. Proto-Germanic, Latin etc. subgrouping is done by establishing that a group of languages share an innovation that is not found in some other portion of the family e.g. Grimm’s Law defines Germanic (English father, German Vater vs. French père (Latin pater), Ancient Greek patēr, Sanskrit pitr); loss of PIE *p defines Celtic (Old Irish lán, Welsh llawn vs. French plein, Russian polon, English full) genetic similarities between languages may be due either to shared retention or to shared innovation: only shared innovation is indicate of subgrouping shared parallel development is a possible confounding factor

The subgrouping problem L1L2L3 L4L5 p p ff zero

The subgrouping problem L1L2L3 L4L5 p p ff zero Most linguists would prefer to posit two changes in the histories of these languages, namely, p > f and (subsequently) f > ø, hence the tree: Note that this means that, perhaps surprisingly, L1 and L2 share no particularly close relationship. (Harrison 2003)

The establishment of Indo-European establishment of Indo-European is often attributed to William Jones’s third discourse to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal (February 1786): Sir William Jones (1746–94)

The establishment of Indo-European connections between Indo-European languages had been observed long before Jones the relationship between Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages had been observed before Jones Jones did not use the comparative method Jones interpreted linguistic relationship as part of ethnic / genealogical relationships in a biblical framework, the history of the human races Jones made a number of errors that were not made by everyone at the time:

The establishment of Indo-European early attempts at language classification in the sixteenth century saw all languages as descended from Hebrew even in the sixteenth century, many of the branches of Indo-European were recognised (e.g. by Konrad Gesner in 1555) early attempts at etymology allowed free substitution of sounds (cf. Voltaire’s alleged remark that ‘etymology is a science in which the vowels count for nothing and the consonants for very little’) an improvement is the notion that certain sound changes recur in different languages

The establishment of Indo-European the idea that various European languages might go back to a common ancestor originates with the ‘Scythian hypothesis’, first propounded by Johannes Goropius Becanus (Jan van Gorp van der Beke) in 1569 and later associated with Claude Saumaise (1588–1653) (Indo-Scythian), Marc Boxhorn (1602–53) and Andreas Jäger (Scytho-Celtic):

The establishment of Indo-European the discovery of Sanskrit added weight to such investigations. Thomas Stephens had noted similarities between Indian languages and Latin and Greek in 1583 (but he meant typological similarity and not common historical origin): The idea of common origin was suggested by Gaston Laurent Coeurdoux in 1767 (but he meant borrowing). Such ideas were commonplace in the mid 18th century. Edward Lhuyd (1707) was perhaps the first to identify sound correspondences and understand that regularity of sound correspondences was proof of common origin e.g. he identified that Greek, Romance, Celtic /k/ corresponds to Germanic /h/ (German hundert ‘ hundred ’ : Latin centum, German Hund ‘ dog (hound) ’ : Latin canis, German Hals ‘ neck ’ : Latin collum = Grimm ’ s Law).