Anthropology 1027A/B Lecture Notes - Lecture 10: Daughter Language, Grammaticalization, Phoneme
6 Dec 2016
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Document Summary
Introduce the comparative method for reconstructing past stages of particular languages. Change is systematic (but some are more systematic than others) Phonological: changes in the systems by adding, elimination, or rearranging phonemes. Shifts: systemic modification which alters organization with respect to one another. Ex. we assume that words which sound the same take similar derivations and inflections. Regular verbs: verb + -ed = past tense. + -ed = climbed used to be an irregular verb with past tense clomb has become regular through proportional analogy. Then singular and plural were the same: hand. By analogy with other words (plural = noun + s) Hamburger - cheese burger; woodchuck - otchek (algonquian) Syntactic change is not regular like sound change. Use of morphemes to indicate relationships among words. Old english: np > n + det. Modern english: np > det + n. Old english: subject either before or after v. Modern english: subject before v or absent.
