LING 1 Lecture Notes - Lecture 7: Great Vowel Shift, Language Change, Neogrammarian
Document Summary
Structure of ug (correlated changes suggest a parameter is involved) Three ways to establish common history: sound laws. Discovery that sanskrit was related to latin, germanic and celtic (picture of language comparison: mass comparison, combination of linguistic comparison and genetic information. 19th century: neogrammarian hypothesis: regularity of sound change. > a diachronic (a change over time) sound change affects simultaneously all words in which its environment is met, without exception. > reconstruction of proto-indoeuropean based on phonetic correspondences. We tend to postulate things that are very general in our grammars. Our current spelling system re ects the ways words were pronounced before the great. Mother tongue? different languages can be grouped together by nding similarities between languages in sounds, syntax, grammars,etc. Indo-european family of languages can be traced to one of ten individual languages. 4 language families in africa each language family represents what the history was.
