LING 100 Chapter Notes - Chapter 17: Philology, Great Vowel Shift, Semantic Change
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LING 100 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
Investigating the features of older languages, and the ways in which they developed into modern languages, involves us in the study of language history and change, also known as philology. Philology dominated the study of language and one result was the creation of family trees to show how languages were related. Sir william (british government of cial) suggest that languages from very different geographical areas must have some common ancestor. In the 19th century, a term came into use to describe that common ancestor: proto-indo- European, the hypothesized original form of a language that was the source of many languages in india and europe. Indo-european is the language family with the largest population and distribution in the world, but it isn"t the only one. There are about 30 such language families containing a large number of different individual languages. There are actually 7,105 known languages in the world.
