Historical Linguistics 3130 A

 

Areal linguistics

Chapter 12 of the textbook has information on areal linguistics and examples of many of them. Here on the web site is a summary of what I presented in class, which is based on Sarah Thomason's ideas outlined in "Linguistic areas and language history" on her web site. Thomason is probably the world's leading expert on areas.

 

Click consonants

If you missed the demonstration on click consonants, want to bee it again or want to show someone else, here are the links to where you can find the information:

• Nama clicks (click one of the links for Nama greetings or click the phonetic symbols to hear the various kinds of clicks)
• Map of southern Africa showing some of the languages that have clicks
• Wikipedia article on click consonants

 

Historical linguistics essay ideas

As you know, you can choose to write a paper instead of doing the second mid-term test. You might get some ideas for essay topics from the Campbell "state of the art" paper, but the site for the historical linguistics course at the University of Cambridge has a section called Supervision Assignments with many good ideas for paper topics (and lists of references you can use for researching them). You could use one of these or they may inspire you to do something slightly different, but along the same lines. One warning: you have to submit a proposal before we get to the topics of reconstruction in class, so you should keep that in mind if you're thinking of doing anything from sections 12 and 13 of the Cambridge site.

 

Readings for Monday, October 24

Monday's class will discuss Chapter 7 "Models of Linguistic Change" and probably part of Chapter 11 "Explaining Linguistic Change." There will not likely be any exercises for the next three weeks, but there will be more than the usual amount of reading.

Exercise 4.2 (pages 120 to 121) will be returned to you on Monday. If you didn't hand it in today (you were sick or whatever), you can e-mail it to me by noon on Sunday and I will still check it). There is no grade for this (or any other) homework, but I want ot see if you understand it.

 

Introduction to current issues in historical linguistics

The next section of the course will be concerned with models of language change and explanation. Today's class was an introduction to current issues in the field of historical linguistics.

The lecture today was meant to introduce you to the issues discussed in Lyle Campbell's "State of the Art" paper, which he presented at the International Congress of Linguists in 2003. (The original is on his website, but the version here has the phonetic fornts included in the file.) You should read this before the next two weeks of classes.

 

Kuryłowycz and Mańczak

Now available for your reference, in case you are trying to figure out part of my explanation:

• The original 1947 Kuryłowycz paper in French
• An English translation published in 1995
• An introduction to the English translation (recommended even if to want to read the French version, references are at the end of the translation itself)
• An unpublished hand-typed English translation, date and translator unknown
(seems to be missing part of Law I and all of Law II)

Also available for those who are interested (but not required reading unless you want to use it for your paper):

• Mańczak's original 1958 paper in French

 

New office hours

Starting next week and continuing for the rest of the course, office hours will be 2:30 to 3:45 on Thursday and not on Monday. I would have made them at that time in the first place, but the tentative list had someone else in the shared part-time professor's office during that time. Also, it seems that people who have come to see me so far prefer Thursday, so I'm switching.

 

Notes for the lecture on Kuryłowycz' laws and on semantic change

Here are the notes from the slides on Kuryłowycz' laws and semantic change.

 

Exam schedule

The exam will be held Wednesday, December 21 at 2:00 p.m. in VNR283 (Vanier Hall, straight south from the University Centre). If you were hoping to take off to the sun in the middle of December, I'm sorry to disappoint you, but we have to take the date that they give us.

 

Analogy and semantic change

On Thursday, we will be doing analogy and semantic change. Analogical change is covered in chapter 4 of your textbook and semantic change is in chapter 9. You should read chapter 4 before the class and quickly skim through chapter 9. We may not be able to cover chapter 9 in great detail, but we can't spend more time of it. If you print the handout on Kuryłowycz's Six Laws of Analogy and the two pages with it before class, it will be helpful in your note-taking.

I will also hand back the mid-term test on Thursday and quickly go through the answeres.

 

Talk on the history of the Greek alphabet.

While writing systems are not really a focus of our historical linguistics course, some of you may be interested in a talk by local author David Sacks on "Ancient Near Eastern Writing and the Birth of the Greek Alphabet." It's in Arts 016 at 2 p.m. on October 14 (Friday after Thanksgiving).

Sacks has written two books on the history of the alphabet recently. There is information about them on the Random House web site. Even though he is mainly talking about the alphabet, there is definitely information we can learn about ancient languages by looking at written records, and we will be talking about this later in the course.

 

Clarifications, earliest posts and a talk Thursday morning

Clarifications to previous lectures

Apparently, some students thought that I said /rib-s/ à /rips/ is an example of progressive assimilation in English. If I said or wrote that, I'm sorry. I meant that /rib-s/ à /ribz/ (plural of "rib"). There is no rule in English that changes /ribs/ to /rips/ (and if there was, it wouldn't be progressive assimilation, it would be regressive).

Also, I should clarify again the difference between umlaut and ablaut. Umlaut is a type of vowel harmony. In the Germanic family, it is the origin of the mouse/mice vowels. Ablaut was a feature of proto-Indoeuropean (vowel gradation: e-grade, o-grade, zero-grade) and is the origin of the sing/sang/sung vowels. The two things are not related to each other in any way, but are easily confused with each other.

Earlier posts on this blog

Earlier posts are still available. Click on the appropriate link on the left under Archives. If you want to print a single post, click on Permalink at the bottom of the post to show it by itself.

Talk on grammatical change in Old and Middle English

Susan Pintzuk from the University of York in northern England will be giving a public talk at the University of Ottawa this Thursday, October 6, at 10:00 am, in Simard 125 (SMD 125). Everyone is invited. See details below. This is a wonderful opportunity to hear about some of the latest work in historical linguistics. The talk is about Old English, but it is part of a larger project called Modéliser le changement: les voies du français / Modelling change: the paths of French involving researchers from 9 countries.

A reception will follow in the Salon Monet in the Linguistics Department (across from the secretariat). PLEASE note the change of time (the talk will take place at 10 am, not 10:30, as previously announced).

Evidence for head-final structure in Old English

By Susan Pintzuk (University of York) and Eric Haeberli (University of Geneva)

Old English is generally regarded as a verb-second language, although the use of V2 order in main clauses is not as regular as in modern Germanic languages. Syntacticians who have investigated OE have agreed that while verb-final main clauses exist, their frequency is low (Fischer et al 2000; van Kemenade 1987; Koopman 1995; Pintzuk 1993, 1999). In this talk we use the position of four diagnostic elements -- particles, stranded prepositions, negative objects, and pronominal objects, all previously established as diagnostics in subordinate clauses -- to demonstrate that the frequency of head-final structure in main clauses is much higher than previously acknowledged. We explore the implications of these findings for the syntactic analysis of OE and for our picture of syntactic variation and change in the Old and Middle English periods.

 

How to write sound change rules

As I promised, I have uploaded some advice on how to write sound change rules. If you're having trouble accessing this file, you should download the latest version of Adobe Reader. (Post revised October 4 with link to Adobe.)

 

Parts of chapter 3 not on the test

Just so you have it in writing, we are one class behind, so we will do analogy and semantic change after the test, and there will be no questions about these topics on the test.

In chapter 3, there will be nothing on the test from sections 3.7 or 3.8, except for the following:

• 3.7.1 borrowed sounds
• 3.7.5 borrowed rules
• 3.7.7 calques

Nothing else from 3.7 will be on the test. Some other topics from section 3.7 will come up later when we do chapter 12.

 

Extra practice problems for Monday

Two more practice problems that we will quickly take up on Monday are here. There are no strange spelling conventions as there were with the Estonian problem we did before. The solutions should be fairly straightforward.

(Originally published with the wrong link, now corrected.)

 

Review of sound changes 2

All the miscellaneous sound changes you need to know for the test are now available here summarized on one sheet.

 

Common sound changes

I will be doing a review sheet for these later today, but these are the sound changes you need to know from Section 2.7 of the textbook:

• affrication, deaffrication
• apocope
• compensatory lengthening
• epenthesis, syncope
• voicing, devoicing (esp. final devoicing)
• lenition (weakening), fortition (also called strengthening)
• gemination, degemination
• intervocalic voicing
• diphthongization, monophthongization
• lengthening, shortening
• nasal assimilation (esp. homorganic nasal assimilation)
• nasalization, [denasalization]
• palatalization
• rhotacism
• vowel lowering, vowel raising
• backing, fronting
• umlaut (a type of vowel harmony)

You should know about the types of assimilation and dissimilation on the first review sheet.

You should be aware of ablaut (also known as vowel gradation), since we talked about it in class.

Rounding and unrounding (of vowels) and deletion/insertion should be fairly obvious, even if they didn't have their own little section in the book.

If you want another explanation in addition to what's in the textbook, the uOttawa library has the The Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics online. (You'll need to sign in with your library user name (the part of and password unless you're on campus.) If you're going to do several searches there, be sure to choose "Search this book" under the search box or you'll get results from all kinds of irrelevant books.

 

Chain shifts and Borrowing

Two new additions to the site right now:

• The diagrams I showed on chain shifts.
• Notes on borrowing from the slides shown in the last class (I added a few extra details and corrected the typo on tamagotchi).

These are both in Adobe PDF format. More review updates coming.