Talk:Historical linguistics

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Tagg580.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 23:30, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

The tree model
There are two assumptions that seem to be implicitly made in this page: that language evolution can be described as a tree-like branching process, and that parents who learned language X from their parents will teach the same language to their children. Are these "dogmas" fundamented/discussed somewhere? Jorge Stolfi 05:17, 4 May 2004 (UTC)


 * The former isn't 100% true, of course - see Michif language. It's just a useful approximation that in practice works almost all the time, like thermodynamics; the evidence for it is simply the statistical idea that so much of the language evolution that we've examined (Indo-European, Semitic, Algonquin, Pama-Nyungan...) works that way.  The second, of course, is false - there must be an article on language shift.  But it is true for the minority of languages that aren't in the process of dying out... - Mustafaa 06:10, 4 May 2004 (UTC)


 * But I agree that the article should make those points explicit. - Mustafaa 17:34, 4 May 2004 (UTC)


 * Hoenigswald, Henry M. 1990. "Does language grow on trees? Ancestry, descent, regularity". Proc. Am. Philos. Soc. 134(1):10-18. Also by Hoenigswald, "Language family trees, topological and metrical", in Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An interdisciplinary perspective, eds. H. M. Hoenigswald and L. F. Wiener, (1987) pp. 257-267. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Bn (talk • contribs) 17:26, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

Conservative, Innovative, Archaic
"Norwegian and Danish have drastically simplified their grammar." I don't know either language (nor proto-Germanic), but I seriously doubt this statement. They have probably simplified their *inflectional morphology*, but there's more to grammar than morphology; and often when a language simplifies in one area, it complexifies in others. (Ok, I made that word up :-).) In this case, I'm betting the modern syntax is more complex.  But I'll leave it to someone who actually knows about the history of these languages to change this if need be. Mcswell (talk) 03:52, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

I don't know much about Norwegian or Danish, but I do know that English once had a fairly complex case system that has almost completely died out over the last couple hundred years. Just sayin' that it's possible that Norwegian or Danish could have undergone a similar change.

Lifetime of pronouns
"…extremely common words like "I" and "you" last so long that it is not possible to even estimate their life span without reconstructions going further back in time than those that are universally accepted."

Um, what? Have you guys heard of some little words called "thou" and "ye"? Those words were pretty cool, until they completely died out between 1700 and 1850 (though "ye" died through evolution into "you"). To give another example, in Japanese the common word for "I" for a long time was "ware." Now, the most common word for "I" is "watashi" which used to mean something like "private," but there are also a lot of other words for "I" in circulation like "boku" = "servant" and "atashi," a variant on "watashi". Japanese didn't even have true personal pronouns for a long time, and there are a number of common words for "you" ("kimi", "anata", "omae", etc.) and the like.
 * Japanese still doesn't have personal pronouns. Grammatically, they function as nouns, as they can take modifiers, etc. True pronouns, like in English, are closed class words, resistant to addition or deletion (how many words for "I" are there in English?). Open class words may be added or lost much more freely. Just because boku gets translated as "I" doesn't mean it's a pronoun.

Anyhow, the sentence needs to be revised, because it's clearly wrong, as "thou" demonstrates.--Carl 09:00, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
 * Evolution is not the same thing as dying... =S
 * Also, "Thou" comes from an IE root, *tu , found in a lot of IE branches, and used daily (AFAIK) in at least most of all germanic and romance languages (except english and dutch).
 * The PIE roots *eg (I), *tu (thou) and *me (me) are thousands of years old and has changed rather little...
 * Although all languages change, I don't think you have disproven this with your "thou" example...


 * Also, just a note. Ye and You are not "sound evolutions". They were different words. "Ye" were used in the nominative case, while "You" were used in the accusative and dative case. Sadly all of sing/plur 2nd pronoun words and nom/acc/dat cases merged, possibly causing confusion and unclearness...

Indeed not. The claim is statistical, not absolute, and is not disproven by individual counterexamples; if you suggested that it is less stable in some areas (eg SE Asia) than it has been shown to be in IE, you might have a better argument... - Mustafaa 01:55, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)

But yes, Japanese is probably the best counterexample I know of, though apparently Thai and Javanese (all heavy-politeness-system languages) are similar. - Mustafaa 02:01, 4 Nov 2004 (UTC)


 * Maybe that is more due to the development of a more complex social system, than to linguistic change. Just a thought...

>

You is obviously a variant of *tu, and I believe the Dutch word sounds pretty similar. And German and Greek don't use *tu, German uses du and Greek uses σου (sou), but they're all obviously closely related. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.198.93.69 (talk) 19:15, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Revised Intro
I've rewritten the intro so it really is about historical linguistics and not just reconstructing proto-languages. I've also put some modern stuff in the bibliography.

Given the existing pages on comparative method and masss lexical comparison, I think most of the other material on this pages could usefully be moved there, and we can start to look at some of the other material that should be covered on this page. --Pfold 21:07, 28 March 2006 (UTC)

The current intro starts "Historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) has been defined by Nordquist as "one of the two main temporal dimensions of language study introduced by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics (1916)"." This is poor, because is isn't a definition, it's a description -- it tells something about the subject but not what it is. I suggest putting this statement as the second sentence of the paragraph, giving:


 * The central focus of historical linguistics (also called diachronic linguistics) is the study of language at different periods in history and as it changes between different periods of history. Historical linguistics has been described by Nordquist as "one of the two main temporal dimensions of language study introduced by Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure in his Course in General Linguistics (1916)".[1] Historical linguistics is directly compared and distinguished from synchronic linguistics which studies language at a single historical period of time.

However, even then Nordquist's description doesn't seem to be very important, unless the reader can be expected to know who Nordquist is and that he is very important. Maybe it should be put at the end of the first paragraph, or eliminated entirely. DWorley (talk) 17:58, 19 August 2014 (UTC)

Template:Berber languages
Watchers of this page may be interested in a discussion currently ongoing at Template:Berber languages. - Lameen Souag (talk) 16:20, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

Weird chart
I removed a weird chart that compared 'traditional' and 'modern' comparative linguistics. It included such absurd claims as that modern comparative linguistics is more interested in syntax than in phonology. One look at a journal such as historische Sprachforschung would prove this false. If there is anything of value in this chart it must be totally rewritten and thoroughly cited. Tibetologist (talk) 17:18, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

.... Not saying that you're wrong, but you can't disprove a wide general claim like that with only one source. Even sourcing multiple sources in only a single language is kind of a stretch, seeing as how there are trends within culture, era, and even in individual parts of individual countries. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.198.93.69 (talk) 19:20, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

New section/paragraph + link needed on Quantitative comparative linguistics?
It isn't my field of expertise and I don't have time to research at the moment, but it seems to me that the work done on evolutionary/contact modelling done over the last 20–25 years by the likes of Don Ringe, Tandy Warnow etc, would be a worthy addition to the article. Grant &#124;  Talk  08:09, 16 September 2016 (UTC)

Sub-fields of study: Phonology
It's disappointing to find in the "Sub-fields of study" part of this article that the para on Phonology doesn't deal with historical aspects at all - it is just a brief summary of what Phonology is. That is information which can already be read in more comprehensive form elsewhere in WP. Was this intentional? RoachPeter (talk) 10:42, 19 March 2017 (UTC)
 * The whole Sub-fields section is poor and could do with a complete revamp. --Pfold (talk) 14:06, 19 March 2017 (UTC)

Relating sub-fields to historical linguistics
In the section on the sub-field of phonology, it is not mentioned how this relates to the field of historical linguistics. It would be helpful to put this in, as had been done with the other sections such as morphology and syntax. Since this is an article on historical linguistics, it would also probably be better if there was a stronger emphasis on how all the sub-fields fit into historical linguistics rather than primarily describing the sub-fields and including only one short sentence connecting the two. Alisab (talk) 19:26, 7 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Well over two years later that's still true. Barefoot through the chollas (talk) 01:30, 9 September 2019 (UTC)

Citations!! And "Evolutionary Context" Section
This entire article is severely lacking in direct citations. As of now, there are only 3 sources cited. As for the section on Evolutionary Context– I'm not entirely sure where the original creator wanted to take this but I feel that a good next step would be to define "Lamarckian acquired characteristics of languages" and how this is different from research into the origins of human language. Pau.guerra (talk) 03:45, 10 April 2017 (UTC)

Evolutionary Context
This section looks like it could use expandingMarkOG (talk) 16:06, 3 May 2017 (UTC)

Can we accommodate this here in the main article? It was too much detail for the section in the Linguistics article.


Heartily (talk) 06:13, 25 November 2020 (UTC)


 * Proper names are ill-suited to illustrate etymology in general, since they are affected by all sorts of explicit cultural issues, and this is particularly the case with names having a religious association.
 * The chart doesn't distinguish between borrowing and genetic descent.
 * The entire thing is unsourced - looks like WP:OR.
 * It's not appropriate for this page, though, properly sourced, it might belong on Personal name. --Pfold (talk) 17:53, 25 November 2020 (UTC)


 * I agree. It doesn't look very useful at all. We can just delete it and let it go then. Heartily (talk) 19:06, 25 November 2020 (UTC)

Problem with the Intro
This article's intro is very poor. I don't know how sensible it is to have a "list" in the intro. I am also in disagreement with the first/opening line. Historical linguistics is not otherwise called diachronic linguistics. Historical linguistics is synchronic and diachronic both. Heartily (talk) 19:06, 9 December 2020 (UTC)