Diachronic analysis

Diachronic analysis

Diachronic analysis is the study of language change. The objectives of the diachronic analysis are to describe the historical evolution of particular languages and language families and to formulate a theory  of language change. Any adequate theory of language change must correctly specify the kinds of changes which can occur in linguistic systems and must clarify the causes and mechanisms of these changes.

Since language change is the modification  through time of a linguistic system, diachronic investigation is most fruitful when two or more historical stages of language are known in some detail and have been adequately analyzed. Consequently, diachronic studies must rely fairly heavily on direct methods to supplement the direct comparison of the different stages of a language.

One indirect technique of diachronic investigation is dialectal analysis, which is the description and comparison of different dialects of a single language. Since dialect diversification and historical evolution are both products of language change, dialects of a language differ from one another in the same kinds of ways that two historical stages of a language differ.

Internal reconstruction is another indirect technique of diachronic investigation. It is the attempt to determine certain details of the historical development of a language by means of a careful scrutiny of its structure.

The comparative method

The comparative method also called external reconstruction, is the systematic comparison of languages thought to be related  in order to establish conclusively that they are in fact related and to reconstruct insofar as possible, the proto language from which they are all descended.

In historical linguistics, the comparative method is a way of systematically comparing a series of languages in order to prove a historical relationship between them. Scholars begin by identifying a set of formal similarities and differences between the languages, and try to work out (or ‘reconstruct’) an earlier stage of development from which all the forms could have derived. The process is known as internal reconstruction. When languages have been shown to have a common ancestor, they are said to be a cognate.

The clearest cases are those where the parent language is known to exist. For example, on the basis of the various words for ‘father’ in the Romance languages, given below, it is possible to see how they all derived from the Latin word pater. If Latin no longer existed, it would be possible to reconstruct a great deal of its form, by comparing large numbers of words in this way. Exactly the same reasoning is used for cases where the parent language does not exist, as when the forms in Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Welsh, etc. are compared to reconstruct the Indo-European form, pater.

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