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.

Family of languages

The first scientific attempts to discover the history of the world’s languages were made at the end of the 18th century.

The late eighteenth century discovery that Sanskrit (the ancient language of India) was related to Latin, Greek, Germanic, and Celtic revolutionized European linguistic studies. Sir William Jones, a British judge and scholar working in India, summed up the nature and implication of the findings in his 1786 address to the Royal Asiatic Society, a part of which follows:

The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious (having more cases) than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of the verbs and in the forms of the grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident.

The main metaphor that is used to explain the historical relationships is that of the language family or family tree. Within the Romance family, Latin is the parent language and French, Spanish, Italian, etc. are daughter languages; French would then be called sister language to Spanish and the others. The same approach is used with larger groups. Within the Indo-European family, Proto Indo-European is the parent language and Latin, Greek, Old Persian, Old Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Proto German, Celtic and others are daughter languages. In a large family it will be necessary to distinguish various branches, each of which may contain several languages or sub-families of languages.

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