Philology 3 – Midterm Exam
Language & sound
Evidence for old pronunciations: spelling, borrowed words, modern pronunciations, etc.
Sources of language change:
1. Incrementation through transmission: we never produce the exact same sound twice.
Adult language varies a lot due to physical / processing constraints. Children have to deduce
rules of language. They introduce changes because of variation (which is also socially
conditioned).
2. Phonetic processes: economizing articulatory effort (sound changes).
3. Analogy: economizing brain processing power. A more common pattern is more automatic
in the brain and a less common pattern needs a more conscious effort. Patterns are
merged / created based on perceived similarity. Ex: a child learns pairs like dog/dogs, and
then learns a new word, like plug, and correctly forms the plural by analogy with the pairs.
4. Changes in the lexicon: language internal: affixation, compounding, conversion, coining.
Language external: borrowing, cultural / social changes (shift / addition in meaning –
polysemy, or death of a word). Semantic changes are things like shift, broadening,
narrowing, taboo, pejoration (a word gaining a negative connotation, ex: madam), ameliorat.
5. Language “external” pressures: accommodation and dialect contact: there is a lasting
effect when contact is sustained, social prestige plays a role. Lack of contact causes
language divergence (ex: migration, political / ideological boundaries, etc).
Sound changes:
Assimilation = sounds become more similar to those in surroundings (ex: better – ‘bedder’)
Dissimilation = sounds become less similar to those in surroundings (ex: pelegrin – pilgrim)
Epenthesis = insertion of a sound (ex: aemtig -> empty).
Metathesis = switching around difficult sounds to make it easier (ex: task -> tax).
Haplology (form of deletion) = deletion of an entire syllable (ex: Angaland -> England).
When the Romans conquered much of the world, Latin became widely spoken. After the
empire’s decline in the 4th century and the barbarian invasions, new countries emerged with
different languages, many still influenced by Latin (Romance languages). Yet, empires can
also erase other languages: Roman rule made the earlier Italic languages disappear.
Proto-Indo-European
English is a Germanic language. It belongs to the Indo-European family (including most
European and Indian languages). This family has developed out of a single language, which
must have been spoken long ago by a small group in a relatively restricted geographical
area. We call this language Proto-Indo-European (PIE). We don’t know exactly where they
lived, even though there are a lot of theories, such as: they appeared on the fringes of the
Mesopotamian area around 1500 BC (a dynasty with Indo-European names is found ruling
there). Words which occur in many Indo-European languages were presumably a part of the
Proto-Indian-European vocabulary. If the words existed, then the things denoted by the
words existed too in the area where they lived (ex: ox, cattle, stone, field, wool).
Within PIE, there are centum and satem languages. This is the earliest major division into
Western and Eastern branches. Satem languages changed /k/-sounds into /s/-sounds.
Centum languages kept the /k/-sounds.
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Language & sound
Evidence for old pronunciations: spelling, borrowed words, modern pronunciations, etc.
Sources of language change:
1. Incrementation through transmission: we never produce the exact same sound twice.
Adult language varies a lot due to physical / processing constraints. Children have to deduce
rules of language. They introduce changes because of variation (which is also socially
conditioned).
2. Phonetic processes: economizing articulatory effort (sound changes).
3. Analogy: economizing brain processing power. A more common pattern is more automatic
in the brain and a less common pattern needs a more conscious effort. Patterns are
merged / created based on perceived similarity. Ex: a child learns pairs like dog/dogs, and
then learns a new word, like plug, and correctly forms the plural by analogy with the pairs.
4. Changes in the lexicon: language internal: affixation, compounding, conversion, coining.
Language external: borrowing, cultural / social changes (shift / addition in meaning –
polysemy, or death of a word). Semantic changes are things like shift, broadening,
narrowing, taboo, pejoration (a word gaining a negative connotation, ex: madam), ameliorat.
5. Language “external” pressures: accommodation and dialect contact: there is a lasting
effect when contact is sustained, social prestige plays a role. Lack of contact causes
language divergence (ex: migration, political / ideological boundaries, etc).
Sound changes:
Assimilation = sounds become more similar to those in surroundings (ex: better – ‘bedder’)
Dissimilation = sounds become less similar to those in surroundings (ex: pelegrin – pilgrim)
Epenthesis = insertion of a sound (ex: aemtig -> empty).
Metathesis = switching around difficult sounds to make it easier (ex: task -> tax).
Haplology (form of deletion) = deletion of an entire syllable (ex: Angaland -> England).
When the Romans conquered much of the world, Latin became widely spoken. After the
empire’s decline in the 4th century and the barbarian invasions, new countries emerged with
different languages, many still influenced by Latin (Romance languages). Yet, empires can
also erase other languages: Roman rule made the earlier Italic languages disappear.
Proto-Indo-European
English is a Germanic language. It belongs to the Indo-European family (including most
European and Indian languages). This family has developed out of a single language, which
must have been spoken long ago by a small group in a relatively restricted geographical
area. We call this language Proto-Indo-European (PIE). We don’t know exactly where they
lived, even though there are a lot of theories, such as: they appeared on the fringes of the
Mesopotamian area around 1500 BC (a dynasty with Indo-European names is found ruling
there). Words which occur in many Indo-European languages were presumably a part of the
Proto-Indian-European vocabulary. If the words existed, then the things denoted by the
words existed too in the area where they lived (ex: ox, cattle, stone, field, wool).
Within PIE, there are centum and satem languages. This is the earliest major division into
Western and Eastern branches. Satem languages changed /k/-sounds into /s/-sounds.
Centum languages kept the /k/-sounds.
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