CLAS 196 IndoEuropean

Fortson Introduction

Most Important Concepts in Chapter:

• Similarities between languages
• Sometimes it is because of chance: deus (Latin) and theos (Greek) both mean god but are not related: pniuw (Klamath) and pneu- (Greek) both mean breath but are not related
• Sometimes it is because they share a common ancestor or one is the other's ancestor
• Sometimes large amounts of one language enter other languages: see http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2014/03/10/etymology_languages_that_have_contributed_to_english_vocabulary_over_time.html
• This course is about words that are either related to each other by common descent and the effort to figure out their common ancestor.
• The "Comparative Method"
• One observed phenomenon: sets of words that seem similar, called "correspondence sets"
  
• One hypothesis: that the similarity of those words is because they are 'genetically' related
• One Law: the neo-grammarian hypothesis: when sounds change in a language, they do so across the board in every case
  
• The method is to collect a data set of words across 2 or more languages, and then formulate a hypothesis that includes a sound change law that will explain the data set.
• See 1.2 tables of numbers and then /d/ and /s/ in other words
• See reconstruction of proto-Romance *dente
  
• Language change
• always ongoing
• every language is equally complex: they are neither simplifying nor becoming more complex
• Neo-grammarian hypothesis
• Why must sound changes be regular and exceptionless for the enterprise of Comparative Historical Linguistics to be "scientific"?
• Phonology and Pronunciation reconstruction
• Alphabets
• Syllabaries
• helpful evidence:
• "misspellings": foreigners trying to write a language: people trying to transliterate a language
  
• Morphology: the shapes that words have in a language
• English nouns have singular and plural and possessive
• English verbs have many forms: say, said, says, saying, etc.
  
• Syntax: rules about how words combine to form phrases, then clauses, then sentences
• We won't be dealing much with syntax in this class: mostly with morphology
  
• Philology: "close reading"
  
• Extent of Indo-European Linguistics
• geographically
• temporally
• The GOAL?
• basic goal: reconstruct the proto-language carefully and consistently
• history of languages revealed
• etymology set on a firm scientific basis
  
• further goals:
  
• connect reconstruction to other disciplines: archaeology, anthropology, history.
• enrich knowledge of any given Indo-European language by knowing the web of language into which it fits