Semantic Change: Reconstructing "Dead" Languages

Zeny Palcis Premalion 1st year English A
English 111 Introduction to Linguistics
Semantic change
Reporter no. 26
The language of this country being always upon the flux, struldbruggs of one age do not
understand those of another, neither is they able after two hundred years to hold any
conversation. The meaning of a word will changed through time, place, and how it is used.
Additionally, the meaning or semantic representation of words may changed, by becoming
broader or narrower, or by shifting.
 Broadening
When the meaning of a word becomes broader, it means everything it used to mean and
more. The word holiday originally meant a day of religious significance, from “holy day”. Today
the word refers to any day that we do not have to work.
 Narrowing
The meaning of a word becomes specific due to modernization or time. God says of the
herbs and trees, “to you they shall be for meat”. To a speaker of seventeenth century English,
meat meant “food”, and flesh meant “ meat”.
 Meaning shifts
The third kind of semantic change that a lexical item may undergo is a shift in meaning.
The word knight once meant “youth” but shifted to “mounted man-at-arms.
 Reconstructing “dead” Languages
According to Miss Blimber, None of your living language. They must be dead-stone
dead-and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a Ghoul. It is through the comparative study of the
living languages that linguist are able to learn about older languages and the changes that
occurred over time.
 The Nineteenth-Century Comparativists
When agreement is found in words in two languages, and so frequently that rules may
be drawn up for the shifts in letters from one to the other, then there is a fundamental
relationship between the two languages. They proposed that languages displaying systematic
similarities and differences must have descended from a common source language-that is, were
genetically related.
Sir William Jones, suggested that these three languages (Ancient Greek, Latin and
Sanskrit) had sprung from a common source” and that probably Germanic and Celtic had the
same origin.
Jacob Grimm explained the sound correspondences by means of rules of phonological

change or also called the sound shift or sound change.Grimm’s major discovery was that
certain rules of sound change that applied to the Germanic family of languages.
Grimm’s Law
Earlier stage: bh dh gh b d g p t k
Later stage: b d g p t k f 0 x(or h)

 Cognates
Words in related Languages that developed from the same ancestral root. Cognates
often, but not always, have the same meaning in different languages. From cognates, we can
observe sound correspondences and from them deduce sound changes.
Indo-European Sanskrit Latin English
*p p p f
Pitar- pater father
Grimm stated: The sound shift is a general tendency; it is not followed in every case
and there were exceptions to the regular correspondences he observed.
Karl Verner formulated Verner’s law to show why Indo-European p,t and k failed to
correspond to f, o and x in certain cases. Verner’s law is on the figure 8.4.
Neo-Grammarian hypothesis was proposed by a group of young nineteenth century

linguist, which says that sound shifts are not merely tendencies(as grimm claimed), but apply in
all words that meet their environment. The Neogrammarians viewed linguistics as a natural
science and therefore believed that laws of sound change were exceptionless. Some Linguists
thought that languages had a “life cycle” and developed according to evolutionary laws.
 Comparative Reconstruction
The comparative has us reconstruct “mVn” as the word for “man” in Proto-Germanic. The V
indicates a vowel whose quality we are unsure of because , despite the similar spelling, the
vowel is phonetically different in the various Germanic Languages. To build confidence in the
comparative method , we can apply it to romance languages such as French, Italian, Spanish,
and Portuguese. Their Parent language is the well-known latin, so we can verify the method by
testing it against written records of Latin. In these data, ch in French is [(], and c in the other
languages is [k].
To use the comparative method, linguists identify regular sound correspondences in the
cognates of potentially related languages. For each correspondence, they deduce the most
likely sound in the parent language.
In this way, much of the sound system of the parent may be reconstructed. This is the
“majority rule” principle, which we illustrated with the four Romance Languages. Additionally,
unconditioned sound change will occur if a sound is changed in all environment in which it
occurs. While the conditioned sound change is where they take place only in certain
phonological environments. When the comparative method is applied to earlier and later forms
of a language the process is called internal reconstruction.
 Historical Evidence
The comparative method is not the only way to explore the history of a language or
language family, and it may prove unable to answer certain questions because data are
lacking or because reconstructions are untenable. Linguists prefer letters written by naïve
spellers, who misspell words according to the way they pronounce them.
Some of the best clues to earlier pronunciation are provided by puns and rhymes in
literature. Two words rhyme if the vowels and final consonant are the same. When a poet
rhymes the verb found with the noun wound, as in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet , it
strongly suggest that the vowels of these two words were identical. Shakespeare’s rhymes
are helpful in reconstructing the sound system of Elizabeth English. The rhyming of convert
with depart in Sonnet XI strengthens the conclusion that er was pronounced as ar.

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Zeny Palcis Premalion 1st year English A

English 111 Introduction to Linguistics

 Reconstructing “dead” Languages

 The Nineteenth-Century Comparativists

Jacob Grimm explained the sound correspondences by means of rules of phonological

Later stage: b d g p t k f 0 x(or h)

Indo-European Sanskrit Latin English

Pitar- pater father

Neo-Grammarian hypothesis was proposed by a group of young nineteenth century

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