Language Change and Historical Linguistics: Crash Course Linguistics #13 - By Math and Science
Transcript
00:0-1 | Hi , I'm taylor and welcome to crash course linguistics | |
00:02 | . Language change is a constant . It's why I | |
00:04 | don't speak the same way as Shakespeare and he didn't | |
00:06 | write the same way chaucer did and he didn't write | |
00:09 | Canterbury Tales in the exact same languages . Bay Wolf | |
00:12 | . Each generation takes the language and makes it their | |
00:14 | own pushing it in new directions . Today , small | |
00:17 | changes can be tomorrow's new dialects and those dialects may | |
00:20 | one day be so different , will think of them | |
00:22 | as distinct languages . While no one can predict the | |
00:25 | future of the language , we can look backward in | |
00:27 | time and piece together the path that a language has | |
00:30 | taken . This is a field known as historical linguistics | |
00:35 | . Mhm . To understand the historical path a language | |
00:47 | has taken , we need to know how language change | |
00:50 | happens in the first place . Language change occurs across | |
00:52 | all levels of language , including sounds , words and | |
00:55 | grammar . At the end of the old english period | |
00:58 | of the 11 hundreds , english speakers dropped a lot | |
01:01 | of suffixes , changing the languages grammar . Then between | |
01:04 | 1416 100 english went through a major change in the | |
01:08 | pronunciation of vowels known as the great english vowel shift | |
01:12 | . So while languages can change in multiple ways , | |
01:15 | they don't always change in all areas at once . | |
01:18 | As anyone who has MS heard a song lyric knows | |
01:20 | sometimes we invent words that were never there in the | |
01:23 | first place . Many newer speakers of a language can | |
01:26 | mistake one word for something else or re analyzed the | |
01:29 | language for example , english apron used to be no | |
01:32 | apron , but people heard on apron as an apron | |
01:37 | . Now apron is the standard english word . Sometimes | |
01:39 | innovation happens because people need the language to work better | |
01:42 | for them take english , third person pronouns in old | |
01:45 | english , they were hey hey oh , hit and | |
01:49 | here but these words sound pretty similar so speaker started | |
01:52 | to differentiate them in middle english , heo changed to | |
01:56 | she hit to it and he a became an entirely | |
01:59 | new pronoun barred from old North . They english speakers | |
02:03 | started using they with non specific singular reference like someone | |
02:07 | or anyone in the 14th century . It's something both | |
02:10 | chaucer and Shakespeare . Did the use of singular they | |
02:13 | for a specific person is more recent . In the | |
02:16 | 18th century singular . They was used to anonymous as | |
02:19 | a person and in recent decades it's become the pronoun | |
02:22 | for some trans , non binary and gender queer people | |
02:24 | , although there have always been people who don't identify | |
02:27 | with the binary gender to get into all of the | |
02:29 | ways they've expressed that through language would be a whole | |
02:32 | other video . However , not all changes have a | |
02:34 | meaningful explanation . Some varieties of spanish spoken in spain | |
02:38 | still maintain a difference between casa , house and casa | |
02:42 | hunt . Meanwhile , other spanish varieties , especially those | |
02:45 | in South America pronounced both words with us as in | |
02:48 | casa . There's no real reason for this change though | |
02:51 | . Language changes typically incremental , but sometimes there's a | |
02:54 | situation that's perfect for the creation of an entirely new | |
02:57 | language . Let's head to the thought that want to | |
02:59 | look at one example in Nicaragua before the 1970s , | |
03:03 | there wasn't a deaf community , there were deaf people | |
03:06 | . Sure , but because of a lack of structural | |
03:08 | support , they stayed at home in their villages and | |
03:11 | didn't share a common language . Instead , they used | |
03:13 | various ad hoc gestures to communicate with their hearing , | |
03:16 | family and friends known as home sign . This changed | |
03:19 | in 1977 when Nicaragua established the first school for the | |
03:23 | deaf and brought together deaf Children of a wide age | |
03:25 | range from villages all over the country . The curriculum | |
03:28 | of the school didn't try to teach kids assigned language | |
03:31 | , instead focusing on spanish lip reading and some finger | |
03:34 | spelling of spanish words , but students were signing with | |
03:37 | each other anyway and they wove together bits of their | |
03:39 | individual home science into a richer , more complicated system | |
03:43 | . Something closer to a language . What's interesting is | |
03:46 | what happened after that the next generation of deaf Children | |
03:49 | who arrived at the school were exposed to this intermediate | |
03:52 | communication system and took it a step further . They | |
03:56 | made it into a full fledged language , one that | |
03:58 | had a complex and systematic grammar like any other language | |
04:02 | . The older generation of Children had used pointing sometimes | |
04:05 | , but the younger generation used pointing more systematically to | |
04:08 | track repeated mentions of the same person pointing , acted | |
04:12 | like a pronoun according to linguist and single linguists around | |
04:16 | the world . Were fascinated . Here was an opportunity | |
04:19 | to study how a language could evolve from scratch . | |
04:21 | In real time . It seems to take exposure to | |
04:24 | something linguistic enough , like the intermediate combination of home | |
04:27 | science at a young age and as part of a | |
04:30 | community , Children's brains will sort out that input into | |
04:34 | language . In this case , the students created what's | |
04:36 | now known as sn idioma disinvest in Nicaragua , the | |
04:40 | official Nicaraguan sign language . Thanks thought bubble . Nicaraguan | |
04:44 | sign language is a unique example . A more common | |
04:47 | observable type of language change occurs because of language contact | |
04:51 | , which is one languages in the same area influence | |
04:54 | each other . It's very common for languages to come | |
04:56 | in contact with other languages . In fact , multilingualism | |
05:00 | has been the norman human society . When languages are | |
05:02 | in contact , there are broadly two possible ways they | |
05:05 | can influence each other . First languages can become more | |
05:08 | like each other . That is , they can converge | |
05:10 | click continents are a typical feature of languages in the | |
05:13 | Khoisan family . In southern Africa , there are a | |
05:15 | number of Bantu languages in southwestern Zambia that also have | |
05:19 | cliques . Even though this isn't a typical feature in | |
05:21 | Bantu languages , the clicks in the Zambian , Bantu | |
05:24 | languages are a result of long term contact between Khoisan | |
05:28 | and Bantu languages and Zambia . Or second languages can | |
05:31 | diverge and become less similar on the northernmost island of | |
05:34 | the pacific nation of Vanuatu . There are 17 different | |
05:38 | languages . These languages are all part of the oceanic | |
05:41 | language family and have lots in common in terms of | |
05:44 | their grammar . But if all diverged in their vocabulary | |
05:47 | in this context , language contact has made speakers willingly | |
05:51 | diverge as they change words to be more distinct from | |
05:54 | each other . If two or more languages aren't understandable | |
05:56 | to each other , we say they're mutually unintelligible . | |
06:00 | When you put speakers of mutually unintelligible languages together , | |
06:04 | they'll use elements of their language to create some basic | |
06:07 | way of communicating . Generally known as a pigeon . | |
06:10 | If the pigeon is spoken for long enough in a | |
06:12 | community where Children are learning it , they'll use the | |
06:14 | same skills as the Nicaraguan deaf Children did to expand | |
06:18 | it into a language . These languages are known as | |
06:20 | creoles . There are many across the world , often | |
06:23 | with names that reflect these origins such as Haitian creole | |
06:26 | , creole in Australia and talk piston and Papua new | |
06:29 | guinea , which means talk pidgin . When talking about | |
06:31 | creole languages . We should note the power asymmetry between | |
06:34 | the people and languages involved . The language contact was | |
06:38 | usually the result of Western colonization , during which colonists | |
06:41 | exploited people who spoke other mother tongues . This power | |
06:45 | imbalance explains why a Creole languages often made up of | |
06:48 | more words from the dominant language . But creoles are | |
06:51 | languages in their own right , just like french isn't | |
06:53 | bad latin for being descended from it . And many | |
06:56 | creole languages have gained recognition and support . For example | |
06:59 | , Top Piston and Haitian creole are both official national | |
07:02 | languages of their respective countries . When it comes to | |
07:04 | studying language change , we've been lucky enough to have | |
07:07 | audio recordings of some major languages and their changes for | |
07:10 | over a century now , but for anything older than | |
07:13 | that , we have to rely on the writing system | |
07:15 | for evidence and hope that it reflects major features of | |
07:17 | how the language is spoken . The good news is | |
07:19 | for a language like tibetan or english for that matter | |
07:22 | , There are over 1000 years of written examples that | |
07:25 | show us the path the language took . Research that | |
07:28 | looks at the change that happens to a language over | |
07:30 | time with this kind of evidence is called Dia chronic | |
07:33 | analysis . Meanwhile , studying variation across dialects or languages | |
07:38 | at the same point in time is known as sing | |
07:40 | chronic analysis . English has father , Dutch , voter | |
07:44 | , Icelandic , father and german fatter . A couple | |
07:47 | of centuries ago , linguists using sing chronic analysis realized | |
07:51 | that similarities like this were too much to be a | |
07:54 | coincidence words across different languages that share a common origin | |
07:58 | , like the different words for father are known as | |
08:00 | cognitive . Its historical linguists now know that languages like | |
08:04 | dutch , english and german have lots of easy to | |
08:06 | see cognitive because their paths diverged only in the last | |
08:09 | couple of 1000 years to prove relationship between languages , | |
08:13 | historical linguists make giant spreadsheets of words that might be | |
08:16 | related and look for systematic patterns across the whole . | |
08:19 | We can reconstruct with the common ancestor word , could | |
08:22 | have sounded like something like fodder because it's the oldest | |
08:26 | version of a dramatic language . We can reconstruct . | |
08:28 | It's known as proto Germanic by the way . Historical | |
08:31 | linguists use that asterix to signal that it's still a | |
08:33 | hypothesis . We can go back even further analyzing proto | |
08:37 | Germanic fodder , latin , potter and Sanskrit . Pitter | |
08:41 | Sanskrit is the classical language that gave rise to modern | |
08:44 | languages like hindi and nepali . While the dramatic languages | |
08:47 | all have fa or ba at the start , these | |
08:50 | more historically distant languages start with the post sound . | |
08:53 | Since the oldest languages start with pa historical linguists hypothesized | |
08:57 | that father must have begun with pa and later changed | |
09:00 | to fa . In the newer Germanic languages , we | |
09:03 | see this and other cognitive to like latin pod and | |
09:06 | english , foot or latin playinus for something flat and | |
09:10 | english field . These and hundreds of other cognitive proved | |
09:13 | that the pa fa swap is a pattern , not | |
09:16 | a fluke , so there must be a common ancestor | |
09:18 | among these languages . If there are only a few | |
09:22 | similar words , it might be a case of one | |
09:24 | language borrowing from another or simply a coincidence , This | |
09:26 | process of methodically piecing together a probable common ancestor language | |
09:30 | from existing records is called comparative reconstruction , but historical | |
09:34 | linguists don't stop there . We need to find further | |
09:37 | similarities among other sounds . To establish a wider pattern | |
09:40 | , linguists then combine this with information about the grammar | |
09:43 | and evidence from other fields like history , archaeology and | |
09:46 | even genetics to conclude that the languages themselves are related | |
09:50 | comparing unrelated languages is interesting too , because it can | |
09:53 | tell us things about language in general . But this | |
09:55 | is referred to as language typology rather than historical linguistics | |
09:59 | . It takes thousands and thousands of cells in a | |
10:02 | table containing words like father and potter and foster to | |
10:05 | reconstruct hypothesized ancestor language called a proto language . Centuries | |
10:10 | of dedicated and meticulous work to find cognitive and understand | |
10:14 | language change backwards has led to the reconstruction of the | |
10:18 | proto indo european language . It was probably spoken around | |
10:21 | 6000 years ago by a group of nomadic pastoralists somewhere | |
10:25 | east of europe and evolved into many of the languages | |
10:28 | of europe and the indian subcontinent . However , everything | |
10:31 | that we know about their language and culture is only | |
10:34 | an educated guess . We can only guess what it | |
10:37 | would have sounded like because it was before there were | |
10:39 | written records and it's not like audio recordings existed thousands | |
10:42 | of years ago . Other large language families that have | |
10:45 | been reconstructed around the world include proto Semitic , the | |
10:48 | ancestor language of Semitic languages like Arabic mm hark and | |
10:52 | hebrew . Proto algonquian , the ancestor language of Algonquian | |
10:55 | languages like Cree , Ojibwe and massachusetts . Proto austronesian | |
10:59 | . The ancestor language of Austronesian languages like japanese , | |
11:03 | tagalog and Malagasy , proto pam and young in the | |
11:06 | ancestor language of pam and young in languages like y'all | |
11:09 | New corona and Darragh and proto Bantu , the ancestor | |
11:12 | language of Bantu languages including Swahili , zulu and Shona | |
11:16 | . Sometimes even after years of careful study , a | |
11:19 | language doesn't have any evidence of being related to any | |
11:22 | other language near or far , these languages are known | |
11:25 | as isolates and examples include bask in spain and France | |
11:29 | . I knew in japan and korean they might have | |
11:32 | originated independently like nicaraguan sign language or we may have | |
11:35 | lost all record of their relatives regardless at some point | |
11:39 | , we just can't go back any further . Just | |
11:41 | like the real horizon , The path of languages taken | |
11:44 | is no longer visible to us . But there are | |
11:46 | fewer than 100 known isolates and many of the world's | |
11:49 | 7000 languages can be grouped into larger families using methods | |
11:53 | like comparative reconstruction . In the next video , we'll | |
11:56 | learn more about how there came to be so many | |
11:58 | languages around the world . Thanks for watching this episode | |
12:01 | of crash course linguistics . If you want to help | |
12:03 | keep all crash course free for everybody forever , you | |
12:06 | can join our community on Patreon . |
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