LANGUAGE CHANGE AND TIME
Imagine that you had a time machine. If you are like me, there would be many times and places that you would like to visit. In most of them, however, no one spoke English. If you could not afford the Six-Month-Immersion Trip to, say, ancient Egypt, you would have to limit yourself to a time and place where you could speak the language. Consider, perhaps, a trip to England. How far back in time could you go and still be understood? Say we go to London in the year 1400 CE.
As you emerge from the time machine, a good first line to speak, something reassuring and recognizable, might be the opening line of the Lord’s Prayer. The first line in a conservative, old-fashioned version of Modern Standard English would be, “Our Father, who is in heaven, blessed be your name.” In the English of 1400, as spoken by Chaucer, you would say, “Oure fadir that art in heuenes, halwid be thy name.” Now turn the dial back another four hundred years to 1000 CE, and in Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, you would say, “Fœader ure thu the eart on heofonum, si thin nama gehalgod.” A chat with Alfred the Great would be out of the question.
Most normal spoken languages over the course of a thousand years undergo enough change that speakers at either end of the millennium, attempting a conversation, would have difficulty understanding each other. Languages like Church Latin or Old Indic (the oldest form of Sanskrit), frozen in ritual, would be your only hope for effective communication with people who lived more than a thousand years ago. Icelandic is a frequently cited example of a spoken language that has changed little in a thousand years, but it is spoken on an island isolated in the North Atlantic by people whose attitude to their old sagas and poetry has been one approaching religious reverence. Most languages undergo significantly more changes than Icelandic over far fewer than a thousand years for two reasons: first, no two people speak the same language exactly alike; and, second, most people meet a lot more people who speak differently than do the Icelanders. A language that borrows many words and phrases from another language changes more rapidly than one with a low borrowing rate. Icelandic has one of the lowest borrowing rates in the world.3 If we are exposed to a number of different ways of speaking, our own way of speaking is likely to change more rapidly. Fortunately, however, although the speed of language change is quite variable, the structure and sequence of language change is not.
Language change is not random; it flows in the direction of accents and phrases admired and emulated by large numbers of people. Once a target accent is selected, the structure of the sound changes that moves the speaker away from his own speech to the target is governed by rules. The same rules apparently exist in all our minds, mouths, and ears. Linguists just noticed them first. If rules define how a given innovation in pronunciation affects the old speech system—if sound shifts are predictable—then we should be able to play them backward, in effect, to hear earlier language states. That is more or less how Proto-Indo-European was reconstructed.
Most surprising about sound change is its regularity, its conformation to rules no one knows consciously. In early Medieval French there probably was a time when tsent’m ‘hundred’ was heard as just a dialectical pronunciation of the Latin word kentum ‘hundred’. The differences in sound between the two were allophones, or different sounds that did not create different meanings. But because of other changes in how Latin was spoken, [ts-] began to be heard as a different sound, a phoneme distinct from [k-] that could change the meaning of a word. At that point people had to decide whether kentum was pronounced with a [k-] or a [ts-]. When French speakers decided to use [ts-], they did so not just for the word kentum but in every word where Latin had the sound k- before a front vowel like -e-. And once this happened, ts- became confused with initial s-, and people had to decide again whether tsentum was pronounced with a [ts-] or [s-]. They chose [s-]. This sequence of shifts dropped below the level of consciousness and spread like a virus through all pre-French words with analogous sequences of sounds. Latin cera ‘wax’, pronounced [kera], became French cire, pronounced [seer]; and Latin civitas ‘community’, pronounced [kivitas], became French cité, pronounced [seetay]. Other sound changes happened, too, but they all followed the same unspoken and unconscious rules—the sound shifts were not idiosyncratic or confined to certain words; rather, they spread systematically to all similar sounds in the language. Peoples’ ears were very discriminating in identifying words that fit or did not fit the analogy. In words where the Latin k– was followed by a back vowel like - o it remained a k-, as in Latin costa > French côte.
Sound changes are rule-governed probably because all humans instinctively search for order in language. This must be a hard-wired part of all human brains. We do it without committee meetings, dictionaries, or even literacy, and we are not conscious of what we are doing (unless we are linguists). Human language is defined by its rules. Rules govern sentence construction (syntax), and the relationship between the sounds of words (phonology and morphology) and their meaning. Learning these rules changes our awareness from that of an infant to a functioning member of the human tribe. Because language is central to human evolution, culture, and social identity, each member of the tribe is biologically equipped to cooperate in converting novel changes into regular parts of the language system.4
Historical linguistics was created as a discipline in the nineteenth century, when scholars first exposed and analyzed the rules we follow when speaking and listening. I do not pretend to know these rules adequately, and if I did I would not try to explain them all. What I hope to do is indicate, in a general way, how some of them work so that we can use the “reconstructed vocabulary” of Proto-Indo-European with some awareness of its possibilities and limitations.
We begin with phonology. Any language can be separated into several interlocking systems, each with its own set of rules. The vocabulary, or lexicon, composes one system; syntax, or word order, and sentence construction compose another; morphology, or word form, including much of what is called “grammar” is the third; and phonology, or the rules about which sounds are acceptable and meaningful, is the fourth. Each system has its own peculiar tendencies, although a change in one (say, phonology) can bring about changes in another (say, morphology).5 We will look most closely at phonology and the lexicon, as these are the most important in understanding how the Proto-Indo-European vocabulary has been reconstructed.
PHONOLOGY: HOW TO RECONSTRUCT A DEAD SOUND
Phonology, or the study of linguistic sounds, is one of the principal tools of the historical linguist. Phonology is useful as a historical tool, because the sounds people utter tend to change over time in certain directions and not in others.
The direction of phonetic change is governed by two kinds of constraints: those that are generally applicable across most languages, and those specific to a single language or a related group of languages. General constraints are imposed by the mechanical limits of the human vocal anatomy, the need to issue sounds that can be distinguished and understood by listeners, and the tendency to simplify sound combinations that are difficult to pronounce. Constraints within languages are imposed by the limited range of sounds that are acceptable and meaningful for that language. Often these language-specific sounds are very recognizable. Comedians can make us laugh by speaking nonsense if they do it in the characteristic phonology of French or Italian, for example. Armed with a knowledge of both the general tendencies in the direction of phonetic change and the specific phonetic conventions within a given language group, a linguist can arrive at reliable conclusions about which phonetic variants are early pronunciations and which come later. This is the first step in reconstructing the phonological history of a language.
We know that French developed historically from the dialects of Latin spoken in the Roman province of Gaul (modern France) during the waning centuries of the Roman Empire around 300–400 CE. As late as the 1500s vernacular French suffered from low prestige among scholars, as it was considered nothing more than a corrupt form of Latin. Even if we knew
nothing about that history, we could examine the Latin centum (pronounced [kentum]), and the French cent (pronounced [sohnt]), both meaning “hundred,” and we could say that the sound of the Latin word makes it the older form, that the Modern French form could have developed from it according to known rules of sound change, and that an intermediate pronunciation, [tsohnt], probably existed before the modern form appeared—and we would be right.
Some Basic Rules of Language Change: Phonology and Analogy
Two general phonetic rules help us make these decisions. One is that initial hard consonants like k and hard g tend to change toward soft sounds like s and sh if they change at all, whereas a change from s to k would generally be unusual. Another is that a consonant pronounced as a stop in the back of the mouth (k) is particularly likely to shift toward the front of the mouth (t or s) in a word where it is followed by a vowel that is pronounced in the front of the mouth (e). Pronounce [ke-] and [se-], and note the position of your tongue. The k is pronounced by using the back of the tongue and both e and s are formed with the middle or the tip of the tongue, which makes it easier to pronounce the segment se– than the segment ke-. Before a front vowel like -e we might expect the k– to shift forward to [ts-] and then to [s-] but not the other way around.
This is an example of a general phonetic tendency called assimilation: one sound tends to assimilate to a nearby sound in the same word, simplifying the needed movements. The specific type of assimilation seen here is called palatalization—a back consonant (k) followed by a front vowel (e) was assimilated in French toward the front of the palate, changing the [k] to [s]. Between the Latin [k] (pronounced with the back of the tongue at the back of the palate) and the Modern French [s] (tip of the tongue at the front of the palate) there should have been an intermediate pronunciation ts (middle of the tongue at the middle of the palate). Such sequences permit historical linguists to reconstruct undocumented intermediate stages in the evolution of a language. Palatalization has been systematic in the development of French from Latin. It is responsible for much of the distinctive phonology of the French language.
Assimilation usually changes the quality of a sound, or sometimes removes sounds from words by slurring two sounds together. The opposite process is the addition of new sounds to a word. A good example of an innovation of this kind is provided by the variable pronunciations of the word athlete in English. Many English speakers insert [-uh] in the middle of the word, saying [ath-uh-lete], but most are not aware they are doing so. The inserted syllable always is pronounced precisely the same way, as [-uh], because it assimilates to the tongue position required to pronounce the following -l. Linguists could have predicted that some speakers would insert a vowel in a difficult cluster of consonants like -thl (a phenomenon called epenthesis) and that the vowel inserted in athlete always would be pronounced [-uh] because of the rule of assimilation.
Another kind of change is analogical change, which tends to affect grammar quite directly. For example, the -s or -es ending for the plural of English nouns was originally limited to one class of Old English nouns: stãn for stone (nominative singular), stãnas for stones (nominative plural). But when a series of sound changes (see note 5) resulted in the loss of the phonemes that had once distinguished nouns of different classes, the -s ending began to be reinterpreted as a general plural indicator and was attached to all nouns. Plurals formed with - n (oxen), with a zero change (sheep), and with a vowel change in the stem (women) remain as relics of Old English, but the shift to -s is driving out such “irregular” forms and has been doing so for eight hundred years. Similar analogical changes have affected verbs: help/helped has replaced Old English help/holp as the -ed ending has been reinterpreted as a general ending for the past tense, reducing the once large number of strong verbs that formed their past with a vowel change. Analogical changes can also create new words or forms by analogy with old ones. Words formed with -able and -scape exist in such great numbers in English because these endings, which were originally bound to specific words (measurable, landscape), were reinterpreted as suffixes that could be removed and reattached to any stem (touchable, moonscape).
Phonological and analogical change are the internal mechanisms through which novel forms are incorporated into a language. By examining a sequence of documents within one language lineage from several different points in the past—inscriptions in, say, classical Latin, late vulgar Latin, early Medieval French, later Medieval French, and modern French—linguists have defined virtually all the sound changes and analogical shifts in the evolution of French from Latin. Regular, systematic rules, applicable also to other cases of language change in other languages, explain most of these shifts. But how do linguists replay these shifts “backward” to discover the origins of modern languages? How can we reconstruct the sounds of a language like Proto-Indo-European, for which there are no documents, a language spoken before writing was invented?
“Hundred”: An Example of Phonetic Reconstruction
Proto-Indo-European words were not reconstructed to create a dictionary of Proto-Indo-European vocabulary, although they are extraordinarily useful in this way. The real aim in reconstruction is to prove that a list of daughter terms are cognates, descended from the same mother term. The reconstruction of the mother term is a by-product of the comparison, the proof that every sound in every daughter word can be derived from a sound in the common parent. The first step is to gather up the suspected daughters: you must make a list of all the variants of the word you can find in the Indo-European languages (table 2.1). You have to know the rules of phonological change to do even this successfully, as some variants of the word might have changed radically in sound. Just recognizing the candidates and making up a good list can be a challenge. We will try this with the Proto-Indo-European word for “hundred.” The Indo-European roots for numbers, especially 1 to 10, 100, and 1,000, have been retained in almost all the Indo-European daughters.
Our list includes Latin centum, Avestan sat∂m, Lithuanian šimtas, and Old Gothic hunda– (a root much like hunda– evolved into the English word hundred). Similar-looking words meaning “hundred” in other Indo-European languages should be added, and I have already referred to the French word cent, but I will use only four for simplicity’s sake. The four words I have chosen come from four Indo-European branches: Italic, Indo-Iranian, Baltic, and Germanic.
TABLE 2.1
Indo-European Cognates for the Root “Hundred”
The question we must answer is this: Are these words phonetically transformed daughters of a single parent word? If the answer is yes, they are cognates. To prove they are cognates, we must be able to reconstruct an ancestral sequence of phonemes that could have developed into all the documented daughter sounds through known rules. We start with the first sound in the word.
The initial [k] phoneme in Latin centum could be explained if the parent term began with a [k] sound as well. The initial soft consonants ([s] [sh]) in Avestan sat∂m and Lithuanian šimtas could have developed from a Proto-Indo-European word that began with a hard consonant [k], like Latin centum, since hard sounds generally tend to shift toward soft sounds if they change at all. The reverse development ([s] or [sh] to [k]) would be very unlikely. Also, palatalization and sibilation (shifting to a ‘s’ or ‘sh’ sound) of initial hard consonants is expected in both the Indic branch, of which Vedic Sanskrit is a member; and the Baltic branch, of which Lithuanian is a member. The general direction of sound change and the specific conventions in each branch permit us to say that the Proto-Indo-European word from which all three of these developed could have begun with ‘k’.
What about hunda? It looks quite different but, in fact, the h is expected—it follows a rule that affected all initial [k] sounds in the Germanic branch. This shift involved not just k but also eight other consonants in Pre-Germanic.6 The consonant shift spread throughout the prehistoric Pre-Germanic language community, giving rise to a new Proto-Germanic phonology that would be retained in all the lat
er Germanic languages, including, ultimately, English. This consonant shift was described by and named after Jakob Grimm (the same Grimm who collected fairy tales) and so is called Grimm’s Law. One of the changes described in Grimm’s Law was that the archaic Indo-European sound [k] shifted in most phonetic environments to Germanic [h]. The Indo-European k preserved in Latin centum shifted to h in Old Gothic hunda-; the initial k seen in Latin caput ‘head’ shifted to h in Old English hafud ‘head’; and so on throughout the vocabulary. (Caput>hafud shows that p also changed to f, as in pater >fater). So, although it looks very different, hunda– conforms: its first consonant can be derived from k by Grimm’s Law.
The first sound in the Proto-Indo-European word for “hundred” probably was k. (An initial [k] sound satisfies the other Indo-European cognates for “hundred” as well.)7 The second sound should have been a vowel, but which vowel?
The second sound was a vowel that does not exist in English. In Proto-Indo-European resonants could act as vowels, similar to the resonant n in the colloquial pronunciation of fish’n’ (as in Bob’s gone fish’n’). The second sound was a resonant, either * or *, both of which occur among the daughter terms being compared. (An asterisk is used before a reconstructed form for which there is no direct evidence.) M is attested in the Lithuanian cognate šimtas. An m in the Proto-Indo-European parent could account for the m in Lithuanian. It could have changed to n in Old Indic, Germanic, and other lineages by assimilating to the following t or d, as both n and t are articulated on the teeth. (Old Spanish semda ‘path’ changed to modern Spanish senda for the same reason.) A shift from an original m to an n before a t is explicable, but a shift from an original n to an m is much less likely. Therefore, the original second sound probably was . This consonant could have been lost entirely in Sanskrit satam by yet another assimilative tendency called total assimilation: after the m changed to n, giving *santam, the n was completely assimilated to the following t, giving satam. The same process was responsible for the loss of the [k] sound in the shift from Latin octo to modern Italian otto ‘eight’.
The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How Bronze-Age Riders From the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World Page 4
