Comparative linguistics

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For the "comparative" in language, see comparative.

Not to be confused with contrastive linguistics.

Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) is a branch of historical

linguistics that is concerned with comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness.
Genetic relatedness implies a common origin or proto-language and comparative linguistics aims
to construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have
resulted in the documented languages. To maintain a clear distinction between attested and
reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix an asterisk to any form that is not found in
surviving texts. A number of methods for carrying out language classification have been
developed, ranging from simple inspection to computerised hypothesis testing. Such methods
have gone through a long process of development.
Contents
[hide]

1Methods

2History

3Related fields

4Pseudolinguistic comparisons

5See also

6References

7Bibliography

Methods[edit]
The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics is to compare phonological systems,
morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon of two or more languages using techniques such
as the comparative method. In principle, every difference between two related languages should
be explicable to a high degree of plausibility and systematic changes, for example in
phonological or morphological systems are expected to be highly regular (i.e. consistent). In
practice, the comparison may be more restricted, e.g. just to the lexicon. In some methods it may
be possible to reconstruct an earlier proto-language. Although the proto-languages reconstructed
by the comparative method are hypothetical, a reconstruction may have predictive power. The
most notable example of this is Saussure's proposal that the Indo-Europeanconsonant system
contained laryngeals, a type of consonant attested in no Indo-European language known at the
time. The hypothesis was vindicated with the discovery of Hittite, which proved to have exactly
the consonants Saussure had hypothesized in the environments he had predicted.
Where languages are derived from a very distant ancestor, and are thus more distantly related,
the comparative method becomes impracticable.[1] In particular, attempting to relate two
reconstructed proto-languages by the comparative method has not generally produced results
that have met with wide acceptance.[citation needed] The method has also not been very good at

unambiguously identifying sub-families and different scholars [who?] have produced conflicting
results, for example in Indo-European.[citation needed] A number of methods based on statistical analysis
of vocabulary have been developed to try and overcome this limitation, such
as lexicostatistics and mass comparison. The former uses lexical cognates like the comparative
method but the latter uses only lexical similarity. The theoretical basis of such methods is that
vocabulary items can be matched without a detailed language reconstruction and that comparing
enough vocabulary items will negate individual inaccuracies. Thus they can be used to determine
relatedness but not to determine the proto-language.

History[edit]
The earliest method of this type was the comparative method, which was developed over many
years, culminating in the nineteenth century. This uses a long word list and detailed study.
However, it has been criticized for example as being subjective, being informal, and lacking
testability.[2] The comparative method uses information from two or more languages and allows
reconstruction of the ancestral language. The method of Internal reconstruction uses only a
single language, with comparison of word variants, to perform the same function. Internal
reconstruction is more resistant to interference but usually has a limited available base of
utilizable words and is able to reconstruct only certain changes (those that have left traces as
morphophonological variations).
In the twentieth century an alternative method, lexicostatistics, was developed, which is mainly
associated with Morris Swadesh but is based on earlier work. This uses a short word list of basic
vocabulary in the various languages for comparisons. Swadesh used 100 (earlier 200) items that
are assumed to be cognate (on the basis of phonetic similarity) in the languages being
compared, though other lists have also been used. Distance measures are derived by
examination of language pairs but such methods reduce the information. An outgrowth of
lexicostatistics is glottochronology, initially developed in the 1950s, which proposed a
mathematical formula for establishing the date when two languages separated, based on
percentage of a core vocabulary of culturally independent words. In its simplest form a constant
rate of change is assumed, though later versions allow variance but still fail to achieve reliability.
Glottochronology has met with mounting scepticism, and is seldom applied today. Dating
estimates can now be generated by computerised methods that have fewer restrictions,
calculating rates from the data. However, no mathematical means of producing proto-language
split-times on the basis of lexical retention has been proven reliable.
Another controversial method, developed by Joseph Greenberg, is mass comparison.[3] The
method, which disavows any ability to date developments, aims simply to show which languages
are more and less close to each other. Greenberg suggested that the method is useful for
preliminary grouping of languages known to be related as a first step toward more in-depth
comparative analysis.[4] However, since mass comparison eschews the establishment of regular
changes, it is flatly rejected by the majority of historical linguists. [5]
Recently, computerised statistical hypothesis testing methods have been developed which are
related to both the comparative method and lexicostatistics. Character based methods are similar
to the former and distanced based methods are similar to the latter (see Quantitative
comparative linguistics). The characters used can be morphological or grammatical as well as
lexical.[6] Since the mid-1990s these more sophisticated tree- and networkbased phylogenetic methods have been used to investigate the relationships between languages
and to determine approximate dates for proto-languages. These are considered by many to show
promise but are not wholly accepted by traditionalists.[7] However, they are not intended to
replace older methods but to supplement them.[8] Such statistical methods cannot be used to
derive the features of a proto-language, apart from the fact of the existence of shared items of
the compared vocabulary. These approaches have been challenged for their methodological
problems, since without a reconstruction or at least a detailed list of phonological
correspondences there can be no demonstration that two words in different languages are
cognate.[citation needed]

Related fields[edit]
There are other branches of linguistics that involve comparing languages, which are not,
however, part of comparative linguistics:

Linguistic typology compares languages to classify them by their features. Its ultimate
aim is to understand the universals that govern language, and the range of types found in the
world's languages in respect of any particular feature (word order or vowel system, for
example). Typological similarity does not imply a historical relationship. However, typological
arguments can be used in comparative linguistics: one reconstruction may be preferred to
another as typologically more plausible.

Contact linguistics examines the linguistic results of contact between the speakers of
different languages, particularly as evidenced in loan words. An empirical study of loans is by
definition historical in focus and therefore forms part of the subject matter of historical
linguistics. One of the goals of etymology is to establish which items in a language's
vocabulary result from linguistic contact. This is also an important issue both for the
comparative method and for the lexical comparison methods, since failure to recognize a
loan may distort the findings.

Contrastive linguistics compares languages usually with the aim of assisting language
learning by identifying important differences between the learner's native and target
languages. Contrastive linguistics deals solely with present-day languages.

Pseudolinguistic comparisons[edit]
Main article: Pseudoscientific language comparison
Comparative linguistics includes the study of the historical relationships of languages using the
comparative method to search for regular (i.e. recurring) correspondences between the
languages' phonology, grammar and core vocabulary, and through hypothesis testing [clarification needed];
some persons with little or no specialization in the field sometimes attempt to establish historical
associations between languages by noting similarities between them, in a way that is
considered pseudoscientific by specialists (e.g. African/Egyptian comparisons[9]).
The most common method applied in pseudoscientific language comparisons is to search two or
more languages for words that seem similar in their sound and meaning. While similarities of this
kind often seem convincing to laypersons, linguistic scientists consider this kind of comparison to
be unreliable for two primary reasons. First, the method applied is not well-defined: the criterion
of similarity is subjective and thus not subject to verification or falsification, which is contrary to
the principles of the scientific method. Second, the large size of all languages' vocabulary and a
relatively limited inventory of articulated sounds used by most languages makes it easy to find
coincidentally similar words between languages.
There are sometimes political or religious reasons for associating languages in ways that some
linguists would dispute. For example, it has been suggested that the Turanian or UralAltaic
language group, which relates Sami and other languages to the Mongolian language, was used
to justify racism towards the Sami in particular.[10] There are also strong, albeit areal not genetic,
similarities between the Uralic and Altaic languages which provided an innocent basis for this
theory. In 1930s Turkey, some promoted the Sun Language Theory, one that showed that Turkic
languages were close to the original language. Some believers in Abrahamic religions try to
derive their native languages from Classical Hebrew, as Herbert W. Armstrong, a proponent
of British Israelism, who said that the word 'British' comes from Hebrew brit meaning 'covenant'
and ish meaning 'man', supposedly proving that the British people are the 'covenant people' of
God. And Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas argued during the mid-1900s that
Basque is clearly related to the extinct Pictish and Etruscan languages, in attempt to show that
Basque was a remnant of an "Old European culture".[11] In the Dissertatio de origine gentium
Americanarum (1625), the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius "proves" that the American Indians

(Mohawks) speak a language (lingua Maquaasiorum) derived from Scandinavian languages

(Grotius was on Sweden's payroll), supporting Swedish colonial pretensions in America. The
Dutch doctor Johannes Goropius Becanus, in his Origines Antverpiana (1580) admits Quis est
enim qui non amet patrium sermonem ("Who does not love his fathers' language?"), whilst
asserting that Hebrew is derived from Dutch. The Frenchman loi Johanneau claimed in 1818
(Mlanges d'origines tymologiques et de questions grammaticales) that the Celtic language is
the oldest, and the mother of all others.
In 1759, Joseph de Guignes theorized (Mmoire dans lequel on prouve que les Chinois sont une
colonie gyptienne) that the Chinese and Egyptians were related, the former being a colony of
the latter. In 1885, Edward Tregear (The Aryan Maori) compared the Maori and "Aryan"
languages. Jean Prat (fr), in his 1941 Les langues nitales, claimed that the Bantu languages of
Africa are descended from Latin, coining the French linguistic term nitale in doing so. But the
Bantu language is also claimed to be related to Ancient Egyptian by Mubabinge Bilolo (fr). Ancient
Egyptian is, according to Cheikh Anta Diop, related to the Wolof language. And, according
to Gilbert Ngom, Ancient Egyptian is similar to the Duala language. Just as Egyptian is related to
Brabantic, following Becanus in his Hieroglyphica, still using Comparative methods.
The first practicians of Comparative linguistics were not universally acclaimed: upon reading
Becanus' book, Scaliger wrote never did I read greater nonsense, and Leibnitz coined the
term goropism (from Goropius) to designate a far-sought, ridiculous etymology.
There have also been claims that humans are descended from other, non-primate animals, with
use of the voice referred to as the main point of comparison. Jean-Pierre Brisset (La Grande
Nouvelle, around 1900) believed and asserted that humans descended from the frog, by
linguistic means, due to frogs' croaking sounding similar to the French language. He held that the
French word logement, "dwelling", derived from the word l'eau, "water".

Comparative linguistics
noun
1.
the study of similarities and differences between languages, in particular the
comparison of related languages with a view to reconstructing forms in their lost
parent languages.
In linguistics, the comparative method is a technique for studying the development of
languages by performing a feature-by-feature comparison of two or more languages with
common descent from a shared ancestor, in order to extrapolate back to infer the properties of
that ancestor. The comparative method may be contrasted with the method of internal
reconstruction, in which the internal development of a single language is inferred by the analysis
of features within that language.[1] Ordinarily both methods are used together to reconstruct
prehistoric phases of languages, to fill in gaps in the historical record of a language, to discover
the development of phonological, morphological, and other linguistic systems, and to confirm or
refute hypothesized relationships between languages.
The comparative method was developed over the 19th century. Key contributions were made by
the Danish scholars Rasmus Rask and Karl Verner and the German scholar Jacob Grimm. The
first linguist to offer reconstructed forms from a proto-language was August Schleicher, in
his Compendium der vergleichenden Grammatik der indogermanischen Sprachen, originally
published in 1861.[2] Here is Schleichers explanation of why he offered reconstructed forms: [3]