How Language Change Actually Took Place

Abstract

The study of language change is a necessary correlate of historical semantics, if not a precondition for it. Yet there are many ways of looking for linguistic alterations: they could be operating at the level of ‘discourse,’ i.e. within an arborescence of ideas; or, they could derive from the material layout of linguistic artefacts. This paper leans toward the latter stance: it commits to analysing language change literally, at its most material, as a physical process of alteration. In administrative and judicial sources from the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Ottoman Empire, that process was referred to (among other names) as taḥrîf. Focusing on the materiality of such rewritings, interpolations, and emulations, means combining two kinds of historical semantics: one that rests on discrete and meaningful lexemes, the other on conceptual relationships embedded in phrasings that determine the choice of words. The case for methodological materialism also implies that language change be understood not primarily as a macroscopic, long-running, institutional process, but as a minute, largely ephemeral, practical event. This way of dealing with historical documents as intrinsically precarious readings lays the groundwork for approaching language change from below.