Comparative Historical Linguistics Research Articles

Comparative sociolinguistic perspectives on the rate of linguistic change

Abstract This issue of the Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics aims to contribute to our understanding of language change in real time by presenting a group of articles particularly focused on social and sociocultural factors underlying language diversification and change. By analysing data from a varied set of languages, including Greek, English, and the Finnic and Mongolic language families, and mainly focussing their investigation on the Middle Ages, the authors connect various social and cultural factors with the specific topic of the issue, the rate of linguistic change. The sociolinguistic themes addressed include community and population size, conflict and conquest, migration and mobility, bi- and multilingualism, diglossia and standardization. In this introduction, the field of comparative historical sociolinguistics is considered a cross-disciplinary enterprise with a sociolinguistic agenda at the crossroads of contact linguistics, historical comparative linguistics and linguistic typology.

The Degree of Relationship among Teochew, Hakka, and Cantonese

This article is entitled "The Degree of Relationship among Teochew, Hakka, and Cantonese". This research is based on theory in Historical Comparative Linguistics. This theory is also called diachronic theory, which involves the analysis of the form and regularity of changes in common languages ​​such as those accompanied by sound changes, to reconstruct the language of the past, the ancient language (proto) that lived on thousands of years before that. The aim of this research is to calculate the cognate percentages of relationship for Teochew (TC), Hakka (HK), and Cantonese (CO). The research method used is quantitative-qualitative method. Data collection method and technique used refer to the method of proficiency and recording. The data analysis method and technique used respectively are qualitative and quantitative methods with lexicostatistic techniques. In lexicostatistics, language kinship is seen based on the similarities of sounds that exist in the lexicon that appears in these languages. This phonetic similarity will be the basis of whether a word in one language has a relationship with another language. The indicator used to determine related words is the basic vocabulary called the Sino-Tibetan Swadesh basic vocabulary which amounts to 207 words that are considered to exist in all languages ​​in the world. After analyzing the 207 words, it is found that TC and HK have 51 related words and are considered in the subgroup of clump or stock (25%), TC and CO have 60 related words and are considered in the subgroup of clump or stock (29%), in addition to HK and CO have 119 words and are considered in the subgroup of family (57%).

LINGUISTIK MODERN PERSEPEKTIF DOKTOR MAHMUD FAHMI AL-HIJAZI

Abstract
 Linguistics is the study of language scientifically. In his study, linguistics has the scope of studies and methods of study. The scope of linguistic studies is phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. Phonology research is the study of language sounds. Morphology is the field of linguistics that studies about word formation and morphemes in a language. Syntax is the study of the structure of language. And the last semantics is the study of meaning. While the methodology of linguistic studies are comparative linguistics, descriptive linguistics, historical linguistics, and contrastive linguistics.

Solon’s poetry in light of comparative-historical linguistics

The subject of this research is the heritage of Indo-European poetics in works of the Ancient Greek poet Solon. The object of this research is the elegies and fragments of his hexametric oeuvres. The authors examine such aspects of the topic as: 1) retention in Solon’s poetry of the structures similar to exposition of hymns in Ancient Greek and Ancient Indian traditions; 2) preservation of stylistic figures widely represented in the poetry of ancient Indo-European peoples; 3) preservation of poetic expressions and mythological ideas that may date back to Indo-European times. For achieving the set goals, the author employ the methods of text hermeneutics, semantic analysis, and comparative-historical linguistics. The following conclusions are made: in the corpus of Solon’s texts there are fragments very similar to expositions of hymns in the Ancient Greek and Vedic traditions; Solon’s poetry contains stylistic approaches that can be reconstructed to the level of Indo-European poetics; poetic expressions and mythological representations dated back to Indo-European times are retained in Solon’s texts.

A modern tudomány előtti és azon kívüli név- és szófejtések alkalmazott vonatkozásai

Applied onomastic aspects of name interpretation before or outside modern science
 The paper reviews the word and name interpretations that existed before and after the emergence of historical-comparative linguistics and that could be found outside and in parallel with it, including classical and medieval etymologization, folk, and contemporary lay etymologies. The research aims to find generalizable features in the sources selected for the purpose of this study in the neglected research field. The first part of the paper explores the reasons for the development of such etymologies at any given time in history, and seeks to define their non-scientific functions in the past and present day. The second part examines the typical methods and directions of these word and name interpretations. The third part focuses on the impacts that etymologies of this category can have on everyday life, human thinking and certain areas of culture. The aim of the study is to draw attention to the potential, possibilities and usefulness of studying etymologies created before or outside modern science as a direction of applied onomastics and folk onomastics.

Язык Корана: особенности морфологии глагола

The Quran is in focus of many researchers as a crucial source of information, including its language. The aim of the study is to describe the morphology of the Quran language in comparison with the modern Arabic literature language, which requires a thorough and comprehensive analysis of its text. The available scientific literature describes the style and vocabulary of the Quran language in detail, while the morphological aspects are not fully studied. The complementary use of modern methods of automatic data processing and techniques of comparative historical linguistics allows not only getting an unbiased picture of the morphology of the classical Arabic language, but also provides the basis for further typological studies. A quantitative analysis of individual verbal word forms in the Quran text in comparison with similar models of the modern Arabic language demonstrates the predominance of archaic forms, which in this case are typical for Arabic dialects, both ancient and modern. The findings substantiate the need for extra insights into the language of the Arabian Peninsula during the emergence of Islam, including on the basis of the Quran studies.

PENERAPAN METODE LEARNING BY DOING SEBAGAI IMPLEMENTASI FILSAFAT PRAGMATISME DALAM MATA KULIAH LINGUISTIK HISTORIS KOMPARATIF

(Title: Application of the Learning by Doing Method as an Implementation of the Pragmatism Philosophy in Comparative Historical Linguistic Subjects). The aim of the article is to describe the implementation of learning by doing method in learning Historical Comparative Linguistics course in Study Program of Indonesian Literature FBS UNY especially on the subject of lexicostatistics and glottochronology. Comparative Historical Linguistics (Linguistik Historis Komparatif/LHK) course is taught in Study Program of Indonesian Literature, Indonesian Language and Literature Education Department, FBS UNY, offered in odd semester and must be taken by the fifth semester students who choose linguistic skill. One of the topics in this course is lexicostatistics and glottochronology. From the results of the examination, it was found that students' understanding and skills of this subject were not entirely satisfactory, therefore learning by doing method was applied so that students had knowledge and skills to determine kinship and a separate period of two languages. In the learning of lexicostatistics and glottochronology subject, the students participating in the class are grouped into several groups. Each group is given the task of calculating the kinship of two languages and then determining the separate period between the two languages. The language studied by each group is different from the other groups. Each group is given the task of finding data in the field. The data is in the form of a lexicon taken from the basic of Swadesh. Students look for respondents who speak the mother tongue of the language who are the object of their research to obtain lexicons from the languages. When the lexicon has been collected, they calculate the kinship and determine the separate period by using the existing formulas. The final results are presented in front of the class. Keyword: learning by doing, pragmatism, comparative historical linguistic

DEVELOPMENT OF UKRAINIAN LANGUAGE’S WORD FORMATION TERMINOLOGY IN THE GRAMATICS OF THE XVI-TH – THE FIRST HALF OF THE XX-TH CENTURY

The article deals with the peculiarities of formation and development of word-formation terminology in the Ukrainian language.The aim of the study is to analyze the formation of specifics and terminological units selection of the word-building system in Ukrainian grammar, from the early stages (XVI-th century.) to the first half of XX-th century. To achieve this goal, it is important to trace the ways of developing the terminology system of word-formation and to define its main stages in the context of the evolution of Ukrainian grammatical terminology in general. It was found that during all periods of the functioning of the Ukrainian language a need for its normalization was appeared, there were problems in the study of language phenomena, which required a clear definition, identical understanding of linguistic concepts, the development and systematization of their terminological names, and most importantly – codification and their implementation in scientific practice. It was formed in the analyzed grammars until the beginning of the XX-th century terminology is a logical step in the history of the development of modern Ukrainian word-formation terminology. It has been proved that these powerful attempts were the first steps towards the establishment of the Ukrainian word process as a separate linguistic branch and laid the foundation for the formation of a terminological word-formation system.The article gives a detailed analysis of the complex process of the Ukrainian linguistic terminology development, including the word creative, based on the analyzed period bilateralism: on the one hand, was subordinated to colloquial language basis, and on the other – was supposed to streamline the achievements of predecessors and normalization and codification vocabulary. It was traced that the leading trend in the termination of this period is the formation of distinctive Ukrainian terminology, however, the authors consistently imitated other language patterns, applied European ideas of historical comparative linguistics, used the heritage of Ukrainian grammarians of the past, involved in the grammatical description of works of contemporary literature, enriched the experience of predecessors by their own ideas.

The Program of Discipline “The Theory of Comparative-Historical Linguistics”

The Program of Discipline “The Theory of Comparative-Historical Linguistics”

The Program of Discipline “The Theory of Comparative-Historical Linguistics”

The Program of Discipline “The Theory of Comparative-Historical Linguistics”

O poglądach Profesora Witolda Mańczaka na paradygmaty językoznawstwa

The paper describes Witold Mańczak’s contribution to the development of general and theoretical linguistics in the last fifty years. Against the background of his monistic notion of language as a material entity, this author presents Mańczak’s critical evaluation of the methodological apparatus of paradigms which came after the inductive historical-comparative linguistics. The analysis focuses primarily on Mańczak’s criticism of Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of language.

Regular homophones: a tool for semantic typology and for linguistic reconstruction

This article deals with two different aspects of “regular homophony” in comparative historical linguistics. “Homophony” is used here as a cover term for both polysemy and homonymy, i.e. all the cases where a word is given several meanings in a dictionary. Our results are based on the semi-automatic analysis of regular homophony in RefLex, the richest online lexical database, which gathers 1,150,000 words from 1289 sources, covering 785 African languages (as of 2018). We show that the first aspect of regular homophony, i.e. regular polysemy, may be effectively used for semantic reconstruction and for the finding of new cognates. An Appendix gives the inventory of all regular polysemic links found in the RefLex corpus for notions included in the Swadesh-100 list. The second aspect, regular homonymy, may be effectively used for the finding of regular sound correspondences between related languages. Such correspondences may even be set up between genetically distant languages, without having to rely on intermediate reconstructions.

Порівняльне мовознавство: цілі, завдання, перспективи розвитку

This is a survey of comparative linguistics viewed as a set of the related paradigms that embrace comparative historical linguistics, aerial linguistics, linguistic typology and contrastive linguistics. The treatment of the science in question is largely based on the author’s long-standing experience deduced from research projects and from teaching it as a University professor. Placing the aforementioned paradigms under the umbrella concept “comparative linguistics” seems relevant and appropriate due to their sharing the key tool of investigation, i.e., COMPARISON, also due to their providing each other with applicable procedures and principles, as in case of two seemingly closer pairs, comparative historical and aerial areal linguistics, on the one hand, linguistic typology and contrastive linguistics, on the other hand.

Linguo-imagology as a New Integrating Direction of Linguistics

Linguo-imagology is considered as a new stage in the development of the language, synthesizing ideas, phenomena and methods of other directions. Linguistic and linguisticology was formed on the basis of imagology - the direction of comparative literary studies, studying the image, (hence the term) of one people or country in the eyes of another, Since the creation of an image is achieved through the use of linguistic means, the foundations of linguo-imagology, which studies the linguistic means of creating the image of one country in the reception of another people. Mirroriness is not obligatory. Thus, in our direction, imagology is synthesized by comparative-historical linguistics (the image of the country can vary over the centuries). axiology (the reception of the other can not be 'passive', there is always an appraisal component), linguoculturology (primarily in terms of units analysis), cognitive linguistics (the category of the linguistic personality, the linguistic picture of the world, concepts), the theory of communication in the aspect of the intercultural field., since linguistic imaging creates a solid foundation her, practical stylistics. All these provisions are implemented on the basis of the vision and assessment of France and the French by D.I. Fonvizin and the US Alexander Pushkin.

Research on the characteristics of ancient kazakh vocabulary

This article takes examples of the fixed and loan words in the kazakh documents from the 18th to 19th centuries, and based on the research theories of historical comparative linguistics and historical philology, preliminary analyzes the characteristics of ancient kazakh vocabulary. For example, the fixed words of ancient kazakh vocabulary are divided into nine, and the loan words are divided into six subsections for detailed study. At the same time, it also emphasizes they leading role in the systematic study of kazakh language development history and the importance of kazakh lexical science research.

Uralo-jukagirische Probleme (1): zu jukagirisch lep(p)ul ‘Blut’

One of the earliest attempts to integrate the Uralo-Yukaghirian languages into the mainstream of comparative historical linguistics was embodied in the research by V.I. Iokhelson during the 1890s. Ever since, linguistic studies of the extant Yukaghirian languages (Samoyed, Tundra and Kolyma dialects) were preoccupied with producing general vocabularies rather than in-depth studies. The present paper should therefore be seen as a suggestion where future research could lead. The discussed topic is the etymology of the term ‘blood’ in Siberian languages, both in semantic terms (‘blood’ relationships) or used interchangeably for ‘soul’.

Bayesian phylolinguistics reveals the internal structure of the Transeurasian family

The historical connection between the Transeurasian languages, i.e. the Japonic, Koreanic, Tungusic, Mongolic, and Turkic languages, is among the most disputed issues of historical linguistics. Here, we will combine the power of classical historical-comparative linguistics and computational Bayesian phylogenetic methods to infer a phylogeny of the Transeurasian languages. To this end, we will use lexical etymologies supporting the reconstruction of proto-Transeurasian forms with meanings that belong to the Leipzig-Jakarta 200 basic vocabulary list. Our application of Bayesian phylogenetic inference to the classification of the Transeurasian languages is unprecedented. In addition to the methodological implications for Bayesian inference applied to proposed language phyla at relatively deep time depths and with relatively sparse sets of surviving daughter languages, our research has also factual implications for the existing theories of Transeurasian relationships. Our results move the field forward in that they provide a quantitative basis to test various competing hypotheses with regard to the internal structure of the Transeurasian family.

August Schleicher and Materialism in 19th-Century Linguistics

SummaryTowards the end of his career, August Schleicher (1821–1868), the great consolidator of Indo-European historical-comparative linguistics in the mid-19th century, famously drew explicit parallels between linguistics and the new evolutionary theory of Darwinism. Based on this, it has become customary in linguistic historiography to refer to Schleicher’s ‘Darwinian’ theory of language, even though it has long been established that Schleicher’s views have other origins that pre-date his contact with Darwinism. For his contemporary critics in Germany, however, Schleicher’s thinking was an example not of Darwinism but of ‘materialism’. This article examines what ‘materialism’ meant in 19th-century Germany – its philosophical as well as its political dimensions – and looks at why Schleicher’s critics applied this label to him. It analyses the relevant aspects of Schleicher’s linguistics and philosophy of science and the criticisms directed against them by H. Steinthal (1823–1899). It then discusses the contemporary movement of scientific materialism and shows how Schleicher’s political views, social background and personal experiences bound him to this movement.

The Lexical and Phonetical Features of The Tengger Dialect of Javanese

Probolinggo, East Java is an area of Pandalungan. Culturally, the area has the mixing of Javanese and Madurese cultures, so as the local languages that are used by the society. Most of Probolinggo people master Javanese as well as Madurese language. Besides, there is one more dialect developing in Probolinggo, that is Tengger dialectdialect. It is used by the Tengger society in Tengger Mountainuos region around Mount Bromo. The Javanese that is used by the Tengger society is different from the Javanese of Probolinggo or even the standard Javanese. The significant difference is in the pronunciation of the vowel. It tends to have the features of the Old Javanese. By doing Comparative Historical Linguistics study, the features of Tengger dialect compared to the Modern and Old Javanese. The qualitative descriptive study uses an observation method to collect the data. Then, they are analyzed by the distributional and identity methods. It indicates that the distribution and development of Javanese as a part of Austronesian language family is not merely innovatively. It can be relix likewise. The Tengger dialect phonetical and lexical features tends to be similar to the Old Javanese feature, not the modern ones as the innovative Javanese.

Inciteful language: knowing and naming technology in south central Africa

ABSTRACTThe word busongo names a kind of technological ‘know-how’ across a large number of languages in south central Africa, a distribution that is a testament to the word’s age. This essay reconstructs the history of the invention and changing meanings of busongo from its first millennium origins and tracks its use to the present using the methods of comparative historical linguistics. The resulting history illustrates the interplay of affective and sensory dimensions of technology in the creation of new understandings of technological practices in medieval central Africa. As a form of conceptual history, the story of busongo also raises new questions about the relationship between tacit knowledge, explicit knowledge and speech: is speech a form of tacit knowledge? If so, what are the implications for the distinction between tacit and explicit knowledge?