The Comparative Method and Linguistic Reconstruction - Arts and Humanities Assignment Help

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5.1 Introduction

The comparative method is central to historical linguistics, the most important of the various methods and techniques we use to recover linguistic history. In this chapter the comparative method is explained, its basic assumptions and its limitations are considered, and its various uses are demonstrated. The primary emphasis is on learning how to apply the method, that is, on how to reconstruct. The comparative method is also important in language classification, in linguistic prehistory, in research on distant genetic relationships, and in other areas; these topics are treated in later chapters.

We say that languages which belong to the same language family are genetically related to one another: this means that these related languages derive from (that is, ‘descend’ from) a single original language, called a proto-language. In time, dialects of the proto-language develop through linguistic changes in different regions where the language was spoken – all languages (and varieties of language) are constantly changing – and then later through further changes the dialects become distinct languages.

The aim of reconstruction by the comparative method is to recover as much as possible of the ancestor language (the proto-language) from a comparison of the related languages, the descendants of the original language, and to determine what changes have taken place in the various languages that developed from the proto-language. The work of reconstruction usually begins with phonology, with an attempt to reconstruct the sound system; this leads in turn to reconstruction of the vocabulary and grammar of the proto-language. As can be seen from the way languages are classified, we speak of linguistic relationships in terms of kinship; we talk about ‘sister languages’, ‘daughter languages’, ‘parent language’ and ‘language families’. If reconstruction is successful, it shows that the assumption that the languages are related is warranted. (See Chapter 6 for family-tree classification and Chapter 13 for methods of determining whether languages are related.)

With the genealogical analogy of your family tree in mind, we can see how modern Romance languages have descended from spoken Latin (better said, from Proto-Romance, which is reconstructed via the comparative method), illustrated in the family tree for the Romance languages in Figure 5.1. (The biological kinship terms added here under the language names in Figure 5.1 are just a trick to reveal the pedigree of the languages; in this case the focus is on Spanish. This is certainly not conventionally done in linguistic family trees.)

By comparing what these sister languages inherited from their ancestor, we attempt to reconstruct the linguistic traits which Proto-Romance possessed. (Proto-Romance is equivalent to the spoken language at the time when Latin began to diversify and split up into its descendant branches, essentially the same as Vulgar Latin at the time. The ‘Vulgar’ of Vulgar Latin means ‘of the people’.) If we are successful, what we reconstruct for Proto-Romance by the comparative method should be similar to the Proto-Romance which was actually spoken at the time before it split up into its daughter languages. Of course, our success is dependent upon the extent to which evidence of the original traits is preserved in the descendant languages (daughter languages) which we compare and upon how astute we are at applying the techniques of the comparative method, among other things. In this case, since Latin is abundantly documented, we can check to see whether what we reconstruct by the comparative method accurately approximates the spoken Latin we know about from written sources. However, the possibility of checking our reconstructions in this way is not available for most language families, for whose proto-languages we have no written records. For example, for Proto-Germanic (from which English descends), there are no written attestations at all, and the language is known only from comparative reconstruction

Currently existing languages which have relatives all have a history which classifies them into language families. By applying the comparative method to related languages, we can postulate what that common earlier ancestor was like – we can reconstruct that language. Thus, comparing English with its relatives, Dutch, Frisian, German, Danish, Swedish, Icelandic and so on, we attempt to understand what the proto-language, in this case called ‘ProtoGermanic’, was like. Thus, English is, in effect, a much-changed ‘dialect’ of Proto-Germanic, having undergone successive linguistic changes to make it what it is today, a different language from Swedish and German and its other sisters, which underwent different changes of their own. Therefore, every protolanguage was once a real language, regardless of whether we are successful at reconstructing it or not.

5.2 The Comparative Method Up Close and Personal

To illustrate the application of the comparative method, let’s begin by applying it briefly in a simplified fashion to some Romance languages. (There are many more Romance languages, but for illustration’s sake, this miniature introduction is limited to just a few of the better-known of these.) First, consider some data, the words compared among Romance languages given in Table 5.1. (The first line represents conventional spelling; the second is phonemic.)

Latin is not a Romance language; the Latin forms in Table 5.1 are presented only so that ultimately we can check the reconstructions which we postulate for Proto-Romance to see how close they come to the forms in the actual spoken proto-language, which was essentially the same as Latin in this case. To understand the comparative method and to be able to apply it, we need to control some concepts and technical terms:

Proto-language: (1) the once spoken ancestral language from which aughter languages descend; (2) the language reconstructed by the comparative method which represents the ancestral language from which the compared languages descend. (To the extent that the reconstruction by the comparative method is accurate and complete, (1) and (2) should coincide.)

Step 1: Assemble cognates

To begin to apply the comparative method, we look for potential cognates among related languages (or among languages for which there is reason to suspect relatedness) and list them in some orderly arrangement (in rows or columns). In Table 5.1, this step has already been done for you for the few Romance cognates considered in this exercise. In general, it is convenient to begin with cognates from ‘basic vocabulary’ (body parts, close kinship terms, low numbers, common geographical terms), since these resist borrowing more than other sorts of vocabulary, and for the comparative method we want to compare only true cognates, words which are related in the daughter languages by virtue of being inherited from the proto-language. For successful reconstruction, we must eliminate all other sets of similar words which are not due to inheritance from a common ancestor, such as those which exhibit similarities among the languages because of borrowing, chance (coincidence) and so on (for details, see Chapter 13). Ultimately, it is the systematic correspondences which we discover in the comparative method (in the following steps) which demonstrate true cognates.

Step 2: Establish sound correspondences

Next, we attempt to determine the sound correspondences. For example, in the words for ‘goat’ in cognate set 1 in Table 5.1, the first sound in each language corresponds in the way as indicated in SOUND CORRESPONDENCE 1 (here now we concentrate on the phonemic representation of the sound and not on the conventional spelling):

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