Comparative linguistics

comparative linguistics or comparative historical linguistics (previously "comparative philology") is a branch and technique used in historical linguistics that deals with of comparing languages to establish their historical relationship.

Genetic relationship implies a common origin or protolanguage and comparative linguistics aims to build language families, reconstruct protolanguages and specify the changes that have given rise to the documented languages. To maintain a clear distinction between attested and reconstructed forms, comparative linguists prefix any form not found in surviving texts with an asterisk. Various methods have been developed to carry out language classification, ranging from simple inspection to computerized hypothesis testing. These methods have gone through a long development process.

Methods

The fundamental technique of comparative linguistics consists of comparing phonological systems, morphological systems, syntax and lexicon of two or more languages using techniques such as the comparative method. In principle, any difference between two related languages should be explainable with a high degree of plausibility; Systematic changes, for example in phonological or morphological systems, are expected to be very regular (consistent). In practice, the comparison may be more restricted, for example, to the lexicon only. 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 Ferdinand de Saussure's proposal that the Indo-European consonant system contained laryngeals, a type of consonant not attested in any known Indo-European language at the time. The hypothesis was justified with the discovery of the Hittite, which was shown to have exactly the consonants that Saussure had posited in the environments that he had predicted.

When languages are derived from a very distant ancestor and are therefore more distant, the comparative method becomes less feasible. In particular, attempting to relate two reconstructed protolanguages using the comparative method has not generally produced widely accepted results. The method has also not been very good at unequivocally identifying subfamilies; thus, different scholars have produced conflicting results, for example, in Indo-European. Several methods based on statistical vocabulary analysis have been developed to try to overcome this limitation, such as lexicostatistics and massive comparison. The former uses lexical cognates as a comparative method, while the latter uses only lexical similarity. The theoretical basis for such methods is that vocabulary items can be matched without detailed reconstruction of the language and that matching enough vocabulary items will nullify individual inaccuracies; thus they can be used to determine relationship but not to determine protolanguage.

History

The oldest such method was the comparative method, which developed over many years and culminated in the 19th century. This uses a long list of words and detailed study. However, it has been criticized, for example, for being subjective, informal, and lacking in verifiability. The comparative method uses information from two or more languages and allows for the reconstruction of the ancestral language. The internal reconstruction method uses a single language, with word variant comparison, to perform the same function. Internal reconstruction is more resistant to interference but generally has a limited available base of usable words and is capable of reconstructing only certain changes (those that have left traces as morphophonological variations).

An alternative method, lexicostatistics, was developed in the 20th century, which is primarily associated with Morris Swadesh but is based in previous jobs. Use a short list of basic vocabulary words in different languages to make comparisons. Swadesh used 100 (previously 200) elements that are assumed to be cognate (based on phonetic similarity) in the languages being compared, although other lists have also been used. Distance measures are obtained by examining language pairs, but these methods reduce information. An outgrowth of lexicostatistics is glottochronology, initially developed in the 1950s, which proposed a mathematical formula for establishing the date that two languages separated, based on the percentage of a core vocabulary of culturally independent words. In its simplest form, a constant rate of change is assumed, although later versions allow for variation but still do not achieve much reliability. Glottochronology has met with increasing skepticism and is rarely applied today. Dating estimates can now be generated by computerized methods that have fewer restrictions, calculating rates from the data. However, no mathematical means of producing protolanguage part tenses on the basis of lexical retention has been shown to be reliable.

Another controversial method, developed by Joseph Greenberg, is bulk comparison. The method, which denies any ability to date developments, aims simply to show which languages are closest and least close to each other. Greenberg suggested that the method is useful for preliminary grouping of languages known to be related as a first step towards deeper comparative analysis. However, since bulk comparison avoids establishing regular changes, most historical linguists strongly reject it.

Recently, computerized statistical hypothesis testing methods have been developed that are related to both the comparative method and lexicostatistics. Character-based methods are similar to the former and distance-based methods are similar to the latter. The characters used can be both morphological or grammatical as well as lexical. Since the mid-1990s, these more sophisticated tree- and network-based phylogenetic methods have been used to investigate relationships between languages and to determine approximate dates for proto-languages. These are considered promising by many, but are not fully accepted by traditionalists. However, they are not intended to replace older methods, but rather to complement them. These statistical methods cannot be used to derive the features of a protolanguage, apart from from the fact of the existence of shared elements of the comparative vocabulary. These approaches have been questioned for their methodological problems, since without a reconstruction or at least a detailed list of phonological correspondences there can be no proof that two words in different languages are cognate.

Related fields

There are other branches of linguistics that involve the comparison of languages, but are not part of comparative linguistics:

• La Language compare the languages to classify them by their characteristics. Its ultimate goal is to understand the universals that govern the language and range of types that are found in the languages of the world with respect to any particular characteristic (order of the words or vocal system, for example). The typological similarity does not imply a historical relationship. However, typological arguments can be used in comparative language: a reconstruction can be preferred to another because it is typologically more plausible.
• La language of contact examines the linguistic results of contact among speakers in different languages, particularly as shown in the words provided. An empirical study of loans has, by definition, a historical approach and, therefore, is part of the topic of historical linguistics. One of the objectives of etymology is to establish which elements of a language's vocabulary result from linguistic contact. This is also an important topic for both the comparative method and the lexical comparison methods, as the lack of recognition of a loan can distort the results.
• La contrasting language compares languages generally with the goal of helping language learning by identifying important differences between the native language and the student's target language. The contrasting language deals only with current languages.

Pseudo-linguistic comparisons

Comparative linguistics includes the study of the historical relationships of languages using the comparative method to find regular (ie, recurring) correspondences between the phonology, grammar, and basic vocabulary of languages, and by testing hypotheses; some people with little or no specialization in the field sometimes try to make historical associations between languages by noting similarities between them, in a way that specialists consider pseudoscientific (for example, African/Egyptian comparisons).

The most common method used in pseudoscientific language comparisons is to search two or more languages for words that seem similar in sound and meaning. While similarities of this type often seem convincing to the lay person, linguistic scientists consider this type of comparison unreliable for two main reasons. First, the applied method is not well defined: the similarity criterion is subjective and therefore not subject to verification or falsification, which is contrary to the principles of the scientific method. Second, the large vocabulary of all languages and a relatively limited inventory of articulate sounds used by most languages makes it easy to find similar matching words across languages.

Sometimes there are political or religious reasons for associating languages in ways that some linguists would dispute. For example, it has been suggested that the Ural-Altaic language group, which relates Sami and other languages to the Mongolian language, was used to justify racism towards the Sami in particular. There are also strong similarities, albeit area and not genetic., between the Uralic and Altaic languages, which provided a basis for this theory. In the 1930s in Turkey, some promoted the solar language theory, according to which the Turkic languages would be closer to the original language of humanity. Some believers of the Abrahamic religions attempt to derive their native languages from classical Hebrew, such as Herbert W. Armstrong, a proponent of British Israelism, who said that the word "British" comes from the Hebrew brit which means "covenant" and ish meaning "man" supposedly proving that the British people are the 'pact people'; of God. And the Lithuanian-American archaeologist Marija Gimbutas argued in the mid-XX century that Basque is clearly related to the extinct Pictish and other languages. Etruscan, in an attempt to show that the Basque language was a vestige of an "ancient European culture". In the Dissertatio de origine gentium Americanarum (1625), the Dutch lawyer Hugo Grotius "test" that American Indians (Mohawks) speak a language (lingua Maquaasiorum) derived from Scandinavian languages (Grotius was on Sweden's payroll), supporting Swedish colonial claims in America. The Dutch physician Johannes Goropius Becanus, in his Origines Antverpiana (1580) admits Quis est enim qui non amet patrium sermonem ("Who does not love the language of his parents?"), while claiming that the Hebrew is derived from Dutch. The French Éloi Johanneau stated in 1818 (Mélanges d'origines étymologiques et de questions grammaticales) that the Celtic language is the oldest and the mother of all others.

In 1759, Joseph de Guignes theorized (Mémoire dans lequel on proveve que les Chinois sont une colonie égyptienne) that the Chinese and Egyptians were related, the former being a colony of the latter. In 1885, Edward Tregear (The Maori Aryan) compared the Maori and "Aryan" languages. Jean Prat, in his 1941 Les langues nitales, claimed that the Bantu languages of Africa descended from Latin, coining the French linguistic term nitale in doing so. But the Bantu language was also said to be related to the ancient Egyptian, according to Mubabinge Bilolo. 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 Brabant, following Becanus in his Hieroglyphica, still using comparative methods.

The early practitioners of comparative linguistics were not universally acclaimed: reading Becanus's book, Scaliger wrote that he never read any more nonsense, and Leibniz coined the term goropism (of Goropius) to designate a ridiculous etymology and very far-fetched.

There have also been claims that humans are descended from animals other than primates, with the use of voice as the main point of comparison. Jean-Pierre Brisset (La Grande Nouvelle, circa 1900) believed and claimed that humans were descended from the frog, through linguistic means, due to the croaking of frogs which sounded similar to the French language. He argued that the French word logement ("dwelling"), derived from the word l'eau ("water").