2.

Comparative linguistics methodology and

instrumentation

Comparative linguistics (originally comparative philology) =

a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with
comparing languages to establish their historical relatedness.
Genetic relatedness = common origin or proto-language
comparative linguistics aims to
o construct language families
o reconstruct proto-languages
o specify the changes that have resulted in the
documented languages
clear distinction between attested and
reconstructed forms, comparative
Methods for carrying out language classification have been
developed from simple inspection to computerized hypothesis
testing. Such methods have gone through a long process of
development.
What to compare:
o phonological systems,
o morphological systems,
o syntax

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.
Some methods are used to reconstruct earlier proto-languages,
although the reconstruction by the comparative method is
hypothetical, but it has a predictive power.
The most notable example of this is Saussure's proposal
that the Indo-European consonant system contained
laryngeals, a type of consonant attested in no IndoEuropean 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.
In particular, attempting to relate two reconstructed protolanguages by the comparative method has not generally
produced results that have met with wide acceptance. The
method has also not been very good at unambiguously
identifying sub-language families

Comparative methods are sometimes developed on:

statistical analysis of vocabulary (lexicostatistics)
o analysis of cognates
mass comparison (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 of comparative linguistics
The earliest method of comparative linguistics research was the
comparative method which was developed over many years,
culminating in the nineteenth century, although it has been
criticized as being
subjective,
informal and
lacking testability
The comparative method uses information from two or
more languages and allows reconstruction of the ancestral
language.
internal reconstruction

o within a single language, with comparison of word

variants, to perform the same function (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)
o between two languages to reconstruct their original
source
lexicostatistics was developed in the XXth century by
Morrris Swadesh. Morris Swadesh (1909 1967; an
influential and controversial American linguist. In his work,
he applied basic concepts of historical linguistics to the
indigenous languages of Americas, similar to the very clear
example of language change, i.e. the shift from Latin to the
Romance languages (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese
and Romanian) that occurred in Europe in fewer than 2000
years. And because these languages were written it would
be easy to gauge the rate of change. He considered this a
basic principle that could be applied to all languages. He
spent much of his life comparing hundreds of Indigenous
languages of the Americas and mapping their relatedness.
mass comparison =another controversial method,
developed by Joseph Greenberg
o 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 towards
more in-depth comparative analysis

 computerized statistical hypothesis testing methods related

to both the
o comparative method and
o lexicostatistics
Character based methods of linguistic investigation
(supplementary methods)
The characters used can be
morphological
grammatical
lexical
Since the mid-1990s these more sophisticated tree/networkbased phylogenetic methods have been used to investigate
the relationships between languages and to determine
approximate dates for proto-languages. 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.
Quantitative comparative linguistics (identify instances
of genetic relatedness amongst languages)
o Statistical methods have been used at least the 1950s
(Swadesh) Since about the year 2000, there has been a
renewed interest in the topic, based on the application
of methods of
computational phylogenetics and

 cladistics to define an optimal tree/network to

represent a hypothesis about the evolutionary
ancestry and perhaps its language contacts. The
probability of relatedness of languages can be
quantified and sometimes the proto-languages
can be approximately dated.
The steps in quantitative analysis are
(i) to devise a procedure based on theoretical grounds, on a
particular model or on past experience, etc.
(ii) (ii) to verify the procedure by applying it to some data
where there exists a large body of linguistic opinion for
comparison (this may lead to a revision of the procedure
of stage (i) or at the extreme of its total abandonment)
(iii) (iii) to apply the procedure to data where linguistic
opinions have not yet been produced, have not yet been
firmly established or perhaps are even in conflict.

 phylogenetic methods: a multi-stage process:

o (a) the encoding stage - getting from real languages
to some expression of the relationships between them
in the form of numerical or state data, so that those
data can then be used as input to phylogenetic
methods
o (b) the representation stage - applying phylogenetic
methods to extract from those numerical and/or state
data a signal that is converted into some useful form of
representation, usually two dimensional graphical ones
such as trees or networks, which synthesize and
"collapse" what are often highly complex multi
dimensional relationships in the signal
o (c) the interpretation stage - assessing those tree and
network representations to extract from them what
they actually mean for real languages and their
relationships through time
Pseudo-linguistic comparisons
Little or no specialization comparison 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.
The most common method applied in pseudoscientific language
comparisons is to
search two or more languages for words that seem similar
in their sound/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:
o the method applied is not well-defined: the criterion of
similarity is subjective and thus not subject to
verification/falsification, which is contrary to the
principles of the scientific method.
o 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 Ural-Altaic
language group, which relates Sami and other languages to
the Mongolian language was used to justify racism towards
the Sami (European Nordic languages) in particular.
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 archeologist 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".In the Dissertatio
de origine gentium Americanarum (1625), the Dutch lawyer
Hugo Grotius proves that the American Indians (Mohawaks)

speak a language (lingua Maquaasiorum) derived from

Scandinavian languages (Grotius was on Sweden's payroll),
supporting Swedish colonial pretensions in America. The Dutch
doctor JohanesGoroipius Becanus in his Orgines 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 - a claim considered so
ridiculous thatLeibniz coined the term"goropism" to mean
"absurd etymology". The Frenchman Eloi 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 (link to French Wikipedia article), in his
1941Les langues nitales, claimed that the Bantu languages of
Africa are descended from Latin, coining the French linguistic
termnitale in doing so.
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".

New Comparative Patterns and Approaches

The early influence of the Greek and Hebraic traditions made
scholars imagine that words had been created as they were. But
they rather focused on the mythical name giver or the agent
than the language itself which was due to the divine majesty.
(Jones, R. 1764:5)
In the time of Enlightenment, speculations on the historical roots
of languages were based on the vastly, complex wealth of
linguistic material that the colonial expansion acquired. Sir
William Jones1, the Darwin of the historical linguistics, made his
lectures notorious as he promoted ideas of a new grammar based
on the common descent of Greek, Latin and Sanskrit. His
conclusions were so authoritative that they generated a cascade
of comparative ethnographic scholarly work tracing back the
origins of words and languages. (van Wyhe, 2005: 94-100)
Genealogical descendency of languages ideas made their own
ways to the European intellectuals. The phonetic correspondences
research in the several languages worked out by the German
philologists, Franz Bopp and Jacob Grimm revealing their
relatedness came to be known under the name of Grimms Law 2.
The 19th century continued to be marked by the prolific language
genealogical descendency theory producing new outcomes.
Hensleigh Wedgwood, cousin of Darwin, established the
Philological Society in London3 and work out the first etymological
dictionary that later became Oxford English Dictionary.
The new historical approach of language descendency study was
largely debated. The astronomer John Herschel wrote in 1836 to
the geologist Charles Lyell an open letter making his view public
on Western European languages (van Wyhe, 2005: 94-100)

1
2
3

Words are to the Anthropologist what rolled pebbles are to

the Geologist Battered relics of past ages often containing
within them indelible records
capable of intelligible interpretation and when we see what
amount of change 2000 years has been able to produce in
the languages of Greece & Italy or 1000 in those of Germany
France & Spain we naturally begin to ask how long a period
must have lapsed since the Chinese, the Hebrew, the
Delaware & the Malesass had a point in common with the
German &
Italian & each other.4
The time for the first Language family tree reconstruction had
arrived. The German linguist August Schleicher developed his
Indo-Germanic tree diagram in 1853 illustrating the gradual
changing and diverging languages under the influence of Darwins
Origin of Species published in 1860. His Die Darwinsche Theorie
und
die Sprachwissenschaft5 focused on the differential relationship
between the diverse organic forms in nature that Darwin had
shown was the same as the relationship philologists had
illustrated between diverse languages. Schleicher hoped that
biology and the science of language were about to converge
because branched descent with modification was so evident in
both. (van Wyhe, 2005: 94-100)
The Anglican Church admitted that languages developed
according to the natural laws of progress from the linguistic germ
implanted by the Creator. The clergyman Frederic William Farrar 6
4

Quoted in Desmond, A. and Moore, J. (1992) Darwin, Penguin (London, UK), p. 214

Schleicher, A. (1863) Die Darwinsche Theorie und die Sprachwissenschaft, Bhlan

the son of a missionary in India, took his London BA in 1852 and became a major public figure. He wrote some
volumes of popular fiction, and several important works in philology and theology

developed a tree diagram of the Indo-European language family

based on the progress towards perfection principle inspired from
Darwin. According to it, the hypothetical primitive languages
developed into the complex and refined modern western ones.
The German-born linguist and orientalist Friedrich Max Mller 7
claimed to be an evolutionist long before Darwin in his works of
comparable philology of the Germanic languages.
I was a Darwinian long before Darwin. How a student
of the Science of Language can be anything but an
evolutionist, is to me utterly unintelligible. He has to
deal with nothing but evolution from beginning to end,
Latin becomes French before his very eyes, Saxon
becomes English, Sanskrit, Bengali. (Mller, F.M.,1887)

Comparative historical language analysis is increasingly

associated with evolutionary approaches which put the
phylogenetic tree-building and network based techniques at work
to estimate descent relationship in biology and to signal historical
branching process. The similarities that Darwin noticed between
the evolution of species and the evolution of languages (van
Wyhe, 2005: 94-100) have been carried further in the 21th
century pointing out mutuality of languages and biological
organisms traits: heritability, mutation, deme-based structuring of
transmission pathways, allopatric (e. g. geographic) and
sympatric (e.g. sociolinguistic) and divergence mechanisms
(Steele, J. Jordan, P. Cochrane, E. 2010)
The linguistic matrix paralleled to an alignment of gene sequence reveals the
productivity of the comparative research patterns. The reconstructed phylogenetic
linguistic trees prove to be scientifically yielding not only for the understanding
languages diversity and evolution, but also the human genetics. The application of
the comparative linguistics approach to the human biology drives the analogy
7

one of the founders of the Indian studies and the comparative linguistics and comparative religion. He studied the
Turanian family of peoples and languages.

between the phenomenon of language diversity and the biological evolution as

remarkable culturally transmitted replicators8 by exploiting the genetic-like
properties of language. The taxonomic criteria community for both linguistic and
biological evolution comprises key parallel discrete heritable units like the
biological nucleotides, aminoacids and genes and the language words, phonemes
and syntax. Other features of language development were extended analogically by
the genetic system: teaching, learning and imitation correspond to mechanisms of
replication, whereas linguistic innovation (formant variation, mistakes, sound
changes) correspond to genetic mutation or alteration; cognates are paralleled to
homology, social selection and trends to natural selection, language borrowings is
associated to horizontal gene transfer, language Creolization to hybridization,
ancient texts to fossils and language death to extinction9.
The addition of data and statistical modeling to the phylogenetic comparative
methods answers the questions of human behavioral ecology and makes the
linguistic research outcome more relevant than those estimated from the ones
derived from the genetic data.

The research was carried out by the School of Biological Sciences of the University of Reading together with the
Institute of Santa Fe, New Mexico and published online on 7 May 2009 in Nature Reviews/Genetics, vol. 10 by
Mark Pagel
9
The author selected some of the analogue criteria of the comparison research between biological and linguistic
evolution provided by the same research paper