Linguistics

It is concerned with the nature of language and communication. It deals both with the
study of particular languages and the search for general properties common to all
languages or large groups of languages. It includes the following subareas: study of
grammar, syntax, and phonetics.

It also includes explorations into the nature of language variation, language change over
time, how language is processed and stored in the brain, and how it is acquired by young
children.

Linguistics as science

Linguistics operates with publicly verified data obtained by means of observation and
experiment.

The purpose of linguistics is to examine the material and to make general statements
about its various elements that relate to regular rules. It is also an empirical and practical
science, since the material it deals with can be observed with sense. For instance, speech
can be heard, the movement of the speech organs can be seen and writing can be seen and
read.

In order to be acceptable, a theory must be:

1- Exhaustive: one which accounts for all the fact.

2- Economical: one which is as simple and straight forward as possible.

3- Consistent, one in which there are no internal contradictions.

As result of applying these criteria, the steps of the scientific procedure, a linguist is
expected to achieve objectivity in his description which gives linguistics the status of a
science.

Manifestly people differ in their ability to understand languages, analyze meanings, and
pick out the significant features within a mass of material, and to hit on satisfactory ways
of explaining how sentences are constructed or words pounced in particular language. It is
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often said that a good deal of what goes on under the name of language learning makes
the use of intuition.

The objection to intuition in scientific discipline just to its use as the final satisfaction of
a particular statement or manner of analysis.

Industrial revolution

Transforms agricultural society into industrialized one, it is characterized by an increase

use of Machines and factors as well as urbanization.

In the industrial revolution Britain led the world in advance that enabled mass production:
trade exchange, transportation, factory technology, and her skills needed for the new
industrialized worlds.

This period was also the first age of printing in Europe from then on literacy the demand
for education grew steadily. Knowledge travelled faster and speeds more wieldy. The
study of foreign languages as well as that of the classical languages was immeasurably
enlivened by the multiplicity and availability of printed texts, grammars, and dictionaries.
These same factors made the exchange of knowledge and theoretical discussion between
scholars in different lands much easier and more speedy.

Historical linguistics

Is the study of the development in languages in the course of time, of the ways in which
languages change from period to period, and of the causes and results of such changes
both outside the language and within them.

External causes of linguistics change are the contacts between the speakers of different
languages, of the sort that occur when a foreign languages is imposed on a people by
conquest or by political or cultural domination, or when cultural and other factors produce
a high degree of bilingualism between adjacent speech areas. Under such condition
speakers who acquire a second language in adulthood will inevitably bring into their use
of it, phonetic, grammatical, and some lexical habits of their own first language.

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Internal causes of linguistics changes lie in the nature of the transmission of speech
habits from one generation to another. Gradual changes appear to be inevitable, and in the
process some general tendencies are found repeatedly at work in various times and areas.

Comparative linguistics

One is concerned with comparing from one or more points of view two or more different
languages, and more generally with the theory and technique applicable to such
conmaprison.so it is divided onto comparison based on or made with view to inferring
historical relationship among particular language, and comparison based on recumbence
of features between different languages without any historical considerations.

Word forms

Word forms in languages are in the great majority of cases only conventionally liked with
their referents or with their whole semantic functions. Among different languages greater
or smaller numbers of words, in which onomatopoeia and sound symbolism are scarcely
adduce able as relevant and whose meanings are related or similar, exhibit manifest
similarities of phonetic form.

Ex:

Meaning English German French Italian Spanish

Hand hand Hand main mano mano

It will be seen from these examples that English and Germanic constitute one group, and
French, Italian, and Spanish another group, in which these word forms of similar
meanings show obvious similarities with one another, but not between languages of the
different group. This reveals that similarity is only a special case of systematic and regular
correspondences between component sound segments in semantically related words.

Semantic change

Part of the change that takes place in the history of all languages consists of change in the
meanings or semantics functions of some of the words in their vocabularies, considered as

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the continuing lexical content of successive stages of the languages. The conditions of life
of individuals in society, their artefacts, customs, forms of organization, and the like are
constantly changing.

Ex: The appearance in English after the Norman conquest of the words of French origin
(veal, beef, and mutton) caused a contraction in the semantic range of the English words
corresponding to modern English (calf, ox, and sheep) these words no longer employed in
normal discourse to refer to the meat derived from these creatures, and their use in
collocation with words like flesh, meat. Become less widespread.

Meat is now used to refer to butcher's meat, flesh food, though in the time of the
translation of the authorized version of the Bible it meant food in general.

Loan words

Wherever there are culture contacts of any sort between the speakers of different
languages and this means virtually everywhere, speakers will make use of words from
other languages to refer to things, processes, and ways of behavior, organization, or
thinking, for which words or phrases were not available or convenient in their own
language. Some of the foreign words so used by individual speakers pass into general
currency in the language, being altered in pronunciation in the process in the direction of
the sound and phonological patterns of the language acquiring them. They are most
obviously exemplified in the words for foreign products: the words for coffee, tea, and
tobacco.

19 century contained two outstanding successful scientific paradigms.

1- The first of these was in physics, according to which all phenomenon could be
described by simple, deterministic laws of force and motion, so that all future states of the
world could in principle be inferred from a complete knowledge of its present state.

2- The second was the biological theory of evolution by natural selection, which emerged
from a great up surge of interest in natural history during the 18 and 19 centuries and
culminated in Darwin's origin of species.

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From physics, philologists took the notion of describing the history of sound change
occurring in a language in terms of laws which apply uniformly to whole ranges of
examples, rather than discussing individual words in the anecdotal, in which a historian
treats individuals persons or events, one of the first such discoveries, for instance was the
[proto Germanic consonants – shift commonly called Grimm's law.

Grimm's Law

One of the first such discoveries for instance was the proto- Germanic consonant – shift
commonly called Grimm's law. He set out clearly the sound correspondences he had noted
between Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin and the Germanic language.

He had stated that the sound shift succeed in the main, but work out completely only in
the individual sound, while others remain unchanged.

Examples:

(a) A word beginning with a voiceless stop such as /p/ in most Indo-European languages
has for its cognate sound an aspirant /f/ in Germanic languages.

(b) A word beginning in a voiceless stop such as /t/ in most Indo-European languages has
as its cognate sound an aspirant /∂/ ("th") in Germanic languages.

(c) A word beginning in a voiceless stop such as /k/ in most Indo-European languages has
as its cognate sound an /h/ in Germanic languages

While Bopp said that the alternation between different vowels in a morphological
paradigm, of which we retain traces in the conjugation of English strong verbs such as
sing – sang – sung by invoking a law of gravity in connection with relative weight of
different syllables.

Bopp din not feel it is necessary to provide explanations for cases which failed to follow
the general rule.

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Neo grammarians

The last quarter of the century, a group of scholars known as Junggrammatiker (Neo
grammarians) centered near Leipzig. They investigated the sound change of many Indo-
European languages. They thought that sound laws are regular. They admit no exceptions.
Within certain geographical limits and between certain dates, a change of one sound into
another in any language would affect in the same way all words containing the sound in
the same phonetics environment of other sounds, but these changes cannot be expected to
affect all words at the same time. Some words may be subject to the change while others
may escape it or affected by a different change.

Sir William Jones (1786)

1786 was one of the most important dates in the history of linguistics. An English man
called Sir William jones pointed out that Sanskrit, Greek, Germanic, Latin, and Celtic all
had structural similarities. He concluded that all these languages sprang from one
common source. The similarities were found in phonology, grammar and to an extent in
vocabulary as seen in the example

English Latin Greek Sanskrit

Ten decem deka dasa

Two duo duo dva

In the above example intimal and final /t/ in English correspond to the /d/ in other
languages. Whereas these three languages have preserved an original /d/, speakers of
English through history have changed the pronunciation of their /d/ into /t/. These findings
encouraged the historical linguist to group such languages together in families. Such
grouping assumes that these related languages descended from apparent language known
as the proto – language.

Wave theory

In 1872 Johannes Schmidt argued that the family –tree model failed to fit the facts of
Indo-European family, therefore, he focused on seeing the process of linguistics change
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instead in terms of innovations originating at different geographical points and spreading
outwards over arbitrary areas of territory, so that the resulting languages show a pattern of
overlapping rather than historically organized relationship. Proposed another model of
language divergence instead of the family tree model, he proposed the wave theory to
account for the distribution of the Indo-European languages.

He wants to replace [the tree] by the image of a wave that spreads out from the center in
concentric circles becoming weaker and weaker the farther they get away from the center.

It displays languages in a pie-chart diagram in a quasi-geographic space. No information

regarding ancestral states of the languages is given, and no temporal dynamics are shown.

According to this theory, Proto-Indo-European, while still united as a family of dialects,

constituted an aggregate of linguistic innovations, which radiated like waves from the
center of the linguistic unity toward its periphery.

Origin of Species

Group of languages have family trees just as groups of biological species do. French,
Italian and Romanian descend from Latin while English , German and Norwegian descend
from proto – Germanic and Latin, proto – Germanic and various others known or
postulated ancient languages descend from more ancient proto 0ndo- European. This
remind us of situation in biology where man, chimpanzee and Gorilla all descend from an
extinct species of Ape while cat, lion and tiger descend from an extinct proto feline, and
proto-ape, proto – feline and others share a common ancestor further back in geological
time.

Darwin struggle for fittest

Language and language families like species compete with one another in struggle for
survival (consider, in the British isles for instance, how English has spread at the expense
of the Celtic languages: Cornish and Manx are extinct, Welsh and Scottish Garlic live on
but lose ground steadily to English)and on a world scale. Scleicher saw the indo –
European language family as having reached a dominant position linguistically as man
has become dominant zoologically.
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Societies are constantly changing. They grow and evolve, they develop new ideas, they
create new tools; even the eventual interaction with new peoples is an inevitability. We
rely heavily on our language to portray these things that further us as a culture, and if it
cannot grow to accommodate these changes than it has no other option but to be dropped.
Certain words like (groovy - wicked – sweet), all essentially being used to convey the
same thing., but if a language cannot accept the natural course of our speech than it is
doomed to die out.