#comparative reconstruction

[allthingslinguistic]

The English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000 Years - Nautilus

The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived.Photograph…

Nautilus Magazine has a nice introduction to Proto-Indo-European and sound change. Excerpt: 

One of my favorite words is lox,” says Gregory Guy, a professor of linguistics at New York University. There is hardly a more quintessential New York food than a lox bagel—a century-old popular appetizing store, Russ & Daughters, calls it “The Classic.” But Guy, who has lived in the city for the past 17 years, is passionate about lox for a different reason. “The pronunciation in the Proto-Indo-European was probably ‘lox,’ and that’s exactly how it is pronounced in modern English,” he says. “Then, it meant salmon, and now it specifically means ‘smoked salmon.’ It’s really cool that that word hasn’t changed its pronunciation at all in 8,000 years and still refers to a particular fish.”

Read the whole thing. 

[allthingslinguistic]

The Proto-Algonquian Dictionary is now online! 

Here, we can see the reconstructed common word for "shoe" and its descendants in modern Algonquian languages (themselves the origins of English "moccasin"). 

Proto-Indo-European gets a lot of attention as a proto-language, but there are other reconstructed ancestor languages in other areas of the world. Over 4000 vocabulary items have been reconstructed for Proto-Algonquian and it's great to see the classic dictionary that this is based on now publically searchable. 

It’s not the only Proto-Algonquian resource though, so if you can’t find something there, it’s worth trying other papers and books as well (Goddard and Costa in particular have written a lot about Proto-Algonquian). Many modern Algonquian language dictionaries and recordings are available online, such as the Passamaquoddy-Maliseet Language Portal and the Algonquian Linguistic Atlas. 

[allthingslinguistic]

A video from Arika Okrent with a quick introduction to historical linguistics. For more on historical sound change in European languages, especially Germanic, I always enjoy this classic youtube series on Verner’s Law. 

[allthingslinguistic]

This is a fun thought experiment: projecting historical linguistic methods onto early-stage linguistic changes currently happening in American English, especially this vowel shift, to predict what the language might look like in another thousand years. It’s got a heavy dose of speculation, of course, but it’s very thorough and well-thought-out as far as speculation goes. 

For comparison, the English spoken at the turn of the last millennium looked like this: 1000 AD: Wé cildra biddaþ þé, éalá láréow, þæt þú tǽce ús sprecan rihte, forþám ungelǽrede wé sindon, and gewæmmodlíce we sprecaþ… 2000 AD: We children beg you, teacher, that you should teach us to speak correctly, because we are ignorant and we speak corruptly…

The process of getting to the prediction is really interesting and highly worth the read -- it gets a bit dense among the details in parts, but it’s still worth skipping around. Here’s the conclusion (oddly, one of the only parts that isn’t also in IPA): 

Mind you, if you've been skipping over the phonetics and only looking at the spellings, you'll get an exaggerated impression of the differences between 2000 AD and 3000 AD, since our present‐day standard orthography is basically mock‐Chaucerian (for instance, we still write knight the way they used to say it: as nit with extra consonants).  As a counterbalance to this, instead of repeating my sample text's 2000 AD version spelled as if it was Middle English, I'll do things the other way round and write it according to Classical American conventions here: 2000 AD: Wi txìldran beg yu, titxar, đat yu xùd titx as tu spik karektli, bikaz wi ar ìgnarant and wi spik karàptli… 3000 AD: *Zᴀ kiad w’‐exùn ya tijuh, da ya‐gᴀr’‐eduketan zᴀ da wa‐tᴀgan lidla, kaz ’ban iagnaran an wa‐tᴀg kurrap…