What is the character of internal and external language changes?

When did the historical study of languages begin? Who was the first to prove the relations of many languages to each other and the existence of their common source?

Sir William Jones, as a Supreme Court Justice in India, studied Sanskrit and

was struck by the affinity among Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. In 1786, in a paper

delivered to the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal, he proposed that these languages,

as well as Germanic and Celtic languages were descended from a common source,

Indo-European (IE), which was probably spoken between 5,000 and 3,000 B.C.E.

Further Indo-European studies were conducted by Franz Bopp, 1816, who

conducted comparisons of verbal systems of different languages; Rasmus Rask,

who noticed systematic phonological changes (1818); A Schleicher, who made

attempt to reconstruct pre-historic Indo-European forms.

What is the character of internal and external language changes?

In studying the history of a language we are faced with a number of problems

concerning the driving forces or causes of changes in the language. The causes can

apparently be of two kinds: external and internal.

· External causes: language is influenced by factors lying outside it, or

extralinguistic factors. Such historic events as social changes, wars, conquests,

migration, cultural contacts and the like strongly influence a language, especially

its vocabulary.

· Internal causes: many changes that occur in the history of language cannot

be traced to any extralinguistic causes; the driving power in such cases is within

the language itself. Most changes in the phonetic structure of a language, and also

in its grammatical structure, are due to internal causes, for example due to the

general tendency of language to economy: speakers tend to make their utterances

as efficient as possible, they try to exert the least effort in communicating with

language (thus making use of abbreviations, simple grammar structures in spoken

language). Also, many changes are caused by analogy, when speaker tend to liken

similar words and grammatical phenomena.

Date: 2015-01-29; view: 1841