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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


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