Archives - History: Page 29
Author: thelanguageguy (Mon Aug 01, 2005 3:25 pm)
Title: Historical Linguistics
One of my favorite topics to discuss regarding my interest in languages is historical linguistics. Such an extensive family tree exists, branching off countless times, throughout the course of history in which we are able to trace the origins of our language. For many years, linguistic historians have been hard at work creating "proto-languages" from their comparative analysis of modern languages to piece together the speech habits of our ancestors. Perhaps the most famous language family to many of us is the "cut and dry" Romance Family. We may think of Spanish, France, Italian, and Portuguese, and, of course, the mother language, Latin. But did anyone know that Romanian, spoken in the Balkan peninsula, is also a derivative of Latin? What of the many other languages that have died out or are dying that are also members of this family...Occitan, Galician, Provençal...and several others? In many cases, the family tree is not so easy to trace. Language families exist throughout the world, and daughter languages have continuously changed throughout time. This continuous change is what brings us new language. Think for a moment of the differences between Portuguese and its daughter Brazilian Portuguese. These languages are in many cases no longer mutually intelligible to native speakers, and therefore we describe them as "new" languages and not dialects of one another.