Language Change
Introduction to Linguistics
Course 1 · Chapter 8 · Language Change
Every living language changes. Shakespeare's English is hard work for a modern reader, and Old English (Hwæt! Wē Gār-Dena …) needs a translation. Nobody decided that these changes should happen, and no speaker notices them in a single lifetime, yet over centuries they add up to new languages. This chapter looks at how sounds, meanings and words change, how linguists use the regular patterns to show that languages are related, and where a deliberately planned language such as Esperanto fits in.
Why Languages Change
Change comes from ordinary use. Children learn the language from what they hear and rebuild the rules slightly differently. Speakers copy people they admire, take shortcuts in fast speech, and meet other languages. The result is not decay: a changed language is as complete and regular as the one before it (the point from Chapter 1). The prescriptive complaint that "gonna is lazy" is the same kind of complaint that was once made against forms we now consider standard.
Sound Change
Sound changes are strikingly regular: when a sound changes, it changes in every word where it occurs in the same environment. This regularity is the foundation of historical linguistics. The best-known example is the set of Germanic changes described by Jacob Grimm (Grimm's Law), which separates English from Latin and the languages descended from it:
| Latin | English | Meaning | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| pater | father | father | p → f |
| pes (ped-) | foot | foot | p → f |
| piscis | fish | fish | p → f |
| tres | three | three | t → θ |
| cornu | horn | horn | k → h |
| decem | ten | ten | d → t |
The pattern repeats in every word, which is why it can't be coincidence. French, which descends from Latin, kept the old sounds: père, pied, poisson, trois, dix. German went through a second round of changes of its own, which is why English ten and two are German zehn and zwei.
Another large English change is the Great Vowel Shift, roughly 1400–1700, when the long vowels all moved up in the mouth. Before it, bite sounded like beet and mouse sounded like moose. Spelling stayed put while pronunciation moved, which is why English spelling looks so odd (Chapter 2).
Meaning Change
Word meanings drift in recognisable directions:
| Type | What happens | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Broadening | meaning becomes wider | dog was once one particular breed; now all dogs |
| Narrowing | meaning becomes narrower | meat once meant any food; hound once meant any dog |
| Amelioration | meaning becomes more positive | nice once meant "foolish" |
| Pejoration | meaning becomes more negative | silly once meant "blessed" or "innocent" |
| Metaphorical shift | a concrete meaning is extended | grasp an idea; see what you mean (Chapter 6) |
Small grammatical words often come from full words by grammaticalisation: English going to (travel somewhere) became the future marker gonna, as in It's gonna rain. The French future (je chanterai) began as Latin "I have to sing", and the endings are the remains of the Latin verb "have".
Borrowing
Languages in contact exchange words. English is a particularly heavy borrower, which is why it has so many near-synonyms from different sources:
Loanwords are adapted to the sound patterns of the borrowing language, which is the phonotactics from Chapter 3 at work. Hungarian has words from Turkic, Slavic and German sources, and Esperanto deliberately built most of its vocabulary from words common to the main European languages.
Language Families and the Comparative Method
Because sound change is regular, linguists can compare languages, find systematic matches (correspondences) and conclude that they come from a common ancestor. Working backwards this way is the comparative method. Matching words is not enough, since words can be borrowed or coincidentally similar: the evidence is a regular pattern across many words.
| Meaning | English | German | French | Hungarian | Finnish |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| three | three | drei | trois | három | kolme |
| fish | fish | Fisch | poisson | hal | kala |
| water | water | Wasser | eau | víz | vesi |
| hand | hand | Hand | main | kéz | käsi |
The first three columns are all Indo-European: English and German are Germanic, French is Romance, and all go back to a common ancestor spoken thousands of years ago. Hungarian and Finnish share no words with them, but they match each other: Hungarian h corresponds to Finnish k (hal/kala, három/kolme), and both belong to the Uralic family. Japanese belongs to the Japonic family, which also includes the Ryukyuan languages of Okinawa, and has no proven relationship to Chinese, despite the large number of Chinese-origin words and characters it borrowed.
Planned Languages and Change
Esperanto was published by L. L. Zamenhof in 1887 and is the best-known planned language: it was designed, not inherited. Its grammar is deliberately regular (Chapter 4), but it is not frozen. Once people use a language every day, it changes: Esperanto speakers have created new words, shifted usage and developed their own idioms, including the community's fondness for loanword-free compounds. A language that has native speakers cannot be held still, whatever its origin. Planned languages show that the design of a language, such as simple grammar, is separate from its life, which comes from its speakers.
Hands-On Exercises
Use the Grimm's Law table to predict the English word that matches each Latin one: (a) dens (dent-) "tooth"; (b) cor (cord-) "heart"; (c) tu "you"; (d) duo "two". Then say which sound change each shows.
📄 View solutionClassify each as broadening, narrowing, amelioration or pejoration, using what you know of the older sense: (a) meat from "food" to flesh; (b) nice from "foolish" to "pleasant"; (c) silly from "blessed" to "foolish"; (d) hound from "dog" to a hunting breed. Then give an English example of a word that has two borrowed near-synonyms.
📄 View solutionUsing the Hungarian and Finnish columns of the family table, state two correspondences (such as h ~ k) and check that they hold across the words. Then explain why finding that English father and Hungarian atya sound alike would not be evidence of a relationship.
📄 View solutionChapter 8 Quick Reference
- All living languages change; change is not decay
- Sound change is regular: Grimm's Law (p → f, t → θ, k → h, d → t); the Great Vowel Shift
- Meaning change: broadening, narrowing, amelioration, pejoration, metaphor; grammaticalisation (going to → gonna)
- Borrowing: loanwords are adapted to the sounds of the borrowing language
- Comparative method: regular correspondences across many words show a common ancestor
- Families: Indo-European (English, German, French), Uralic (Hungarian, Finnish), Japonic (Japanese, Ryukyuan)
- Look-alike words alone prove nothing; Esperanto is planned yet still changes