campbell_lyle_mixco_mauricio_j_a_glossary_of_historical_ling

74 A GLOSSARY OF HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

grammatischer Wechsel see Verner’s Law

Grassmann’s Law A well-known sound change of IndoEuropean found by Hermann Grassmann that involves regular dissimilation in Greek and Sanskrit where in roots with two aspirated stops the first dissimilates to an unaspirated stop. The consonants involved are voiced aspirated stops in Sanskrit and voiceless aspirated stops in Greek:

Sanskrit bhabhu¯ va > babhu¯ va ‘became’ (reduplication of root bhu-)

Greek phéphu¯ ka > péphu¯ ka ‘converted’ (reduplication of phú- ‘to engender’).

A well-known Greek example is: trikh-ós ‘hair’ (genitive singular) / thrík-s (nominative singular), where trikhos comes from *thrikh-os, to which Grassmann’s law has applied dissimilating the th because of the following aspirated kh (*th ... kh > t ... kh); in thríks ‘hair’, from *thrikh-s, the kh lost its aspiration because of the following s (*khs >ks), and so Grassmann’s law did not apply to this form, there no longer being two aspirated stops.

Great Vowel Shift (also called the English Great Vowel Shift) A chain shift (series of sound changes) in Middle English (with its main effects of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries) in which low and mid-long vowels were raised:

/æ:/ > /e:/ (and later > /i:/) (as in beak) /a:/ > /e:/ (as in make)

/e:/ > /i:/ (as in feet) and /o:/ > /u:/ (as in boot),

and the long high vowels were diphthongized:

/i:/ > /ai/ (as in mice)

/u:/ > /au/ (as in mouse). See also chain shift.

Grimm’s Law A set of interrelated sound changes associated with Jakob Grimm (of Grimm brothers fairytale fame) involving changes in the stop series from Proto- Indo-European to Proto-Germanic:

1.voiceless stops > fricatives: p, t, k > f, θ, h, respectively

2.voiced stops > voiceless stops: b, d, g > p, t, k, respectively

3.voiced aspirated stops > plain voiced stops: bh, dh, gh > b, d, g, respectively

This means that words in Germanic languages, because they inherit the results of these changes from Proto-Germanic, show the effects of these changes, while cognate words from other Indo-European languages (not from the Germanic branch) do not undergo the changes, as seen in the following examples, in which the French cognates have not undergone Grimm’s Law, but the English forms have:

76 A GLOSSARY OF HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

*g > k in Germanic:

Gulf Hypothesis of a distant genetic relationship proposed by Mary R. Haas (1951, 1952, 1960) that would group

Muskogean, Natchez, Tunica, Atakapa and Chitimacha, no longer supported by most linguists (see Campbell 1997: 306–9).

H

Hamito-Semitic see Afroasiatic

haplology (from Greek haplo- ‘simple, single’) Sound change in which a repeated sequence of sounds is simplified to a single occurrence. For example, some English speakers reduce library to ‘libry’ [láibri] and probably to ‘probly’ [prábli]; English humbly comes from humblely by haplology.

heritage language (or dialect) see endangered language

heteroclitic noun class A class of nouns rare or fossilized in the Indo-European languages except in Hittite and some of the other older Indo-European languages, characterized by an alternation of /n/ with /l/ or /r/: Sanskrit údhar (nominative), údh-n-as (accusative) ‘udder’, Latin iecur (nominative), iec-in-oris (‘dative’) ‘liver’,

Proto-Indo-European *iékw-r (nominative), *i(e)kw-én-s

(genitive) ‘liver’; Proto-Indo-European *péHur,

*p(e)H-uén-s ‘fire’, Hittite pahhur, pahh-uen-as ‘fire’ (Trask 2000: 148).

High German Consonant Shift see Second Germanic

Consonant Shift

historical linguist A linguist who studies language change.

historical linguistics (sometimes called historical and comparative linguistics) The study of language change, of how and why languages change. See also diachronic linguistics, philology.

historical syntax The study of syntactic change.

Hittite One of several extinct languages in the Anatolian branch of Indo-European; the subfamily also includes Lydian, Palaic, Luvian, Lycian and Carian. Hittite is best known from the library of cuneiform tablets from

1600–1200 BC found at Bogaz Köy, in modern Turkey. The Anatolian languages reflect a degree of archaism with respect to Proto-Indo-European, retaining a heteroclitic noun class (rare or fossilized except in Hittite) and laryngeal consonants (mostly changed to vocalic elements in other Indo-European languages). See also heteroclitic noun class, laryngeal hypothesis.

Hmong-Mien see Miao-Yao

Hokan A controversial hypothesis of distant genetic relationship proposed by Dixon and Kroeber (1913a, 1913b, 1919) among certain languages of California; the original list included Shastan, Chimariko, Pomoan, Karok and Yana, to which they soon added Esselen,

Yuman and later Chumashan, Salinan, Seri and

78 A GLOSSARY OF HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

Tequistlatecan. Later scholars, especially Edward Sapir, proposed various additions to Hokan. Many ‘Hokan’ specialists doubt the validity of the hypothesis (Mixco 1997).

Hokan-Coahuiltecan A hypothesis of distant genetic relationship proposed by Edward Sapir (1929) that would join Hokan and Coahuiltecan, two proposals of remote linguistic relationships that are doubted by most specialists. See also Hokan, Coahuiltecan.

Hokan-Siouan Sapir’s (1929) proposed superphylum which would group Hokan-Coahuiltecan, Siouan and several other families and isolates; mostly abandoned today. (Campbell 1997: 260–305.) See also Hokan,

Coahuiltecan, Siouan, Hokan-Coahuiltecan.

homeland see linguistic homeland

homophony see avoidance of homophony

Hurrian Name of the language of the Hurrians, a people who entered northern Mesopotamia around 2300 BC and vanished by around 1000 BC. It is believed that the Hurrians came out of Armenia and spread over parts of southeast Anatolia and northern Mesopotamia. The Urartian language is thought to be descended from Hurrian. Hurrian texts, written in cuneiform script, have been found in the ancient archives of Urkesh and from

the Hittite archives of Hattusas, modern Bogaz Köy. Hurrian domination in the area was replaced by Hittite.

hyperbole (from Greek hyperbole¯ ‘excess’) Semantic change in which meaning shifts because of exaggeration by overstatement. For example, English terribly,

horribly, awfully and similar words today mean little more than ‘very’, a way of intensifying the meaning of whatever adjective they may modify; by overstatement they came to have no real connection with their origins, terror, horror, awe etc.

hypercorrection A kind of analogical change in which speakers make an attempt to change a form from a less prestigious variety to make it conform with how it would be pronounced in a more prestigious variety but in the process overshoot the target so that the result is erroneous from the point of view of the prestige variety being mimicked. For example, for you and I (for Standard English for you and me) is a hypercorrection based on stigmatized use of me as subject pronoun in instances such as Billy and me saw a rat or me and him chased the rat. Speakers, in attempting to correct instances such as these sometimes go too far and hypercorrect instances of me to I even when me is an object (direct or indirect) and correct in Standard English (as in

Jimmy gave the rat to Billy and me (hypercorrected to … to Billy and I). Some Spanish dialects change dr to gr, as in magre ‘mother’ (Standard Spanish madre), pagre ‘father’ (< padre), piegra ‘stone’ (< piedra), Pegro ‘Pedro’ (< Pedro); speakers of these dialects often attempt to change these gr pronunciations back to dr to match the prestigious dr of Standard Spanish, but in doing this, they sometimes hypercorrect by changing some instances of gr to dr which in fact are gr in the prestige variety, as for example suedros ‘parents-in-law’ (Standard Spanish suegros), sadrado ‘sacred’ (< sagrado).

hyperforeignization see emphatic foreignization

80 A GLOSSARY OF HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

I

iconicity A non-arbitrary, motivated link between a linguistic form’s phonetic shape and its meaning. In historical linguistics, it is often assumed that iconic material may resist changes that would lessen the iconic link between form and meaning, and, also, that change can be favored to increase iconicity. For example, English peep should have undergone the Great Vowel Shift to give /paip/ (as pipe actually did, from earlier /pi:p/), but such a change would have decreased the connection between the sound of ‘peep’ and the noise birds make, and therefore the change was resisted.

Functionalist linguists explain the structure of language on the basis of function; for them, function drives shape – a very iconic notion. For them, the way grammatical constructions are packaged reflects their function, their role in communication. The functional explanations offered often involve assumptions about perception and production, about what would facilitate the hearer’s being able to process (parse) what he/she hears and about what would aid the speaker to produce (package) the intended message. Iconicity plays an important role; it has to do with claims that the structure of language somehow reflects the structure of the world. For example, we say in English (and equivalently in almost all languages) ‘Hillary entered the room and she sat down on the couch’, where the order of the clauses reflects the temporal sequence in the real-world events, with Hillary first entering and then subsequently sitting. The fact that the linguistic order reflects the order of events as they transpired in the real world reflects the linear order iconic principle: The order of clauses in coherent discourse will tend to correspond to the temporal order of the occurrence of the depicted events

(Givón 1990: 971). Iconic motivations have been proposed for many pieces of grammar and for correspondences among pieces of grammar (see Haiman 1985, Givón 1990). Iconic principles that have been proposed include:

Quantity (or economy)

1.A larger chunk of information will be given a larger chunk of code.

2.Less predictable information will be given more coding material.

3.More important information will be given more coding material.

Proximity

4.Entities that are closer together functionally, conceptually, or cognitively will be placed closer together at the code level, i.e. temporally or spatially.

5.Functional operators will be placed closest, temporally or spatially at the code level, to the conceptual unit to which they are most relevant (Givón 1990: 969–70).

The term ‘iconicity’ owes its origin to Peirce’s theory of signs, in which icons are one kind of sign, though its usage in linguistics is now independent of its origins. See onomatopoeia, sound symbolism.

ideophone, ideophonic see sound symbolism

idiolect The language (‘dialect’) of a single particular speaker; a variety of a language unique to an individual seen in the grammatical and lexical choices, characteristic pronunciation or idioms that characterize that individual’s speech. See also lect.

82 A GLOSSARY OF HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS

idiomaticization see lexicalization

independent parallel innovation see parallel innovation

indeterminacy of reconstruction see limitations of the comparative method, reality of reconstructions

Indian linguistic area see South Asian linguistic area

Indic see Indo-Aryan

Indo-Aryan (also called Indic) Branch of Indo-European, closely related to the Iranian languages within the larger Indo-Iranian subgroup, located in the Indian subcontinent and contiguous regions. The Indo-Aryan (Indic) languages include Bengali, Gujerati, Hindi-Urdu, Panjabi, Sindhi. Nepali, Romani (the language of the Rom or Gypsies) and many others.

Indo-European The best known of all language families. Branches of the Indo-European family include

Anatolian, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Hellenic (Greek), Armenian, Italic, Celtic, Germanic, Balto-Slavic and

Albanian, among others. By extension, Indo-European is an adjective referring to the cultures, religions and peoples associated with these languages. See also

Proto-Indo-European.

Indo-Germanic see Indo-European

Indo-Hittite hypothesis The hypothesis, associated with Edgar Sturtevant, that Hittite (or better said, the Anatolian languages, of which Hittite is the best known member) was the earliest Indo-European language to

split off from the others. That is, this hypothesis would have Anatolian and Indo-European as sisters, two branches of a Proto-Indo-Hittite. The more accepted view is that Anatolian is just one subgroup of IndoEuropean, albeit perhaps the first to have branched off, hence not ‘Indo-Hittite’ but just ‘Indo-European’ with Anatolian as one of its branches. In fact the two views differ very little in substance, since, in either case, Anatolian ends up being a subfamily distinct from the other branches and in the view of many the first to branch off the family.

Indo-Pacific A rejected proposal of distant genetic relationship in which Joseph H. Greenberg (1971: 807) argued that ‘the bulk of the non-Austronesian languages of Oceania from the Andaman Islands on the west of the Bay of Bengal to Tasmania in the southeast [excluding Australia] forms a single group of genetically related languages’. The hypothesis is mainly concerned with the non-Austronesian ‘Papuan’ languages of New Guinea, but also includes several groups outside New Guinea. The major groups involved are: (1) Andaman Islands,

(2) Timor-Alor, (3) Halmahera, (4) New Britain, (5) Bougainville, (6) Central Melanesia, (7) Northern New Guinea, (8) Tasmania, (9) Western New Guinea, (10) Northern New Guinea, (11) South West New Guinea, (12) Southern New Guinea, (13) Central New Guinea, (14) North East New Guinea, (15) and (16) Eastern New Guinea. As van Driem (2001: 139–40) pointed out, Greenberg’s ‘Indo-Pacific’ hypothesis is essentially identical to Finck’s (1909) family, which he called the ‘Sprachen der ozeanischen Neger’ [languages of the Oceanic Negroes] based on racial notions; the name ‘Indo-Pacific’ had already been used for this group, rooted in the ‘Pan-Negrito theory’, the ‘crinkly hair