History and development of Linguistic
Posted in 18th century, 1st Year second semester, comparative methods, Comparative studies, History, Linguistic, MCU Assignments, Uralic Language
Modern
historical linguistics
dates from the late 18th century
and grew out of the earlier discipline of philology,
the study of ancient texts and documents, which goes back to antiquity.
At
first historical linguistics was comparative
linguistics and mainly concerned with
establishing language families and the reconstruction of prehistoric
proto-languages, using the comparative method and internal
reconstruction. The focus was on the well-known Indo-European
languages, many of which had long written
histories. But since then, significant comparative linguistic work has been
done on the Uralic languages, Austronesia
languages and various families of Native American
languages, among many others. Comparative
linguistics is now, however, only a part of a
more broadly conceived discipline of historical linguistics. For the Indo-European
languages comparative study is now a highly specialized
field and most research is being carried out on the subsequent development of
these languages, particularly the development of the modern standard varieties.
Some scholars have undertaken studies attempting
to establish super-families, linking for example Indo-European, Uralic and
other families into Nostratic. These attempts have not been accepted widely
because the information necessary to establish relatedness becomes less
available as the time depth is increased. The time-depth of linguistic methods
is limited because of chance word resemblances and varies between language
groups, but a limit of around 10,000 years is often assumed. The dating of the
various proto-languages is also difficult. Several methods are available for
this but only approximate results can be obtained.
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