Historical linguistics

group of languages related through descent from a common ancestor

Philology () is the study of language in oral and written historical sources. It is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics with strong ties to etymology. Philology is also defined as the study of literary texts and oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning. A person who pursues this kind of study is known as a philologist. In older usage, especially British, philology is more general, covering comparative and historical linguistics.

thumb|The English language|English word [[tofu is a loanword from the Japanese word , which is itself a loanword from the Chinese word dòufu.]]

classic compilation of basic concepts for the purposes of historical-comparative linguistics

study of language change over time

In the tree model of historical linguistics, a proto-language is a postulated ancestral language from which a number of attested languages are believed to have descended by evolution, forming a language family. Proto-languages are usually unattested, or partially attested at best. They are reconstructed by way of the comparative method.

thumb|Isoglosses on the Faroe Islands

study of the relationships between two or more languages

theory of Indo-European origin

thumb|240px|Diagram showing relationships between etymologically related words In historical linguistics, cognates or lexical cognates are sets of words that have been inherited in direct descent from an etymological ancestor in a common parent language.

process when a language loses its last native speaker

Germanisation, or Germanization, is the spread of the German language, people, and culture. It was a central idea of German conservative thought in the 19th and the 20th centuries, when conservatism and ethnic nationalism went hand in hand. In linguistics, Germanisation of non-German languages also occurs when they adopt many German words.

modification or development of a language

In phonetics, nasalisation (or nasalization in American English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is .

Glottochronology (from Attic Greek 'tongue, language' and 'time') is the part of lexicostatistics which involves comparative linguistics and deals with the chronological relationship between languages.

substitution of a community's language by another one over time

process of language change affecting pronunciation or sound system structure

The Neogrammarians (, , ) were a German school of linguists, originally at the University of Leipzig, in the late 19th century who proposed the Neogrammarian hypothesis of the regularity of sound change.

Grammaticalization (also known as grammatization or grammaticization) is a linguistic process in which words change from representing objects or actions to serving grammatical functions. Grammaticalization can involve content words, such as nouns and verbs, developing into new function words that express grammatical relationships among other words in a sentence. This may happen rather than speakers deriving such new function words from (for example) existing bound, inflectional constructions. For example, the Old English verb 'to want', 'to wish' has become the Modern English auxiliary verb wi

region in which a proto-language was spoken

languages of Europe and South Asia before the arrival of Indo-European languages

hypothesis

distinct lexemes in the same language with a common etymological root

processes of understanding how earlier languages were spoken

philosophical method of comparativism, technique for studying the development of scientific fields by comparing them, apparently, in different language groups

Gradualism, from the Latin ("step"), is a hypothesis, a theory or a tenet assuming that change comes about gradually or that variation is gradual in nature and happens over time as opposed to in large steps. Uniformitarianism, incrementalism, and reformism are similar concepts.

form of language change regarding the evolution of word usage

grammatical change of vowels in Indo-European languages

model of language change in which a new language feature (innovation) or a new combination of language features spreads from its region of origin, affecting a gradually expanding cluster of dialects

model of the evolution of languages analogous to the concept of a family tree, particularly a phylogenetic tree in the biological evolution of species; model in which each language is assumed to have evolved from a single parent language

A ' ( , sometimes pluralized as ', usually capitalized following German practice) is a word that has spread as a loanword among numerous languages and cultures, especially those that are far away from one another. As such, are a curiosity in historical linguistics and sociolinguistics within a wider study of language contact. At a sufficient time depth, it can be very difficult to establish in which language or language family a originated and into which it was borrowed.

A macrofamily (also called a superfamily or superphylum) is a term often used in historical linguistics to refer to a hypothetical higher order grouping of languages, composed of multiple language families and/or isolates. Some scholars, such as Campbell, view this designation as superfluous or redundant, preferring "language family" for those classifications for which there is consensus and "distant genetic relationship" for those which lack consensus, whether due to lack of documentation, lack of scholarship, or time depth thought by linguists too great for accurate reconstruction, but which

language preservation project

lengthening of vowel sounds in place of a deleted consonant

Reborrowing is the process where a word travels from one language to another and then back to the originating language in a different form or with a different meaning. A reborrowed word is sometimes called a Rückwanderer (German, a 'returner').

sound change that either results in a palatal or palatalized consonant or a front vowel

loanword that occurs in several languages with the same or similar meaning and etymology

hypothesis in historical linguistics that the Urheimat of proto-Indo-European is in the Caucacus

words that look or sound alike, but are not related

Lexicostatistics is a method of comparative linguistics that involves comparing the percentage of lexical cognates between languages to determine their relationship. Lexicostatistics is related to the comparative method but does not reconstruct a proto-language. It is to be distinguished from glottochronology, which attempts to use lexicostatistical methods to estimate the length of time since two or more languages diverged from a common earlier proto-language. This is merely one application of lexicostatistics, however; other applications of it may not share the assumption of a constant rate

thumb|300px|Claude Monet's [[Impression, soleil levant was ridiculed as "Impression-ist" in 1872, but the term then became the name of the art movement, "impressionism", and painters began to self-identify as "impressionist".]] In linguistics, reappropriation, reclamation, or resignification is the cultural process by which a group reclaims words or artifacts that were previously used in a way disparaging of that group. It is a specific form of a semantic change (i.e., change in a word's meaning). Linguistic reclamation can have wider implications in the fields of discourse and has been descri

linguistic theory

Postulation that the Kartvelian languages of the Caucasus area are related to the Semitic languages of the Middle East; proposed by Nikolay Yakovlevich Marr in 1920s and 1930s, now seen as outdated

field of humanities

Rebracketing (also known as resegmentation or metanalysis) is a process in historical linguistics where a word originally derived from one set of morphemes is broken down or bracketed into a different set. For example, hamburger, originally from Hamburg+er, has been rebracketed into ham+burger, and burger was later reused as a productive morpheme in coinages such as cheeseburger. It is usually a form of folk etymology, or may seem to be the result of valid morphological processes.

language that influences, or is influenced by another through contact

term used in historical linguistics in relation to a language that evolved from another (parent) language

thumb|300x300px|Map of major European languages Eurolinguistics is a neologistic term for the study of the languages of Europe. The term Eurolinguistics was first used by Norbert Reiter in 1991 (German equivalent: Eurolinguistik). Apart from a series of works dealing with only a part of the European languages, the work of Harald Haarmann pursues a "pan- or trans-European perspective". This goal is also pursued by Mario Wandruszka.

word that is broadly obsolete but remains in current use due to its presence within an idiom

linguistic method developed by J. Greenberg to determine genetic relatedness between languages, now generally regarded as misleading

language variety with direct evidence of having existed

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A relict is a surviving remnant of a natural phenomenon.

In linguistics, a chronolect or temporal dialect is a specific speech variety whose characteristics are in particular determined by time-related factors. As such, it can be contrasted with a sociolect, an ethnolect or a geolect. In historical linguistics, a chronolect is set more or less equal to a specific language stage. Many chronolects are extinct or endangered.

method of recovering information about a language's past from the characteristics of the language at a later date

linguistics term for language forms that change little over time

Paleolinguistics is a term used by some linguists for the study of the distant human past by linguistic means. For most historical linguists there is no separate field of paleolinguistics. Those who use the term are generally advocates of hypotheses not generally accepted by mainstream historical linguists, a group colloquially referred to as "long-rangers".

group of related languages

science that studies written ans oral texts as the product of human mental processes

science school of linguistics