Like many of you
translators, I’m a language nerd, and I like learning more about languages –
both specific tongues and also languages and linguistics in general. So I
enjoyed Historical Linguistics by
Lyle Campbell; it’s a textbook, really, and you wouldn’t want to read it before
bed, but it is a fun and interesting book to dip into.
Campbell writes on the
first page: ”A number of historical linguistics textbooks exist, but this one
is different. Most others talk about
historical linguistics; they may illustrate concepts and describe methods, and
perhaps discuss theoretical issues, but they do not focus on how to do historical linguistics.” (p. xv) In
other words, the book is quite practical and it’s an introduction to historical
linguistics. It has more than 500 pages about topics including sound change,
linguistic reconstruction, lexical change, language contact, quantitative
approaches (for example, “glottochronology”), and more, with examples from
loads of different languages, including some I’d never heard of before, such as
Mednyj Aleut, Karuk, Cholti, and Uto-aztecan.
If you are interested
in how language changes and develops over time, you know that sound change is a
big part of this. Campbell talks about different ways for this to happen, such
as syncope (“The loss (deletion) of a vowel from the interior of a word”, p.
28), or anaptyxis (“a kind of epenethsis in which an extra vowel is inserted
between two consonants”, p. 30), or haplology (“in which a repeated sequence of
sounds is simplified to a single occurrence,” such as how some people pronounce
“library” as “libry”, p. 34). Campbell then shows how we can see which changes
have taken place and when. “In the history of Swedish, the change of umlaut
took place before syncope...From Proto-Germanic to Modern Swedish: *gasti-z > Proto-Scandinavian *gastiz > gestir > Old Norse gestr
> Modern Swedish gäst...We can be
reasonably certain that these changes took place in this chronological order,
since if syncope had taken place first (gastir
> gastr), then there would have
been no remaining i to condition the
umlaut and the form would have come out as the non-existent X gast.” (p. 39)
In another chapter, he
discusses different models, such as family trees (“the traditional model of
language diversification” which ”attempts to show how languages diversify and
how language families are classified”, p. 187) and dialectology (which “deals
with regional variation in a language”, p. 190), or sociolinguistics (which “deals
with systematic co-variation of linguistic structure with social structure,
especially with the variation in language which is conditioned by social
differences”, p. 193). In still other chapters, he discusses Pidgins and
Creoles, endangered languages, how children speak (“mamma” or “baba”, p. 354), and
writing. Campbell claims that you can reconstruct a language that doesn’t have
a written form (p. 396), but, as he puts it, it is often “a matter of luck, a
matter of what happens to show up in the sources” and sometimes you have to make
guesses (p. 398). But obviously spelling and pronunciation can help in
reconstructing the history of a tongue. For example, in English, there are
words such as “marcy/mercy ‘mercy’, sarten/certein ‘certain’,
parson/persoun ‘person’, and so on..that /er/ changed to /ar/ in the
pronunciation of the writer of these forms. (This change was fairly general,
though sociolinguistically conditioned, and it was ultimately reversed, but
left such doublets in English as clerk/clark, person/parson, vermin/varmint, and university/varsity.)” (p. 398)
Every chapter also has
exercises, in case you want to try your hand at what you’re learning.
This isn’t an
easy-to-read book, but it is a good one for learning a little (or a lot!) more about
linguistics.
