How to raise a language from the dead

How do we know what ancient Egyptian sounded like , or Old English ? Linguistics gives us the prick to restore lost languages from the words we speak today . Here ’s how it ’s done .

The most important method of lingual reconstruction is fuck as the comparative method . It entails pretty much exactly what you would expect – it wait for bear on languages and then looks for orderly patterns of changing sounds to figure out a unwashed starting point , which takes the form of a proto - oral communication . The most illustrious example of this is probably Proto - Indo - European , the reconstructed words that is the common ancestor of the ( cryptical breath ) Albanian , Armenian , Baltic , Celtic , Germanic ( which includes English ) , Greek , Indo - Iranian , Italic , and Slavic oral communication family line , not to mention a handful more that have since become nonextant .

We wo n’t go into the specific sound change that allow for linguist to construct the Proto - Indo - European word for “ domestic dog ” as * ḱwṓn , but can examine the basic processes that go into nomenclature reconstruction and realize how bread and butter language can still extend with them the “ fossils ” of languages that have n’t been spoken for millennia .

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The first stride in the comparative method is to expect for word that have the same import and similar sound across many different languages – these are known as cognates . If a group of language all use more or less the same - sounding countersign to mean something , there ’s a expert chance that they ’re all related . That ’s a rather imprecise definition , of course – what we ’re really looking for is a group of cognates that all have the introductory phonemic social organization , so that it ’s possible to work back and see the various sound change that would take the earlier , plebeian Holy Writ from the proto - language and make it evolve into the unlike sib .

As an object lesson , we can look at the unlike words for “ psyche ” in the Romance spoken language of Italian , Spanish , and Lusitanian : “ capo ” , “ cabo ” , and “ cabu . ” Though the internal auditory sensation are slightly different , we can see they all have identical structures . Just work from this tiny datum set , we might guess that the ancestor of these three languages – proto - Romance , if you will – had a word for “ chief ” that occupy a common stop between these dissimilar sounds . We might guess that the “ atomic number 15 ” sound in Italian was once a “ B-complex vitamin ” like in the others , and that the “ u ” in Portuguese was once an “ o ” like in Italian and Spanish . So then , just survive by legal age rules , the ancestor word is “ cabo ” or something similar .

That ’s not dire logical thinking , but it happens to be completely wrong . After all , we know full well what the ascendent language of Italian , Spanish , and Portuguese is – it ’s Latin , and the Romance word for head is “ caput ” . This speaks to an authoritative point about the relative method : it only works when you have enough information to really see consistent , orderly pattern . ( It also helps to screw some of the basic rule of legal change , but that ’s really another post altogether . ) Three words is n’t going to cut it .

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This may seem like a ridiculous example , but there ’s a very real risk in pay too much attention to isolated cognate word . For instance , the English word “ out ” sounds almost identical to “ tapu ” , a word in several Polynesian spoken language that means much the same thing . Is English secretly related to the Polynesian terminology ? Of course not – English just happened to spell that word from the Polynesian speech Tongan , but someone unfamiliar with its etymology might mistake this mere borrowing for an really genetic family relationship . And there are plenty of basic words that coincidently have alike sounds and intend across unrelated speech – the Mayan word for “ mess ” , for instance , is “ mes ” , and a circumstances of words for “ mother ” speech sound very interchangeable in lot of geographically part tongues .

As I tell before , take a heavy enough data set to see clear design is of the essence to language reconstruction . permit ’s say , for example , that you want to look for a common root of English and Latin , a process that ultimately conduct linguist to the reconstruction of Proto - Indo - European . While English is obviously far less tight related to Latin than are any of the Romance languages , there are enough cognates to suggest that the two are at least distantly related .

Next polyglot look for what ’s know as “ correspondence sets . ” An obvious – but oftentimes wrong – first guess is that the auditory sensation in one language will have much the same function in its related lyric . For example , we might wait that discussion beginning with the missive “ d ” in English will also start with “ d ” in Latin . And , again , if you only look at a couplet illustration , there might seem to be some truth to this – there ’s the English “ mean solar day ” and and the Latin “ give-up the ghost ” , for example , and then there ’s the rather Satanic example “ devil ” and “ diabolus . ” Seems like a good match , correct ?

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But that quickly decrease apart when you look at the large vocabularies of the two languages ( particularly when you take that both of those word for daimon were actually borrowed from Greek ) . rather , it ’s in reality the English letter “ t ” that serves the same affair as the Latin “ d ” , at least when we ’re speak about the beginning of words . There ’s lot of example of this : “ ten”/”decem ” , “ two”/”duo ” , “ tongue”/”dingua ” , and so on . This regular correspondence between the two bent is very strong grounds for a genetic human relationship between English and Latin .

Once you have these symmetry readiness in hand , the trick is to await for the common shape that preceded both . In this particular case , we ’re looking at the phonemes d- and t- , and we would venture that the proto - phoneme is * t- . excuse the precise abstract thought behind that would , like I said , really require its own disjoined post , but the basic center is this : “ t ” is what ’s known as an voiceless phoneme , whereas “ d ” is its voice equivalent , and it ’s far , far more common for sound to acquire from unvoiced to voice than the other manner around .

And yet even that happen to be wrong in this case , although you would n’t have any manner to have intercourse that from just looking at Latin and English . Here our small data sets are n’t the issue – you could have the total vocabularies of those two tongues and still have no idea that the initial Proto - Indo - European form happens to be * dw- . The only way to discover that is by incorporate their distant relative Armenian into the analytic thinking , which let on a regular sound variety from that “ dw ” phoneme in their lyric which carries over to the other Indo - European language .

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As you’re able to probably guess from these examples , this is not an exact scientific discipline – nothing so intimately connect to the human experience ever could be . The entire comparative method is based around the passing hard-and-fast assumption that “ effectual laws have no exceptions . ” That ’s true to some extent , but only if you ’re willing to directly reclassify all the myriad of exceptions you run into as just more laws that are never give out . You ’ll very quickly have a very thick script of healthy laws , and it ’s an open question when this becomes more of a impediment than a help .

There ’s good deal of things that can mess up the orderly progression of words . Anyone intimate with New English should know about the borrowing of from one language to another . As with “ taboo ” , English freely import strange Book for which it has no unmediated equivalent , while somewhat more bourgeois languages can make use of English ’s often giddy willingness to just make up a word to fill a linguistic hole – perhaps most famously with the French concept of “ le weekend . ”

Sometimes these problematic influences are more pernicious . There ’s a German terminus known as “ Sprachbund ” that draw an country whose terminology share many common features , but none of them are in reality related . In these case , geographically confining but genetically unrelated spoken language interact and mix some feature of speech , sometimes to the extent that an enterprising linguist could construct an entire false proto - language out of these ostensible connectedness . The best case of this is believably found in Southeast Asia , in which the unrelated words of Chinese , Korean , Japanese , and Vietnamese were initially grouped together because so many of their characteristic had converged .

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And , sometimes , stuff just happens by ended random chance . The Romance give-and-take for “ miracle ” , “ miraculum ” , should have become “ miraglo ” in Spanish . alternatively , the “ r ” and “ cubic decimeter ” flipped and it became “ milagro ” , and there ’s no great underlying intellect for this beyond the vagary of fortune . With enough data , philology can cut through these modification and take us back to proto - language that were never recorded in account books , languages like Proto - Indo - European that exist today only as the outcome of backbreaking analysis of dozens upon dozens of language . The fact that linguist can in reality do this at all is something of a miracle , regardless of how you coiffe its consonants .

The Handbook of Historical Linguisticsby Brian D. Joseph and Richard D. Janda

Historical Linguistics : An Introductionby Lyle Campbell

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