A brief history of linguistic thought
To appreciate the methods and assumptions of modern-day linguistics, we need to understand how people have reflected on language in the past, and what has motivated them to do so. For Aristotle, for example, analysis of grammatical categories such as gender, number and case in his Rhetoric served primarily to illuminate a wider discussion of good style. Descriptions of non-European languages were often compiled by missionaries seeking to spread what they saw as the word of God in parts of the world where European languages were not spoken. Emerging nation-states promoted national standard languages (see Chapter 12), and with them came the publication of prescriptive works, which held up the usage of a social elite as the only acceptable norm for speech and writing.
Our brief review of linguistic thinking through the ages reveals some remarkably contemporary themes. The notion of arbitrariness, which underpins modern structuralist approaches, emerges in Plato’s work; a twelfth-century treatise on Icelandic spelling reform shows a very modern approach to phonology, and debates between rationalists and empiricists over innate ideas and universal grammar find twentieth-century echoes in Chomsky’s clash with the Descriptivists who preceded him, as we will see in Chapter 8.
But the Lord came down to see the city and the tower that the men were building. The Lord said, ‘If as one people speaking the same language they have begun to do this, then nothing they plan will be impossible for them. Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other.’ So the Lord scattered them from there all over the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel – because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world.Genesis 11: 5–9
The story of the Tower of Babel in the epigraph above is one of many such myths in which ‘confusion of tongues’ is seen as divine retribution for human hubris. Within such narratives, the natural processes of change to which all languages are subject are equated with decay, prompting the search for an original, ‘uncorrupted’ pre-Babelian tongue from which all others are held to derive (see Case study below).
Case study: National language myths
Writing in the fifth century BCE, Herodotus (History 2:2) recounts how Pharoah Psammetichus of Egypt had set out to discover the original language of mankind by ordering that two children should be raised in isolation by a shepherd, who was forbidden to speak to them. After two years, the children’s first word was similar to bekos, the Phrygian word for bread, from which the Pharoah was forced to conclude that the Phrygians, and not the Egyptians, were the most ancient people.
As Robins (1997: 153) points out, this tale has been recast with many different outcomes, revealing how the search for an ‘original’ language is often suffused with nationalist ideology. The ‘language of Adam’ has at various times been equated with Greek, Latin or Hebrew, and a real or imagined association with an ancient language has often been spuriously advanced to promote the cause of a contemporary one. A treatise published in 1569 by the Dutch scholar Goropius Becanus, for example, argued that the oldest language was Cimmerian, traces of which, he claimed, could be found in the Brabantic Dutch dialect. In the same year, Henri Estienne published an impassioned defence of the French language, at that time emerging as a serious rival to Latin in France and a competitor, notably with Italian, for international prestige, on the grounds of it being allegedly closer to ancient Greek than other European languages.
Early linguistic scholarship
Early linguistic scholarship was often motivated by the need to preserve sacred and ancient texts for future generations. We owe much of our grammatical meta-language to the descriptions set out for Greek, which were designed to facilitate reading of the Homeric texts, dating from around the eighth century BCE; our knowledge of Sanskrit likewise derives largely from descriptions designed to preserve religious texts from the Vedic period (1200–1000 BCE). In the Europe of the Middle Ages, the teaching of Classical Latin for liturgical purposes grew in importance as the Romance languages (e.g. Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese) moved ever further from their Latin parent.
Throughout history, debate has raged between two approaches, which might be labelled empiricism and rationalism. Very broadly, empiricists were (and are) concerned with the recording and analysis of observable facts of language structure as revealed in speech and writing, while rationalists seek to account for language in terms of innate abilities or ideas. Linked to the latter is a concern with finding universals, i.e. features common to all languages rather than just to individual ones. Where the Port-Royal Grammars of the seventeenth century (see below) proposed universal linguistic categories on the basis of those found in the Classical languages, the North American Descriptivists of the twentieth century celebrated linguistic relativity, i.e. the view that each language conceptualizes the world in its own way. The pendulum was to swing back in favour of universalism with the publication of Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures in 1957 (see Chapter 8), heralding the emergence of the generative paradigm, which started from the belief that human beings are innately equipped to learn language, and that therefore at an underlying level all languages must be structurally similar.
Key idea: Rationalists v. empiricists
Rationalists linked language to innate mental structures, while empiricists denied the existence of these structures and saw language as moulded by sensory experience.
A final important theme is that of linguistics as a science. The scientific model for linguistics has, however, varied over time, from comparisons to geology or natural history in the nineteenth century, with its focus on regularities in sound changes, to an emphasis on ‘mathematical’ descriptive rules in the twentieth. Part of the requirement for treating linguistics as a science, as we saw in Chapter 1, was that language be studied on its own terms: in Saussure’s words, ‘en elle-même et pour elle-même’ (in itself and for itself).
However, it ultimately proved impossible to view language in isolation from other aspects of human life. Language variation, for example, cannot be divorced from social factors such as class or regional origin with which it correlates. Part of speakers’ unconscious knowledge of their mother tongue is clearly of a social nature: English speakers, for example, can make informed judgements about a person’s regional origins or social background on the basis of his/her speech. The relationship between language and society is explored in the subdiscipline of sociolinguistics (see Chapters 11 and 12). Similarly, meaning cannot be properly understood in isolation from context and the knowledge shared by participants in an interaction, which form the subject matter of pragmatics (see Chapter 10).
The emergent fields of psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics and biolinguistics all attest to the interaction of linguistic study with other fields of scientific enquiry, while the branch of linguistics known as stylistics uses theories of language to illuminate the study of literature.
Classical and medieval linguistics
Greek linguistic scholars were profoundly to influence their Latin successors, whose thinking, as we saw in Chapter 1, exerts a profound influence on prescriptive English grammar even today. The achievement that was to have the greatest impact on Europe and the wider world, however, was the development of a phonemic writing system, i.e. one based on the key sound contrasts used by the language. As early as the second millennium BCE, a syllabic writing system now known to archaeologists as ‘Linear B’ was used by the Myceneans, and in the first millennium BCE the first alphabet in the modern sense of the term was adapted by the Greeks from Phoenician script. The Phoenician ‘alphabet’ had consisted essentially of consonants: vowels, which in Semitic languages are largely predictable from word structure and context, did not generally need to be marked (see Spotlight below).
The Greeks introduced vowel symbols, sometimes adapting them from Phoenician characters: Phoenician aleph, for example, which indicated a glottal stop (see Chapter 4), eventually became alpha, representing the /a/ phoneme (the word alphabet is derived from alpha and beta, the first two Greek letters). The alphabetic system was borrowed initially by the Etruscans of central Italy, and subsequently adapted to become the Latin alphabet, which forms the basis for most modern European writing systems.
Spotlight: The ancient origins of text-speak?
Given the consonants of the word root k\t\b, an Arabic speaker can deduce the vowels and their position from context and easily determine whether the word is kitab (book) or one of its cognates, katib (writer) or kataba (he wrote). This works less well in English and other non-Semitic languages: given bldr, for example, it is not immediately clear whether the word is bolder, boulder, builder or even balder, and similar problems beset Greek. But it has often been pointed out that, even in English, sentences in which the vowels have been omitted are still relatively easy to decipher:
Th qck brwn fx jmpd vr th lzy dg
while those in which the consonants have been left out are impenetrable:
e ui o o ue oe e a o
(The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog.)
This essential insight informs modern shorthand systems, conference interpreters’ note-taking and, of course, txt msgng!
Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, written probably in the eighth century BCE, held a quasi-scriptural status in ancient Greek education, and Homeric scholarship from the sixth century BCE onwards shows acute awareness of how the Greek language had changed in the intervening period. The ‘problem’ of linguistic change is also explored in Plato’s Cratylus, the theme of which is the fit between the essence of an object or concept and its rendering in language. Socrates and the eponymous Cratylus himself argue for linguistic naturalism, i.e. the view that names or words belong naturally to the objects or concepts they identify: in Cratylus’ view these were laid down by the gods themselves, though the connection between a word and its essence may have become opaque as a result of linguistic change.
The counter position – conventionalism – is advanced by Hermogenes, who sees no connection between words and concepts, arguing that they have come about purely as a result of convention. The naturalist perspective of Cratlyus in particular reflects a purely hellenocentric world view. The ancient Greeks were generally uninterested in languages other than their own, speakers of which were dismissed as bárbaroi (from which the English barbarian derives), and the question of why, if words are divinely ordained, languages express similar concepts in so many different ways is simply not raised. But what is interesting about this dialogue is the debate it prefigures about arbitrariness in language, which will be central to Saussure’s thinking in the early twentieth century (see Chapter 3).
A grammatical description of the Greek language was provided by Aristotle, whose Rhetoric offers a rudimentary categorical description of Greek words into nominal (onoma, Gk) and verbal (rhema, Gk) elements, together with a third class of functional elements he called syndesmoi, and which included conjunctions, articles and pronouns. This was developed by Dionysius Thrax (c. 100 BCE) in Alexandria, whose Techne grammatike (‘Art of Grammar’) set out the basis for the ‘parts of speech’ of traditional grammar. His eight word classes included nouns, verbs, participles and articles, but not yet adjectives: at this stage these are seen to form part of the noun class.
Later Roman writers largely adopted Dionysius’s categories and applied them to Latin: Varro’s De Lingua Latina (‘On the Latin language’), composed in the first century BCE, introduces the notion of derivational and inflectional formation (or morphology in modern terms: see Chapter 6); Priscian’s 18-volume Institutiones Grammaticae (‘Foundations of Grammar’), written some six centuries later, presented some minor modifications to Dionysius’ system – omitting for example the word class of articles, which Latin did not possess – and also addressed pronunciation and syllable structure. The continuing importance of Latin as a lingua franca throughout Europe for education and, more importantly, the Christian church ensured that Priscian’s work remained influential throughout the Middle Ages and beyond (see Case study below). Descriptions of other languages (e.g. Welsh, Irish, Provençal), which appear in the early medieval period, are often based on Priscian’s model or are designed to illuminate the study of Latin: Aelfric says of his Latin Grammar, composed around the turn of the eleventh century and believed to be the first grammar of Latin in a vernacular (or low-status) language, that it would serve as a good introduction to English, even though this was not its primary purpose.
Case study: Charlemagne and the law of unintended consequences
History is littered with examples of top-down intervention in linguistic matters that have not had the desired effect, and there is none better than Charlemagne’s disastrous attempt to reintroduce classical Latin to the Carolingian Empire, over which he reigned from 800 to 814.
Following the fall of Rome, spoken Latin had fragmented quickly into what became known as Romance varieties. By the eighth century, many of these had diverged so far from classical Latin norms that the laity could no longer understand scripture. The problem was most acute in the north, where the priests’ tacit response had been to align their pronunciation as far as possible with local vernacular usage to ensure comprehensibility. Fearing dilution of the religious and linguistic unity of his empire, Charlemagne attempted to stamp out this practice, decreeing that the Mass must be delivered literaliter, i.e. according to classical Latin norms. These norms were not, however, well known in the Carolingian Empire, so Latin scholars, among them Alcuin of York (whose Latin had always been a foreign tongue and therefore unaffected by ongoing changes in Romance), were brought in from outside to school the clergy in classical Latin pronunciation.
The consequence was chaotic non-communication between clergy and laity. The crisis was partly resolved in 813 by a compromise reached at the Synod of Tours, which allowed sermons to be preached in local vernaculars while insisting that the liturgy itself be conducted in classical Latin. Charlemagne’s attempt to strengthen the position of classical Latin had had precisely the opposite effect: in historical terms the Synod of Tours compromise represented the thin end of an extremely long wedge. The diglossic relationship between Latin and the vernaculars (see Chapter 12) had started to ‘leak’ in favour of the latter, with local vernaculars now fulfilling a function formerly reserved for Latin.
The retreat of Latin would continue remorselessly over the centuries, with one of these vernaculars, that of Paris, gradually usurping all its main functions. This variety, known as français, or French, became the official language of the French nation that would later emerge. In the nation states which developed elsewhere in the former Roman Empire, Latin would similarly be replaced in its High or H functions by standard varieties of other Romance languages: for example, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
While much medieval linguistic scholarship starts from the teaching of Latin, or bears the imprint of a Latin model, one twelfth-century work, which has become known as The First Grammatical Treatise, stands out for highlighting the inappropriateness of Latin as a model for other languages. The anonymous author (generally referred to as ‘The First Grammarian’) sets out a compelling case for spelling reform in Icelandic, for which, he argues, the Latin alphabet as it stands is ill-suited:
I have composed an alphabet for us Icelanders as well, both of all those Latin letters that seemed to me to fit our language well, in such a way that they could retain their proper pronunciation, and of those that seemed to me to be needed in (the alphabet), but those were left out that do not suit the sounds of our language. A few consonants are left out of the Latin alphabet, and some put in; no vowels are left out, but a good many put in, because our language has almost all sonants or vowels.‘The First Grammarian’, 12
century (translated by Haugen, 1972)
Striking about this work, which was unknown outside Scandinavia until the nineteenth century, are the First Grammarian’s detailed knowledge of early Icelandic phonetics and his grasp of phonological principles, which would not be fully developed until the twentieth century. He proposed the use of diacritics on Latin vowel symbols to mark contrastive features such as length and nasality, and noted the distinction in Icelandic between short and long (or geminate) consonants, suggesting the use of capital letters to mark the latter, for example P to represent /pp/. In its use of minimal pairs to determine phonemic oppositions, that is the substitution of different sounds in the same environment to produce words with different meaning – see Chapter 5 – his approach seems very modern:
Now I shall place these… letters… between the same two consonants, each in its turn, and show and give examples how each of them, with the support of the same letters (and) placed in the same position… makes a discourse of its own, and this way give examples, throughout the booklet of the most delicate distinctions that are made between the letters.‘The First Grammarian’, 12th century (translated by Haugen, 1972)
His examples were often humorous and (for the twelfth century at least) occasionally racy:
‘Mjǫk eru þeir min frȧmėr, er eigi skammask at taka mina konu frȧ mér.’ (‘Those men are brazen, who are not ashamed to take my wife from me.’)
A similarly modern resonance is found in the work of the thirteenth and fourteenth century Modistae, or speculative grammarians, who began, as languages other than Greek and Latin were becoming better known in Europe, to question the philosophical basis of grammar. Roger Bacon and others argued that grammar was universal, and that differences between languages were merely superficial. The theme of universal grammar was developed further by Lancelot and Arnauld in their Port-Royal Grammar (Grammaire générale et raisonnée contenant les fondemens de l’art de parler, expliqués d’une manière claire et naturelle, ‘General and Rational Grammar, containing the fundamentals of the art of speaking, explained in a clear and natural manner’) first published in 1660, which viewed grammar as the product of innate mental processes. This rationalist position was rejected by the British empiricist philosophers Locke, Hume and Berkeley, who denied the existence of innate ideas and held that knowledge was a product of sensory experience.
Drawing on examples from Latin, Greek, Hebrew and the modern vernacular languages of Europe (but not beyond) the Port-Royal Grammar presented the six-case structure of Latin noun declension as a universal framework, realized in a variety of ways by different languages (in the Romance languages, for example, much of the grammatical work which had been done by Latin case-endings was now performed by prepositions). The belief in language as a window to universal logic or laws of reason, exemplified by the Port-Royal Grammar, prompted a search for fundamental roots from which words are derived. This led in turn to some fanciful and often unsustainable etymologies, exemplified for example in the work of Horne Tooke, whose two-volume The Diversions of Purley was published in in 1786 and 1805. Culler (1976: 56) notes Tooke’s tenuous speculations on the nature of the word bar:
A bar in all its uses is a defence: that by which anything is fortified, strengthened or defended. A barn is a covered enclosure in which the grain, etc. is protected or defended from the weather, from depredations, etc. A baron is an armed, defenceful, or powerful man. A barge is a strong boat. A bargain is a confirmed, strengthened agreement.… a bark is a stout vessel. The bark of a tree is its defence…Culler (1976: 56)
The belief that linguistic signs have a rational basis, obscured by phonetic change, is, as we have seen, an enduring one, but it became increasingly untenable as the diversity of human language became better understood. It was not, however, until the twentieth century and the work of Saussure (see Chapter 3) that the essential arbitrariness of the sign finally became a central tenet in linguistic thought. The age-old conflict between empiricism and rationalism, however, has continued in different guises to this day, and finds new expression in the debate between proponents of universal grammar within the generative paradigm and their critics.
Key idea: Linking form to meaning
The quest for a fundamental link between form and meaning, obscured by language change, led to some fanciful etymologies.
The prescriptive tradition
As new standard languages began to replace Latin in the nations of Europe, a flourishing market emerged for manuals of ‘good’ speech and writing. This prescriptive tradition, over which Latin cast a long shadow, was especially strong in France and Great Britain. In France, battle lines were drawn from the sixteenth century between those who equated good usage with that of a social elite (the Royal Court) and members of an intellectual elite, trained in Classical languages, who saw themselves as the proper arbiters of linguistic correctness. The interests of the former largely prevailed, and Vaugelas’ Remarks on the French Language (Remarques sur la langue française), published in 1647, became a veritable bible for social climbers anxious to learn the secrets of the ‘good’ courtly speech.
The book’s preface is very revealing of the nature of prescriptivism. The usage of even a narrow social elite is found to be heterogeneous: not all courtly usage is acceptable, and Vaugelas is interested only in the ‘healthiest part’ (la plus saine partie) of the Court, which he does not define. His prescriptions are therefore based on circularity (good speech is to be found in the healthiest part of the Court, which itself is recognized by…good speech) and are both arbitrary and idiosyncratic. In a country hungry for prescriptive rules, this mattered little, and many of Vaugelas’ strictures have been accepted as ‘correct’ French ever since.
Key idea: The Latin model
As nation states emerged in Europe, the need to develop national standard languages became keenly felt. Prescriptive linguistic works condemned all but the usage of a narrow social elite. Grammars of European languages generally followed the Latin model of Priscian, for which in many cases they were unsuited. Many modern prescriptive rules of English derive ultimately from Latin grammar.
From the sixteenth century onwards, prescriptive works in Britain largely follow Priscian’s Latin model. Bullokar’s Bref Grammar for English (1586), for example, takes the eight Priscianic word classes set out in William Lily’s Grammar of Latin in English (c.1540) and applies them to English; the prescriptions of Robert Lowth’s Introduction to English Grammar (1762) are likewise informed by Latin, and even by 1795, Lindley Murray’s English Grammar was arguing for three nominal cases (nominative, genitive, accusative), justified on the model of Latin, in spite of the fact that English – then as now – only regularly distinguishes nominative and accusative in pronouns (_he_ saw me vs. I saw _him_). While prescriptive grammarians of English are no longer as in thrall to Latin as they once were, many complaints about ‘bad’ English, as we saw in Chapter 1, start from assumptions about Latin grammar. Simon Heffer’s Strictly English: The correct way to write… and why it matters, published in 2011, still condemns the use of split infinitives, though its author seems more relaxed than his predecessors about ending sentences with prepositions (p. 89).
Case study: Grammar and morality
The preface to Lindley Murray’s English Grammar reveals the author’s intention to ‘promote the cause of virtue as well as learning’. Murray was neither the first, nor the last, to equate ‘good’ English with moral virtue, as these 1985 comments by Norman Tebbit, the former Conservative cabinet minister, demonstrate:
‘If you allow standards to slip to the stage where good English is no better than bad English, where people turn up filthy … at school … all those things tend to cause people to have no standards at all, and once you lose standards there’s no imperative to stay out of crime.’
Similar sentiments expressed by Prince Charles, John Rae and Jeffrey Archer (Cameron 1995: 85–94) attest to the remarkable persistence of such attitudes wherever what Milroy and Milroy (1985) have called ‘the linguistic complaint tradition’ is strong. Across the Channel, attempts to reform French spelling were criticized in 1990 by Danielle Mitterrand, wife of then President François Mitterrand, on the grounds that they represented a unacceptable weakening of standards:
‘Loosening standards is a slippery slope: once you’ve let things slip with spelling, why shouldn’t moral standards go the same way?’ (Quoted by Ball 1997: 191; translation mine)
Madame Mitterrand would no doubt have been horrified by the Presidential communiqué announcing her death in November 2011, which contained no fewer than five spelling errors, provoking something of a media storm in France.
Nineteenth-century philology
What finally helped break the hold of classical Latin in Europe was the discovery, in the late eighteenth century, of the Sanskrit scholarship of India, and notably Pāṇini’s grammar of Sanskrit, believed to date from the fourth century BCE, which described the language of ancient sacred texts dating from some eight centuries earlier. Thanks to such codification, Sanskrit had remained, like Latin in Europe, a high-status lingua franca in India long after it had died out as a mother tongue. Bloomfield (1933: 11) describes Pāṇini’s grammar as the first example to Europeans of ‘a complete and accurate description of a language, based not upon theory but upon observation’, i.e. one unfettered by classical Latin or Greek models. It also brought to light some striking resemblances between Sanskrit and the more familiar language families of Europe, i.e. the Romance languages, the Germanic group (e.g. German, Danish, English, Dutch) and the Slavonic (e.g. Russian, Czech, Polish, Bulgarian). As the table below demonstrates, these similarities were far too common and regular to be the result of mere chance.
Table 2.1: Some Indo-European correspondences
Such correspondences could only be explained, argued William Jones in a famous paper to the Asiatic Society in 1786, in terms of a common ancestor, which would later become known as Indo-European.
The Sanscrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists; there is a similar reason, though not quite so forcible, for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic, though blended with a very different idiom, had the same origin with the Sanscrit; and the old Persian might be added to the same family.William Jones, 1786
Establishing links between languages of the Indo-European family became the prime focus of scholarly linguistic activity for most of the nineteenth century, and drew, as Friedrich Schlegel anticipated in his short 1808 work Über die Sprache und Weisheit der Inder (‘On the Language and Wisdom of the Indians’), on the model of natural history:
Comparative grammar will give us entirely new information on the genealogy of language, in exactly the same way in which comparative anatomy has thrown light upon the natural history.Friedrich Schlegel, 1808
Where biologists found similar physical features in a number of different organisms, they concluded that, in all probability, they had been inherited from a common ancestor, even where no direct evidence for that ancestor was available. In similar vein, where philologists, working from historical written sources, found correspondences between basic lexical items that were unlikely to have been borrowed, they posited a common ancestor in Indo-European. Of course, no written evidence for Indo-European, widely believed to have been spoken some 6,000 years ago, was available, but on the basis of regularities between its descendant languages, explained in terms of sound laws, a partial reconstruction known as Proto-Indo-European (PIE) was developed.
The best-known example of such correspondences is Grimm’s Law, named after Jakob Grimm, but drawing on the observations of Schlegel, Kanne and Rask, which explains a number of correspondences between Latin, Sanskrit and Germanic in terms of sound changes from Indo-European. In many words where Latin has \[p], the Germanic languages have \[f], as in the examples below.
Table 2.2: P/f correspondences in Latin and Germanic
\*Note that the letter v has the value \[f] in German
Grimm explained this in terms of PIE voiceless stops \[p, t, k] becoming fricatives \[f, θ, x/h] in Germanic, but not in Latin, Greek or Sanskrit (compare Latin canis; Greek kýōn but German Hund; English hound). Related changes saw PIE voiced stops \[b, d, g] become voiceless \[p, t, k] (hence Latin duo, but English two; Swedish två).
From these regular patterns of sound change, August Schleicher developed the family tree model (which owed much to botanical classification methods developed by Linnaeus), tracing the ‘parentage’ of living languages back to PIE. One version of the Indo-European family tree can be seen in the following diagram:
Figure 2.1: The Indo-European language family
Key idea: A common ancestor
Parallels between Sanskrit, Latin and Greek led philologists to posit a common ancestor, which was reconstructed from historical evidence as Proto-Indo-European. Family trees show historical relationships between languages, but fail to account for the effects of language contact.
The family tree model is a useful presentational tool which has been successfully applied to other language groups, for example Eskimo-Aleut, Sino-Tibetan or Austro-Asiatic, but it is nonetheless misleading in a number of respects. Firstly, it takes far too little account of language contact (see Case study on next page): the dotted arrow in the diagram above is an attempt to represent the very strong lexical influence of (Norman) French on Middle English, which belong to quite separate branches of the Indo-European trunk. The branching works well where there is a physical separation between speaker groups, allowing varieties to develop independently, as in the case of Afrikaans and Dutch, but in most cases the picture is rather messier, with branches often confusingly intertwined.
The model also presupposes relatively homogeneous varieties separating into dialects, which appear at the end branches of the tree, ignoring the fact that all languages are internally variable. Labelling a single branch as, for example, ‘English’ suggests that a homogeneous variety of that name emerged first, from which dialects were to branch off later. In fact, historically the very opposite was true: the dialectal divisions were present all along, and the codified standard language we now call ‘English’ emerged from contact between a number of them.
Case study: Meet the family
From the language family tree, it can be seen that English is ‘genetically’ (the use of this biological metaphor is common in describing the relationships between languages) part of the West Germanic branch, and that its closest relative is Frisian, a language spoken in the north-west Netherlands, which has recognized minority language status and its own language academy (Fryske Akademy, founded in 1938). The close family relationship between the two languages should not be taken too literally: they have diverged from each other considerably and have had very different contact histories. English vocabulary was hugely influenced by Norman French as a result of the Norman conquest of 1066, while the Frisian language has seen extensive lexical borrowing from Dutch. But nonetheless, close similarities to English are still evident in the following examples, taken from the Virtual Linguist website:
Key idea: Sound changes
The Neogrammarian hypothesis held that sound changes were subject to laws that applied without exception in given environments.
Fact-check
[1](answers.mdx#rfn2-1) What is Plato’s Cratylus ultimately about?
The nature of good speech
Repairing the damage wrought by sound change
The arbitrariness of linguistic signs
The superiority of Greek over other languages
[2](answers.mdx#rfn2-2) What view did rationalists hold about language?
It was linked to innate ideas
It derives from external sense impressions
All languages derive from Indo-European
The written system of Latin is not suited to all languages
[3](answers.mdx#rfn2-3) What characterizes a phonemic writing system?
It is based only on consonants
It uses symbols to represent syllables
It uses symbols that reflect the meaningful sound contrasts in a language
It has a one-to-one relationship between sound and symbol
[4](answers.mdx#rfn2-4) What is the First Grammatical Treatise about?
The origins of Latin
Spelling reform in Icelandic
Universal grammar
Correspondences between Latin and Greek
[5](answers.mdx#rfn2-5) Standard languages are usually …?
The creation of intellectuals
Varieties with the strongest links to the Classical languages
A good indicator of personal morality
Languages modelled on the speech of a social elite
[6](answers.mdx#rfn2-6) What is the Proto-Indo-European language?
The ancestor of all languages
A language reconstructed from the historical evidence of its descendant languages
The ancestor of Finnish, Hungarian and Basque
A contact language used by Asian immigrants in Europe
[7](answers.mdx#rfn2-7) What is the Neogrammarian hypothesis?
An early language teaching method
Grammar linked to personal morality
A theory that every word has its own history
A theory that sound laws apply without exception
[8](answers.mdx#rfn2-8) What does Grimm’s Law explain?
Correspondences between Sanskrit and Latin
Sound changes involving \[p], \[t], and \[k] sounds in Proto-Indo-European
How Latin words changed when they were borrowed by Germanic
Why some German words use v and others f for the same sound
[9](answers.mdx#rfn2-9) Why can the ‘family tree’ model be misleading?
It fails to allow for internal variability in language
It fails properly to allow for language contact
It assumes that dialects are recent outgrowths from homogeneous languages, whereas the reverse may in fact be true
All of the above
[10](answers.mdx#rfn2-10) Which of these is not true?
Rumanian, Polish and Russian all come from the same branch of Proto-Indo-European
English, Dutch and German are all West Germanic languages
Afrikaans is more closely related to English than Spanish is
Greek has no sister languages
Dig deeper
L. Bloomfield, Language (Holt, 1933), Chapter 1
L. Campbell, ‘The history of linguistics’, in M. Aronoff & J. Rees-Miller (eds), The Handbook of Linguistics (Blackwell, 2001), pp. 81–104
R. Harris & T. Taylor, Landmarks in Linguistic Thought: The Western Tradition from Socrates to Saussure (Routledge, 2001), esp. Chapters 1, 8, 10, 12 & 16
R. Robins, A Short History of Linguistics (Longman, 1997), esp. Chapters 3, 6 & 7
G. Sampson, Schools of Linguistics: Competition and Evolution (Hutchinson, 1980), Chapter 1
Online sources
The Frisian examples and their English translations on p. 38 have been taken from the Virtual Linguist website: http://virtuallinguist.typepad.com/the\_virtual\_linguist/2008/11/frisian.html
An outline of the history of linguistics (continuum books.net) is available at http://mcgregor.continuumbooks.net/media/1/history\_outline.pdf
On the link between morality and language, see S. Johnson (1999), ‘From linguistic molehills to social mountains? Introducing moral panics about language’, Lancaster University Centre for Language in Social Life, Working Paper No. 105. Available online: http://www.ling.lancs.ac.uk/pubs/clsl/clsl105.pdf