Intro to Historical Linguistics

Spring 1994; Judith Maxwell

The course catalog says: The investigation of language change and its causes. The reconstruction of earlier linguistic forms. The Indo-European language family. Selected problems in phonological and grammatical reconstruction.

This was the first linguistics class I ever took, and boy was it a doozy. I hadn't a clue what was going on, and everyone else seemed to already be familiar with not only the course material but also each other. Nonetheless, I survived.

Selected Topics from the Syllabus

Projects and Papers

Internal Reconstruction Project. Assuming that modern variation is a development from a prior, invariant state, we attempted to reconstruct the latter by applying natural phonetic processes in reverse. This project was on Russian consonant mutation in the conjugation of verbs. There are probably some kinks in the rules, but it was my first stab at linguistics.

Comparative Method Project. We compared three languages using the 100-word Swadesh list. By applying natural phonetic rules in reverse, we attempted to reconstruct a "proto-language" from which the three languages emerged. Using the percentage of cognates, we calculated the time depth of the language split. This project compared Russian, Polish, and Ukrainian, and took an incredible amount of time to do. In fact, when I finally finished it, I made 3 more copies: one to hand in, one to send to a friend (who, I'm sure, couldn't have cared less about it), one (annotated) to plaster the door of my dormroom so all could revel in the glory of it, and one to brutally destroy as a way of venting all the stress I had accumulated as a result of doing it. The professor may or may not still have the original filed away somewhere, and my friend has his copy somewhere near the bottom of an enormous stack of letters from me which he has amassed over the past 4 years. The other two copies were eliminated long ago.

Text and Readings




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