Ablaut: root vowel changes in certain verbs

Ex: given

-Internal language: reconstruction using analogy by using the bits that still exist.

--> Anderson and Grimm brothers: grammatical linguists

-->discovered german shifts by comparing it to Latin

Ex: pater vater --> father

pod fuss -->foot from Indoeuropean

-External reconstructionuses other languages to compare another.

--> the germanic root of english has disappeared.

ACCIDENTAL SIMILARITIES:

-greek verb “to breathe”, “blow” has a root pneu- and in the language of the Indian tribe Klawath of Oregon the verb “to blow” is pniw-. They are not remotely related.

-In the language of most countries : cuckoo has a name derived from the sound it makes

àcuckoo: onomatopeia or iconic:relation between the word and what it refers to

It’s kind of accidental.

-relationships need to be systematic, not accidental. The normal situation is that the signifier and the signified are arbitrary: splash

-a vast number of languages around the globe have baby talk words like mama or papa.

-languages commonly borrow words and other features from one another in a whole gamut of ways ranging from casual or chance contact with learned coinages of the kind that english systematically makes from Latin and Greek.

àthere are words that weren`t borrowed

Invasion of french words after 1066

-try to reconstruct the parent form of forms used in contemporary romance languages to denote father, to do that = external reconstruction = collect words from different potentially cognate languages.

padre -->italian

pare -->catalàn

pere -->french

PROCESSES IN THE EVOLUTION OF LANGUAGES:

- Weakening (lenisization) which results in the change t>d>0 in the derivation above forms from their common parent form (in agreement with the trend towards simplicity in articulatory effort)

What happened to the pare in catalàn, dropping vowels. It should always happen in English.

- Metathesis: which could result in change er>re when deriving the forms in

the daughter languages.

- Vowel harmony causes the change of the putative vowel (a) in the first

syllable into (e) under the influence of the vowel (e) of the second syllable

resulting in the present french form

ex: foot --> feet but before foti -->fet (long e sound)

because of vowel shift