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LING: Final Exam
Historical Linguistics
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Bleaching | An extreme form of semantic broadening in which most or all of the lexical meaning of a word is lost. |
| Semantic broadening | A kind of semantic change whereby a word’s meaning becomes wider and more generally applicable than it was previously. |
| Bleeding | The act whereby one sound change prevents another sound change from affecting a particular word by eliminating the conditioning environment. |
| Centum languages | The group of Indo-European languages in which velar *k and palatal *ḱ merged into a simple velar stop but labiovelar *kw remained distinct—e.g., Latin, for whose word for ‘100’ the group is named. |
| Cognate | A word which is descended from the same ancestral form as another. |
| Comparative method | A method of reconstruction that involves comparing words from multiple languages. |
| Family-tree model | A way of representing the genetic relationship between languages that emphasizes their common ancestry. |
| Feeding | The act whereby one sound change enables another sound change to affect a particular word by creating the conditioning environment. |
| Grammaticalization | The process by which a previously lexical element loses its semantic content and is repurposed as a grammatical element |
| Great Vowel Shift | An important development in the transition from Middle English to Modern English that radically altered the qualities of English’s long vowels, depriving them of their continental values and restructuring the language’s vowel space. |
| Grimm’s law | A law of sound change that was proposed in order to explain the correspondence of certain stops and fricatives between apparent cognates in Greek and Latin. |
| Internal reconstruction | A method of reconstruction that involves comparing forms within a single language. |
| Jespersen’s Cycle | The process according to which languages tend to shift from pre-verbal negation to post-verbal negation |
| Pre-language | The result of successful internal reconstruction. |
| Proto-Indo-European | The common ancestor of most European and some Indian languages, including English, German, Russian, Welsh, Spanish, Albanian, Greek, Hindi, and Persian. |
| Proto-language | The result of a successful application of the comparative method. |
| Satem languages | The group of Indo-European languages in which velar *k and labiovelar *kw merged but palatal *ḱ remained distinct, shifting to some kind of postalveolar or alveolar fricative—e.g., Avestan, for whose word for ‘100’ the group is named, or Sanskrit. |
| Semantic narrowing | A kind of semantic change whereby a word’s meaning becomes more precise and specific than it was previously |
| Verner’s law | An extension to Grimm’s law that explains apparent exceptions by proposing that voiced fricatives, not voiceless ones, result from voiceless stops after unstressed syllables in Proto-Indo-European |
| Wave model | A way of representing the relationship between languages that emphasizes degree of difference and is usually based on geography. |
Created by:
emily.zegarra
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