Comparative Linguistic

M. Montanez Ortiz
ENGL 3073
3/8/2012

COMPARATIVE LINGUISTICS

What is a comparative linguistics?

* Is a branch of historical linguistics that is concerned with comparing languagesto establish their historical relatedness.
* Aims to construct language families, to reconstruct proto-languages and specify the changes that have resulted in the documented languages.
*The fundamental technique is to compare phonological systems, morphological systems, syntax and the lexicon of two or more languages using techniques such as the comparative method.

Comparativemethod

* Every difference between two related languages should be explicable to a high degree of plausibility, and systematic changes.
* In some methods it may be possible toreconstruct an earlier proto-language.
* The proto-xlanguage reconstructed by the comparative method are hypothetical, a reconstruction may have predictive power.
* Where languages are derivedfrom a very distant ancestor the comparative method becomes impracticable.
* The method has also not been very good at unambiguously identifying sub-families and different scholars haveproduced conflicting results.
* The theoretical basis of such methods is that vocabulary items can be matched without a detailed language reconstruction and that comparing enough vocabulary itemswill negate individual inaccuracies.

Other related fields

There are other branches of linguistics that involve comparing languages, which are not, however, part of comparativelinguistics:

* Linguistic typology compares languages to classify them by their features.
* Contact linguistics examines the linguistic results of contact between the speakers of differentlanguages.
* Contrastive linguistics compares languages usually with the aim of assisting languages learning by identifying important differences between the learner’s native an target languages.