Language change and historical linguistics

Greek philosophers were aware of the fact that human language is subject to change in the course of time. But only from the nineteenth century onwards did scholars develop a truly scientific approach to language change and its description. During the Middle Ages various suggestions had been put forward with regard to language development, but religious prejudices frequently stood in the way of a correct understanding of historical processes; thus one widespread view was that all languages somehow descended from Hebrew. Then in his justly famous Anniversary Discourse of 2 February 1786 (published in Asiatick Researches 1.415–431 (1788)) Sir William Jones brought basic features of Sanskrit to the attention of western scholars. He contended that Sanskrit, Greek and Latin stem from a ‘common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists’ and surmised that Germanic and Celtic derive from the same source ‘though blended with a very different idiom’. The first quarter of the nineteenth century then saw the development of a reliable methodology in genetic linquistics. The main point concerning language relationship can be phrased as follows: two or more languages are genetically related if they stem from a common ancestor; the fact and the degree of the relationship are established on the basis of deep-cutting structural agreements which cannot be due to chance. Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, Germanic, Celtic and a few other languages stem from a common proto-language, which is usually termed ‘Indo-European’ (in German indogermanisch).