Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Conventions, abbreviations and symbols
- General prologue: time travel and signal processing
- 1 The past, the present and the historian
- 2 Written records: evidence and argument
- 3 Relatedness, ancestry and comparison
- 4 Convergence and contact
- 5 The nature of reconstruction
- 6 Time and change: the shape(s) of history
- 7 Explanation and ontology
- References
- Index of names
- Subject index
6 - Time and change: the shape(s) of history
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Conventions, abbreviations and symbols
- General prologue: time travel and signal processing
- 1 The past, the present and the historian
- 2 Written records: evidence and argument
- 3 Relatedness, ancestry and comparison
- 4 Convergence and contact
- 5 The nature of reconstruction
- 6 Time and change: the shape(s) of history
- 7 Explanation and ontology
- References
- Index of names
- Subject index
Summary
In our game there's two views of history: conspiracy and fuck-up.
(John Le Carré, The honourable schoolboy)The nature of ‘change’
‘Change’ has been a philosophical issue at least since the Pre-Socratics. Heraclitus, Plato tells us (Cratylus 402a), said that everything is in flux and nothing stays still, and that reality is like a river: you can't step into the same one twice. On the other hand, according to Parmenides, the world is uncreated and imperishable, the universe endless and static (Diels Fragment 8, Kirk & Raven 1957: 273). Parmenides does admit that the senses perceive change, but this is epiphenomenal, a matter of the names given to (misleading) appearances. Somewhat later Empedocles derived the appearance of change from a vision of eternal cycles, and that of stability from the fact that the cycles always return to their starting-point, and everything repeats itself. (See §6.3 on linear vs. cyclic views of time, and their relation to the interpretation of linguistic change.)
Change is clearly a major puzzlement and source of distress: the early Greek solution was either to recognize it and posit a universe in flux, or reduce it to the status of an illusion (as the ancient Hindus did with their concept of māya).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Historical Linguistics and Language Change , pp. 277 - 324Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1997