Synchronic and diachronic approaches to studying the language
Proto-indo-European language and comparative linguistics
When there are no documents of language to be traced the pre-written history of any language is studied by methods of comparative linguistics. It is 200 years old. It all started with a publication of an article by Franz Bopp (1816). The talk is about the so-called I-E language. It is now well-supported with evidence from many languages that there was a language spoken by people in pre-historic times. It was given a name Proto-Indo-European. There are 2 main problems. Actually, when and where it was spoken. The time can hardly be accurately dated. It is dated far back 10000 B.C. – 4000 B.C. In the 15th thousand B.C. I-E still existed and people spoke it. Why is it so? The most ancient languages are compared like the Hittite, Ancient Greek, Veda. It was found out that the difference between them is so much that the time period between them should be no less than 2000 years. In the 4th millennium B.C. P-I-E was dead. 10000 B.C. is the most probable time of existing P-I-E homeland. It is based upon linguistic and archeological facts.
Linguistic facts:
words denoting the sea (the root mor- denotes the water area)
names of the tress
names of the rulers
names of the devices for cultivating soil (the plough)
Archeological facts:
the crockery, the pots, the burial places
people in power were buried with what they possessed
tools made of stone and absence of metal
evidences of transition from gathering food to cultivating soil
megalithic culture. Pre-historic monuments were reconstructed with huge stones.
Marina Gimbutas writes that Indo-Europeans lived north-west of the Caucasus and north of the Caspian Sea as for Southern Urals. This result is supported by many scientists. Other locations have been proposed for I-E homeland:
Northern Central Europe between the Vistula and the Elbe
Modern Turkey
It was supported by Russians Camkelidze and Ivanov.
What happened to Latin?
Various migrations began. Indo-Europeans were driven from their original homeland to many parts of Europe and Asia. So P-I-E developed in different ways in the various parts of the world to each its speakers traveled. At the beginning of historical times languages that derived from it were spoken from Europe in the west to India in the east. P-I-E was the ancestor language of most of the Europe languages and many of those in South Asia. Its descendants make up the I-E family: Italic (Italian, French, Spanish) group, Balto-Slavic languages (Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, and Ukrainian), Indo-Iranian (Modern Persian, Sanskrit, Hindi), Germanic (English, German, Dutch and Flemish).
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The aims of studying the history of the English language.
A language can be considered from different angles. In studying Modern English we regard the language as fixed in time and describe each linguistic level – phonetics, grammar or lexis – synchronically, taking no account of the origin of present-day features. When considered diachronically, every linguistic fact is interpreted as a stage or step in the never-ending evolution of language. In practice, however, the contrast between diachronic and synchronic study is not so marked as in theory.
Through learning the history of the English language the student achieves a variety of aims, both theoretical and practical. So, one of the aims is to provide the student with a knowledge of linguistic history sufficient to account for the principal features of present-day English. For example, through centuries writing and spelling was changing in English. At the time when Latin letters were first used in Britain (7th c.) writing was phonetic: the letters stood for the same sound. After the introduction of printing (15th c.) the written form of the word became fixed, while the sounds continued to change (knight was [knix’t]). Another important aim of this course is of a more theoretical nature. While tracing the evolution of the English language through time, the student will be confronted with a number of theoretical questions such as the relationship between statics and dynamics in language, the role of linguistic and extralinguistic factors and so on. These problems may be considered on a theoretical plane within the scope of general linguistics. In describing the evolution of English, they will be discussed in respect of concrete linguistic facts, which will ensure a better understanding of these facts and will demonstrate the application of general principles to language material. One more aim of this course is to provide the student of English with a wider philological outlook. The history of the English language shows the place of English in the linguistic world.
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synchronic and diachronic approaches to studying the language
Synchrony and diachrony are two different and complementary viewpoints in linguistic analysis. A synchronic approach (from Greek συν- "together" and χρόνος "time") considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history into account. Synchronic linguistics aims at describing a language at a specific point of time, usually the present. By contrast, a diachronic approach (from δια- "through" and χρόνος "time") considers the development and evolution of a language through history. Historical linguistics is typically a diachronic study.[1]
The concepts were theorized by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, professor of general linguistics in Geneva from 1896 to 1911, and appeared in writing in his posthumous Course in General Linguistics published in 1916. In contrast with most of his predecessors, who focused on historical evolution of languages, Saussure emphasized the primacy of synchronic analysis of languages to understand their inner functioning, though never forgetting the importance of complementary diachrony. This dualistic opposition has been carried over into philosophy and sociology, for instance by Roland Barthes and Jean-Paul Sartre. Jacques Lacan also used it for psychoanalysis.[2] Prior to de Saussure, many similar concepts were also developed independently by Polish linguists Jan Baudouin de Courtenay and Mikołaj Kruszewski of the Kazan school, who used the terms statics and dynamics of language.
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