Linguistic change
All languages change in the course of time. Written records make it clear that 15th-century English is quite noticeably different from 21st-century English, as is 15th-century French or German from modern French or German. It was the principal achievement of the 19th-century linguists not only to realize more clearly than their predecessors the ubiquity of linguistic change but also to put its scientific investigation on a sound footing by means of the comparative method (see above History of linguistics: The 19th century). This will be treated in greater detail in the following section. Here various kinds, or categories, of linguistic change will be listed and exemplified.
Sound change
Since the beginning of the 19th century, when scholars observed that there were a number of systematic correspondences in related words between the sounds of the Germanic languages and the sounds of what were later recognized as other Indo-European languages, particular attention has been paid in diachronic linguistics to changes in the sound systems of languages.
Certain common types of sound change, most notably assimilation and dissimilation, can be explained, at least partially, in terms of syntagmatic, or contextual, conditioning. By assimilation is meant the process by which one sound is made similar in its place or manner of articulation to a neighbouring sound. For example, the word “cupboard” was presumably once pronounced, as the spelling indicates, with the consonant cluster pb in the middle. The p was assimilated to b in manner of articulation (i.e., voicing was maintained throughout the cluster), and subsequently the resultant double consonant bb was simplified. With a single b in the middle and an unstressed second syllable, the word “cupboard,” as it is pronounced nowadays, is no longer so evidently a compound of “cup” and “board” as its spelling still shows it to have been. The Italian words notte “night” and otto “eight” manifest assimilation of the first consonant to the second consonant of the cluster in place of articulation (compare Latin nocte[m], octo). Assimilation is also responsible for the phenomenon referred to as umlaut in the Germanic languages. The high front vowel i of suffixes had the effect of fronting and raising preceding back vowels and, in particular, of converting an a sound into an e sound. In Modern German this is still a morphologically productive process (compare Mann “man” : Männer “men”). In English it has left its mark in such irregular forms as “men” (from *manniz), “feet” (from *fotiz), and “length” (from *langa).
Dissimilation refers to the process by which one sound becomes different from a neighbouring sound. For example, the word “pilgrim” (French pèlerin) derives ultimately from the Latin peregrinus; the l sound results from dissimilation of the first r under the influence of the second r. A special case of dissimilation is haplology, in which the second of the two identical or similar syllables is dropped. Examples include the standard modern British pronunciations of “Worcester” and “Gloucester” with two syllables rather than three and the common pronunciation of “library” as if it were written “libry.” Both assimilation and dissimilation are commonly subsumed under the principle of “ease of articulation.” This is clearly applicable in typical instances of assimilation. It is less obvious how or why a succession of unlike sounds in contiguous syllables should be easier to pronounce than a succession of identical or similar sounds. But a better understanding of this phenomenon, as of other “slips of the tongue,” may result from current work in the physiological and neurological aspects of speech production.
Not all sound change is to be accounted for in terms of syntagmatic conditioning. The change of p, t, and k to f, θ (the th sound in “thin”), and h or of b, d, g to p, t, and k in early Germanic cannot be explained in these terms. Nor can the so-called Great Vowel Shift in English, which, in the 15th century, modified the quality of all the long vowels (compare “profane” : “profanity”; “divine” : “divinity”; and others). Attempts have been made to develop a general theory of sound change, notably by the French linguist André Martinet. But no such theory has yet won universal acceptance, and it is likely that the causes of sound change are multiple.
Sound change is not necessarily phonological; it may be merely phonetic (see above Structural linguistics: Phonology). The pronunciation of one or more of the phones realizing a particular phoneme may change slightly without affecting any of the previously existing phonological distinctions; this no doubt happens quite frequently as a language is transmitted from one generation to the next. Two diachronically distinct states of the language would differ in this respect in the same way as two coexistent but geographically or socially distinct accents of the same language might differ. It is only when two previously distinct phonemes are merged or a unitary phoneme splits into two (typically when allophonic variation becomes phonemic) that sound change must definitely be considered as phonological. For example, the sound change of p to f, t to θ (th), and k to h, on the one hand, and of b to p, d to t, and g to k, on the other, in early Germanic had the effect of changing the phonological system. The voiceless stops did not become fricatives in all positions; they remained as voiceless stops after s. Consequently, the p sound that was preserved after s merged with the p that derived by sound change from b. (It is here assumed that the aspirated p sound and the unaspirated p sound are to be regarded as allophones of the same phoneme). Prior to the Germanic sound shift the phoneme to be found at the beginning of the words for “five” or “father” also occurred after s in words for “spit” or “spew”; after the change this was no longer the case.
Grammatical change
A language can acquire a grammatical distinction that it did not have previously, as when English developed the progressive (“He is running”) in contrast to the simple present (“He runs”). It can also lose a distinction; e.g., modern spoken French has lost the distinction between the simple past (Il marcha “he walked”) and the perfect (Il a marché “he has walked”). What was expressed by means of one grammatical device may come to be expressed by means of another. For example, in the older Indo-European languages the syntactic function of the nouns and noun phrases in a sentence was expressed primarily by means of case endings (the subject of the sentence being in the nominative case, the object in the accusative case, and so on); in most of the modern Indo-European languages these functions are expressed by means of word order and the use of prepositions. It is arguable, although it can hardly be said to have been satisfactorily demonstrated yet, that the grammatical changes that take place in a language in the course of time generally leave its deep structure unaffected and tend to modify the ways in which the deeper syntactic functions and distinctions are expressed (whether morphologically, by word order, by the use of prepositions and auxiliary verbs, or otherwise), without affecting the functions and distinctions themselves. Many grammatical changes are traditionally accounted for in terms of analogy.
Semantic change
Near the end of the 19th century, a French scholar, Michel Bréal, set out to determine the laws that govern changes in the meaning of words. This was the task that dominated semantic research until the 1930s, when scholars began to turn their attention to the synchronic study of meaning. Many systems for the classification of changes of meaning have been proposed, and a variety of explanatory principles have been suggested. So far no “laws” of semantic change comparable to the phonologist’s sound laws have been discovered. It seems that changes of meaning can be brought about by a variety of causes. Most important, perhaps, and the factor that has been emphasized particularly by the so-called words-and-things movement in historical semantics is the change undergone in the course of time by the objects or institutions that words denote. For example, the English word “car” goes back through Latin carrus to a Celtic word for a four-wheeled wagon. It now denotes a very different sort of vehicle; confronted with a model of a Celtic wagon in a museum, one would not describe it as a car.
Some changes in the meaning of words are caused by their habitual use in particular contexts. The word “starve” once meant “to die” (compare Old English steorfan, German sterben); in most dialects of English, it now has the more restricted meaning “to die of hunger,” though in the north of England “He was starving” can also mean “He was very cold” (i.e., “dying” of cold, rather than hunger). Similarly, the word “deer” has acquired a more specialized meaning than the meaning “wild animal” that it once bore (compare German Tier); and “meat,” which originally meant food in general (hence, “sweetmeats” and the archaic phrase “meat and drink”) now denotes the flesh of an animal treated as food. In all such cases, the narrower meaning has developed from the constant use of the word in a more specialized context, and the contextual presuppositions of the word have in time become part of its meaning.
Borrowing
Languages borrow words freely from one another. Usually this happens when some new object or institution is developed for which the borrowing language has no word of its own. For example, the large number of words denoting financial institutions and operations borrowed from Italian by the other western European languages at the time of the Renaissance testifies to the importance of the Italian bankers in that period. (The word “bank” itself, in this sense, comes through French from the Italian banca). Words now pass from one language to another on a scale that is probably unprecedented, partly because of the enormous number of new inventions that have been made in the 20th and 21st centuries and partly because international communications are now so much more rapid and important. The vocabulary of modern science and technology is very largely international.