Re: I need help explaining basic linguistic concepts to a lay person

Heidi Graw wrote:
>
> >"António Marques" <m.ap@xxxxxxx> wrote in message
> >news:43c584d9$0$31188$a729d347@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> (snip)
>
> >Antonio wrote:
> > What Neeraj is referring to is the historical development that turned
> > hypothetical bh- and dh- (pronounced something like b'HA and d'HA) into
> > f- (pronounced f-) in latin, that is, during latin's process of
> > evolution and before it was recognisable latin (by which time it had f-
> > already).
>
> I find this really interesting. Can you give me a bit of a background as to
> how this "hypothetical" bh- and dh-
> came about?

Comparative philologists gather vast amounts of data about the languages
concerned (the principal classical languages in question, in approximate
chronological order, are Hittite, Avestan, Vedic, Greek, Latin, Gothic,
Old Irish, and Old Church Slavonic -- but that far from exhausts the
database) and discover that words in those languages resemble each other
in consistent, though sometimes surprising, ways, and work out in
meticulous detail what an ancestral language might have looked like that
could have given rise to all the daughter languages. Items like these
"bh" and "dh" are really formulas for the hypothetical reconstructions,
and letters are used for them that plausibly might represent sounds they
might have had.

But no one claims that when an Indo-Europeanist gets a time machine and
meets the speakers, they'd be able to understand him or her (and vice
versa).

The essential fact is that language change is slow but regular, so there
are dozens of words in which any particular sound has survived to be
reconstructed back to its source.

For Indo-European, we're talking maybe 2000 years earlier than the
oldest examples of Latin, and a lot of language change can happen in
2000 years.
--
Peter T. Daniels grammatim@xxxxxxx
.

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